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Personality Types and Leadership – Part 2

April 4, 2012 By

If you are like most people, you’ve either met or heard of someone who just seems to attract others like a light bulb attracts moths at night.  He or she is seen as being warm, approachable, magnetic.  When there is work to be done, this person leads others into it with excitement and enthusiasm. COREMAP® calls these people Entertainers.

Entertainer Personalities as Leaders

Just as the Commander Personality brings specific skills to a leadership position, Entertainers bring skills that make people want to follow them; and makes the follower feel special for having chosen to follow this leader.  To separate themselves from the not-so-great, GREAT Entertainer-Leaders are:

  • Great Communicators – By their very nature, Entertainer Personalities have the ability to communicate their thoughts, their vision of the future, in clear and vivid terms.  For these leaders, words are not merely “words” … they are tools that bring their experiences and vision to life … when properly put together and sequenced, they change mere music into the soundtrack of a dream come to life.  For this person, the sky is not simply blue; it is a cerulean blue so bright that it hurts your eyes to look at it for any length of time.
  • Good Listeners – This seems highly improbable since Entertainer Personalities love to talk!  But, the fact is that great Entertainer-Leaders have learned that taking time to listen attracts followers; and, that having listened, they will be asked to provide feedback … they will be asked to talk and their audience will be eagerly awaiting their every word.
  • Interpersonal Skills – Entertainer Personalities love to be the center of attention.  Great Entertainer-Leaders take the time to interact with their followers and make themselves available … to have an “open-door” policy that is backed up with a welcoming, receptive attitude.  Great Entertainer-Leaders have learned that to have an audience that is fully engaged with them, they must give their audience their undivided attention.  When they are with you, they are with you; nothing and no one is permitted to interrupt or distract.
  • Optimistic – No one’s life is free from adversity.  The great Entertainer-Leader though has learned to find the silver lining in any cloud.
    There are no road blocks to progress.  Rather, these temporary obstacles are viewed as opportunities to be innovative; challenges that empower each of us to demonstrate how we can rise up to the challenge and create solutions.  Great Entertainer-Leaders use this optimism to inspire those around them to accomplish things that the followers have never thought possible.
  • Create a “Fun” Environment – For the Entertainer Personality, life is to be enjoyed and lived to the fullest.  The Entertainer-Leader knows that no one wants to slave away in a work environment that is dull, boring, and the days blur into a monotonous week in which nothing distinguishes one day from another.  Consequently, the Entertainer-Leader is going to create an environment in which not only are organizational objectives attained, the wants and needs of each individual are going to be fulfilled as well … an environment that is upbeat, positive, and contains occasional surprises that make each team member smile and eager to see what the coming day will bring.

In Part 1, I stated that Ray was a Commander-Leader.  He also had a lot of the Entertainer-Leader in him, too.  Whether it was a sales contest that made each salesperson want to make one more cold call; or, an end of the day “sale-a-bration” in which everyone returned to the office after their last evening appointment for pizza, he was always finding ways to make working feel like play.  He even found ways to make weekly sales meetings fun.

Anyone who has attended more than a couple of sales meetings knows that they usually follow a template that says, “I know you’ve sold something in the past but that is the past … go sell something today.”  Ray’s sales meetings were different.  He found ways to make them fun.  While I did not witness this one first hand, one of his greatest sales meetings was held right around Halloween.

He had a casket delivered to the office and set up in the meeting room.  Just before it was time for people to arrive for the weekly meeting, he laid down in that casket, folded his arms across his chest and closed his eyes.  When the sales people arrived, they were ushered into the meeting room by his secretary who simply told them to sit down and wait quietly for the service to begin.  They found Ray lying in the coffin and heard organ music playing softly.  When everyone was present, his secretary closed the door letting him know it was time to start the sales meeting.  While everyone sat there wondering what was going on, he suddenly sat up, climbed out of the casket, slapped his hands together and cried out, “Now that I have your attention … Now that you’ve thought about the permanence of death … NOW we’re going to talk about the miracle of life insurance!”  When the meeting ended, everyone of those sales people walked out with a smile on their face, eager to share the miracle of life insurance with a prospective client.  Obviously, Ray did not do this for every sales meeting; but, you can be assured that every member of his sales team looked forward to each meeting, wondering if today was going to be the day he grabbed their attention in a new and unusual way.

