by Rick Baker
On Dec 16, 2010
Wikipedia provides the following “Big Five”
factors of personality:
Considering these “Big Five” factors of personality…
How would you describe your personality?
How would you describe the personalities of the key people at your company?
There are many tools for assessing personality. It seems to me they often make things much more complicated than necessary.
Here are some suggestions for a simpler way to assess other people’s personalities:
- Understand personalities will affect behaviour…so, behaviour provides some clues
- Understand situations will affect behaviour…so, check behaviour under a variety of situations
- Consider the “Big Five”…that’s a good starting point...and that may be enough
- Spend a bit of time learning about each of those “Big Five” [they are clusters]
- Learn how each of these “Big Five” factors show up in people’s behaviour
- Work at observing people’s behaviour
- Encourage people at your company to observe people’s behaviour
- Make it a priority to communicate about behaviour and personality
- Do not criticize what you believe to be people’s weaknesses
- Focus on people’s strengths