Challenging Personalities – Their Role in Developing Your People Management Skills!
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Whether we like managing people or tolerate it as part of the job, all of us will meet personalities we will struggle to like and deal with. Rather than seeing this as a drain on your time and energy why not reframe the situation and consider the development opportunity it offers you?
Some years ago, I was asked to take someone into my team another manager found ‘difficult’. Her current manager found her opinionated and less ‘easy-going’ than her younger peers. I agreed to meet her and talk about her experience and what she might add to my team – which was considerable – and she moved across. Far from finding her difficult, I found she was hard-working and resourceful. So why the problem in the other team? From her perspective the issue was her previous manager, younger than she was, who took an ‘older brother’ approach to all the team members rather than her preference – ‘to be treated like an adult’.
I’ve come across this quite a few times, a young manager struggling to feel competent and in command in the face of older, more experienced, workers. Yet other young managers in the same situation have used the opportunity to talk to their team, using 1-to-1 meetings to discuss how they are working together, what manager behaviour they find helpful, and what they don’t find helpful. In this way they connect with and win respect from team members even when the age gap has been more than 30 years.
If you find someone challenging to deal with, why not reframe the situation to see what personal development it might offer?
Be honest – what personalities or traits challenge you?
- Is it an older worker with more knowledge and experience?
- Perhaps you’re a planner, and like to have clear goals and milestones that are met reliably – but your team member always seems to delay until the last moment, and scrambles to produce their work only when the deadline is perilously close?
- Perhaps you are driven by pride and precision and someone in the team has a commercial, goal-orientated approach to delivering ‘good enough’ solutions. Could you both learn from each other?
Finally, recognise when the challenge isn’t right for you – there’s no shame in this. If you really can’t make it work, it’s perfectly fair to see if this person might work better in another team with a manager who has a different style that brings out their best contribution.
TAKE AWAY
Avoiding difficult personalities that we find challenging can reduce the diversity in our team and limit our experience of managing different types of people. Instead reframe the situation to see how you might develop your people management skills. Above all, learn from the experience – because “Sometimes we win, and sometimes we learn.”