NEXT:  Organizer Personalities as Leaders

Filed Under: Dynamic Leadership, How personality type impacts leadership, Lead from strength, Leadership, Personality Assessment, Personality types, What characterizes good leaders Tagged With: , , ,

Personality Types and Leadership – Part 1

March 28, 2012 By

Go into nearly any corporate environment and ask what type of person the company looks for when selecting a leader and you can be fairly confident that the answer will describe a “hard charging”, “take charge”, “get it done” type of personality; a person whose motto is “lead, follow, or get out of the way”.  COREMAP® refers to these people as Commander Personalities.

Now, make no mistake about it, Commanders clearly have the ability to lead.  However, the traits that can make Commanders great leaders are not the only characteristics that make great leaders.  In this and future articles, we’ll take a look at the characteristics of great leaders and try to determine what it is/was that makes/made them great.

COMMANDERS AS LEADERS

  • VISION – Commander Personalities are “big picture” people.  They have the unique ability to see where all the moving parts fit together to make a plan come together and achieve the desired outcome.
  • DRIVE & DETERMINATION – Call it being strong-willed, forceful, ambitious, or determined, Commander Personalities know where they want to go and how they want to get there.  They are driven to succeed; and, this is what makes them good leaders, they want to take others to the top with them.
  • DYNAMIC LEADERS – As “big picture” people, these individuals don’t get bogged down in details.  As dynamic leaders, they identify people whose strengths compliment the areas in which they are not strong.  When the objective has been reached, the goals met, the Commander gives credit where it is due and tells all who will listen of the role each team member played and how each person’s contributions made the team’s success inevitable.  This type of leader is a good delegator who makes certain that all team members have what they need to perform their part of the job; stays out of the team member’s way so that he or she can do what needs to be done but also monitor progress so that goals and deadlines are met.
  • DECISIVE – Living by the dictum “lead, follow, or get out of the way”, these leaders recognize that indecision serves only to block the team’s progress and ultimate success.  The Commander Personality is willing to make decisions, both the easy ones and the hard ones, and take responsibility for those decisions.

To illustrate these traits, consider …

Entering the insurance industry as a recent college graduate, I had the privilege of following one of the most dynamic leaders I’d ever met.  For that matter, Ray is still the greatest leader I’ve had the privilege of following.

Ray gauged his success as an agency manager by some very clear measures:

  • He wanted to have the #1 Agency in the Southwest U.S. on a year-in, year-out basis.
  • He wanted his agents to be the highest paid agents in the company.
  • He wanted to develop and promote talented individuals into agency management positions for the company.

He believed that all three were attainable and communicated his vision to everyone in the agency.  He also knew what he was good at and where he needed support so he built a management team where each team member had a clearly defined role and expectations.

With his guidance, the team set monthly and annual goals and developed plans to reach them.  Once the plans were in place, he’d urge the team to “take massive action”.  It did not matter if you were ahead of projections or right on schedule, Ray encouraged you to “keep working the plan”.  If you were behind schedule, he’d say, “let’s change the plan if we need to do something differently to reach your goals”.

When the team succeeded in reaching the agency goals, he praised everyone and made it abundantly clear that “WE did it”.  When the team fell short of its goals, he took full responsibility by telling everyone that “the fault was not in the followers but in his leadership”.

Over the years I worked in his agency and later when I became an agency manager and his friendly competitor, Ray’s agency was the leading agency in the Southwest United States.  He developed 29 individuals who went on to manage their own successful agencies throughout the nation.

Ray’s leadership style exhibited all of the positive characteristics of a Commander Personality in a leadership role.  Commander was his dominant personality style; but, when it was appropriate he blended his Commander traits with the traits of other personality types.

NEXT:  Entertainer Personalities as Leaders.

Filed Under: Dynamic Leadership, How personality type impacts leadership, Lead from strength, Leadership, Personality types, What characterizes good leaders Tagged With: , , ,
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