Team dynamics and cohesion: Fostering collaboration through personality styles

In this article, discover tips for exploiting different personality styles to improve team cohesion.

Leadership

Glenda Farias

Marketing Specialist

Thursday, August 31, 2023

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Have you ever been part of a team where everything just seemed to run smoothly? Chances are, the diversity of personalities and complementarity of team members played a key role in that success. In this article, discover tips for harnessing different personality styles to improve your team's cohesion.

Do you know the Atmanco personality Styles?

AtmanCo has identified six personality Styles that can significantly influence team dynamics and contribute to team building. These six Styles, each with its own distinct characteristics, are a way of understanding your team members more easily to foster better collaboration and cohesion.

6 AtmanCo personality Styles:

Caring
Driver
Creative
Rigorous
Investigator
Ambassador

By understanding these six personality Styles within your team, you can harness each person's strengths, manage conflict constructively and create a working environment where every member feels valued and understood. This knowledge can strengthen team cohesion, improve communication and boost productivity - a valuable asset for any challenge.

Understanding team complementarity

You've probably heard the expression "You are the Yin to my Yang", right? When two people with opposing personalities work together, they can complement each other's strengths to find a balance. For example, if you tend to focus on the overall vision and strategy of a project, a partner who is naturally focused on rigor and process can ensure that crucial details are not overlooked.

The same principle applies to cooperation. Different personalities can work more effectively together to achieve their goals. For example, if your strengths are relationship-oriented, collaborating with someone task-oriented can ensure that individual needs and project requirements are met.

These examples show how diverse personalities can strengthen team cohesion. However, it's crucial to understand not only your colleagues' personalities, but also your own. Combining opposing personalities doesn't automatically guarantee positive results, especially when you don't identify each person's way of working and expectations of collaboration.

Many people think they know their colleagues' personalities well, but assessing our own personalities and those of others can be fraught with misperceptions. It's best to use scientifically validated tools to obtain data-driven assessments to truly understand the facets of each team member's personality and how they influence the way they work. This knowledge can help everyone better understand their strengths and contributions, and develop effective communication strategies.

The relationship between communication and personality Styles

As you can imagine, effective communication is a vital aspect of team cohesion. When team members can communicate effectively, productivity and performance are greatly boosted. Here are some strategies for improving communication within your team:

Building mutual understanding through self-assessmentencouraging employee retention

Fostering mutual understanding within the team can be as simple as organizing a meeting where each member shares their perception of their personality style and how they think this affects their approach to work.

Encourage an open discussion and invite everyone to express their views on their personal self-assessments, as well as those of their colleagues. This conversation will provide insights into individual communication preferences, learning methods, collaboration preferences, comfort and discomfort zones, even without resorting to formal personality assessments.

If you've done your AtmanCo personality style assessment: You could also do this exercise by sharing your own dominant and secondary personality styles to deepen the exchange of perceptions and foster a better understanding of yourself and others. The 6 AtmanCo personality styles help simplify discussions, improve your understanding of each facet of your personality and identify your natural talents.

Cooperation across diverse personalities

Cooperation across diverse personalities is essential to your team's success. Once you've identified the different personality styles among your team members, it's time to put them to constructive use.

One of the keys to effective collaboration is to adopt a common language.

For example, if your team is predominantly made up of Creatives, these minds are keen to explore new (and not always conventional) ways of achieving a goal. This may mean using new tools, new processes, or brainstorming sessions to communicate ideas, mission and objectives. This approach not only builds on creativity, but also engages your team and promotes a better understanding of the project as a whole.

By tailoring your communication to the preferences of the Creatives within the team, you can not only stimulate their creativity, but also allow them to express themselves fully, and encourage them to contribute in a meaningful way. This approach will help to integrate their innovative concepts more effectively into the working environment, reinforcing the team's ability to tackle challenges effectively.

If, on the other hand, your team includes more results-oriented Drivers, it may make sense to communicate in a more concise, goal-oriented way. Fonceurs prefer challenges and concrete results, so communication needs to emphasize these elements to fully engage them.

It's important to recognize that each personality style has its own preferences when it comes to communication and work. Ambassadors will appreciate human interaction and the opportunity to share ideas, while Rigorous people will want detailed, structured information. Caring people are sensitive to interpersonal relations and conciliation...

Using this knowledge of your team's personality styles, you can adapt your communication to achieve a balance that engages each member in a meaningful way. This strengthens team cohesion, improves mutual understanding and promotes the achievement of common goals.

The importance of self-awareness in team cohesion

Self-awareness plays a central role in building team cohesion, providing a better understanding of how each member functions within the group. Personality styles, identified using tools such as AtmanCo, offer essential insight into these individual dynamics.

To foster self-awareness within the team, be receptive to feedback from your teammates. Each personality, whether Creative, Caring, Investigator, Rigorous, Driver or Ambassador, brings unique perspectives that can significantly contribute to improving team synergy and performance.

Encourage each member to share their thoughts, as their contributions bring diverse skills and viewpoints to the table.

For example, a Creative can bring innovative ideas, a Caring person can facilitate conflict resolution, a Thorough person can ensure accuracy of detail, an Ambassador can create unifying events, a Driver can lead to results, and an Investigator can solve complex problems.

By understanding and valuing these different approaches within the team, you create a more cohesive group, able to take full advantage of the diversity of personality styles. This contributes to stronger results, while reinforcing the sense of belonging and mutual understanding within the team.

Pursuing common goals

Recognizing and understanding the different personalities in your team is a valuable asset in achieving common goals. Using personality styles, such as those identified by AtmanCo, allows you to capture the individual motivations and career goals of each team member.

By appreciating the specific strengths of each personality style and how they complement the group, you can build high-performance teams.

For example, a Creative can bring innovation to strategic planning, a Caring can strengthen customer relationships, an Investigator can deepen analyses, an Ambassador can facilitate interdependent agreements, a Driver can lead the team towards objectives, and a Rigorous can manage processes for efficient execution.

By understanding these unique contributions, you can align individual goals with those of the team, creating an equation that strengthens collective performance. Each member will feel valued, understood and motivated to actively contribute to the achievement of common goals. The benefits of this approach include improved productivity, increased job satisfaction and stronger team cohesion.

Do you have any memorable experiences linked to personality styles and team mobilization? Share this article on your social networks and mention us in your publication. Your experiences could inspire other professionals and leaders like you!

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