“I am an A type personality. I set high standards and I work very hard. If you want to be on my team, then that’s what I expect of you.” OR “I am a ‘virtuoso crafter’ – they must just leave me alone to do my work. I will solve more problems for them that way.”
These are common sentiments expressed when taking managers through their 360° feedback reports. Understanding your personality is a good thing. Using it to shield you from the possibility of changing your leadership behaviour, is to deny that we can improve our leadership and management skills.
Personality profiles are valuable tools in leadership development. They help people understand their preferences and motivations, and to understand their natural leadership style and potential blind spots. They talk to who you are deep inside – how you experience yourself.
360° feedback does something quite different: It tells you how others experience you, and highlights particular strengths and development areas in your workplace behaviour as seen by your manager, colleagues and the team you manage. This is important for at least two reasons.
Firstly, how you “show up” at work every day determines your impact as a leader and a manager. And how you show up is about how you behave, not who you are deep inside.
Secondly, it is much easier to think about changing a behaviour (or even two), than it is to think about changing your personality.
To illustrate this point with an example: You may learn from 360° feedback that both your colleagues and your direct reports think you are not very good at listening to other people’s feedback, or their suggestions about how something in the workflow could be improved. They may see this as you being defensive and a “know it all”, when in fact you are just impatient to get to work and you “know” your way of doing things is right. So you interrupt, talk over people, and tell your team to “get on with it, we have a deadline to meet.”
That may be “in your nature”. However, it is really not difficult to learn to behave differently on this one point: to pause, to pay attention, to respond positively with “thanks for that feedback” or “that’s an interesting idea, let’s explore it in the next team meeting.” And sometimes, you may find to your surprise that it is a good idea, or helpful feedback.
Learning to change behaviours like this is not easy, but it is doable. Like learning to ride a bicycle it takes some practice, and maybe you need to develop some “listening muscles”, but it doesn’t require you to change your personality and it can change how people experience you, and therefore your leadership impact.
What makes 360° feedback so useful in this regard, is that it is coming from a number of different sources, and it is giving you well ordered and structured feedback on a wide range of different leadership behaviours. It is important not to get overwhelmed by the amount of feedback you are receiving all at once. This makes it imperative to have an experienced coach or mentor work through the report with you.
Carefully done this allows you to pick the two or three most important signals about important strengths you can build on, and the one or two areas for improvement that will make the greatest difference to your impact and effectiveness as a leader. Developing and implementing plans to make those one or two behaviour changes should feel quite manageable.
It certainly beats trying to change your whole personality all at once.
Personality tests foster self-awareness, whereas 360° feedback lets you see yourself as others see you. Used together, they can bring a quantum leap in your leadership capabilities. But only if you work at it. Knowing is one thing – reflection and change is a lifelong commitment.
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Written by Cedric de Beer