Want a 29% increase in profit? The secret is tuning into your personality type

Do you ever get frustrated that despite having all of the ‘pieces’, skills, knowledge and resources, despite reading all the books, and despite working harder than anyone you know, there’s still something missing?

There’s some piece of the puzzle that, if you could just find, you know things would be easier, more streamlined and more effortless.

You could move past the feeling of constantly pushing really hard only to go nowhere fast.

For all those who have ever said ‘there has to be an easier way’, this is for you.

Skills will only get you so far…

The harsh reality is, that I’m afraid it doesn’t matter how much knowledge you have, how many skills you have amassed or how many resources are at your disposal. These are only going to get you so far.

To really and truly get ahead and be successful in business and in life, the secret is to also have an acute awareness of your personality type.

This awareness of how you uniquely think, feel and behave will set you apart from others scrambling to follow the experts, or find the magic formula they can copy and paste into their businesses.

By levering your unique strengths and what makes you ‘uniquely you’, you can build greater momentum, achieve greater outcomes and move forward faster.

By understanding how we best work and how our ‘operating system’ is wired, we can ensure that more often than not we are operating at peak performance. We can increase our exposure to that incredibly motivating and productivity-inducing flow state.

So how do we do this?

How do you approach certain tasks?

It can be as simple as examining our behaviour around certain tasks.

For example, do you relish spending hours deeply focused on technical reports or proposals, or does this fill you with dread?

Do you love to work at pace, gaining energy and satisfaction from ticking things off a list and feeling like you’ve been making real progress?

Do you thrive on chaos and problem-solving?

Are you happy to adapt to situations when they change or do you hate it when your routine and carefully laid plans get thrown into disarray?

Do you work best when surrounded by people, bouncing off ideas, brainstorming possibilities and talking about a future that does not yet exist?

Or are you most at home when the strategy has been decided, the plans all laid out and you can bring all of the pieces together to make it happen?

Simply knowing whether you are more of an ‘executor’ or an ‘influencer’ can have vast operational benefits.

Understanding your behaviour behind the tasks, by being more aware of how you naturally approach a situation given the chance and how you choose to operate, means you can orchestrate more of these ideal environments and therefore forge forward with more confidence and ultimately more success.

In teams, the benefits are multiplied

For those with teams, the benefits can be extended even further, with research from Gallup suggesting those teams in which members are aware of their personality type and their unique talents are six times more likely to be engaged in their jobs.

Layer on some kind of strengths training for the team and individual productivity increases can increase by about 8%, sales can increase 10-19% and profit can increase 14-29%!

Personality tests and behaviour profiles sometimes get a bad rap. They are accused of ‘bucketing’ us and of adding labels when in truth human behaviour is much more complex and our make-up completely unique.

While I very much agree with this premise and that we should appreciate the finer details, the quirks and the nuances of each and every one of us.

If you choose your test wisely, knowing your personality type and your behavioural characteristics can give you a huge edge over the competition.

Far from ‘bucketing’ you, it can free you to truly lean in, give you permission to truly ‘do you’, to leverage those unique talents and forge ahead.

By freeing ourselves from ‘the way others do it’ and of trying to continually follow the status quo, we can find ourselves happier, more energised and spending far more time playing to our strengths rather than pushing against a pattern of behaviour that just feels, well, wrong.

And this is not to give excuses for bad behaviour or avoiding difficult conversations or not getting things done because it’s just ‘not our style’.

But rather, by dialling up on the behaviour and the attributes that make us great, and allowing ourselves to flourish using our natural style, the increase in momentum can be huge.

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