What is personality?

- As a leader, your role is to guide your team in the right direction. Now, this sounds easy, but we both know that it's not. One of the biggest reasons why it's challenging is because each person on your team is different, but understanding the psychology of personality can help you to understand these differences so you can become a better leader. Let's start off by getting clear on what I mean by personality. Well, personality is the unique way that someone navigates the world, and it consists of patterns of thought and behavior. A blanket approach to persuasion and motivation is going to have limited efficacy. This is because people's personalities will lead them to respond differently to what you say and do as a leader. Understanding individual personalities allows you to lead, persuade, and motivate more effectively. You'll be able to customize your message to the person in front of you. Now, there are five personality traits that are measured on a sliding scale. An easy way to remember this is with the acronym, OCEAN, Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, which is also known as emotional stability, because the word neurotic can sometimes sound like an insult. After decades of researching personality, psychologists began to come to a consensus on the key personality traits in the 1980s and dubbed these five characteristics, the Big Five Personality Traits. One of the most important things to understand about this framework is that none of these are either or propositions, and what I mean by that is you're not agreeable or disagreeable, extroverted or introverted. Each trait is assessed on a scale, so the question isn't whether or not you have the trait. It's how high or how low you are in that specific trait. For example, an extrovert that is high in agreeableness is very different from an extrovert who is low in agreeableness. One of the most important aspects of understanding personality is the necessity of a significant sample size. How many data points do you have? You can't make an assessment of someone's personality in a day or a week. It takes time. For example, let's say after three weeks in a row, you identify someone as a disagreeable, but what if they just experienced a death in their family? Then you've mislabeled someone based on a mood, not a trait. Moods can change. Traits remain the same. Before you start trying to label others, let's start off by labeling yourself. Where do you think you fit within the Big Five Personality Traits? This self-analysis will give you good practice. Self-awareness is the best place to begin.