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Personality diversity in a workplace is essential. If you hire people who are alike, your team will likely have no room for improvement. Diverse personalities offer alternative strengths and weaknesses which complement each other. Together, they can help your business achieve its goals.
Diversity in the workplace is what employees want these days. More than four out of every five responding to a diversity recruiting survey agree that employee diversity is essential.
Here are the main reasons why personality diversity is vital to your organization:
A range of personalities in a team ensures a balance of strengths and weaknesses. For example, if you only have thinkers in your human resources department, they may focus only on your company's business goals without considering the employees' well-being. You could end up with a workplace where employees' morale is low, and employees resent HR because of its inhumane policies.
If you have a mix of practical and emotional people in your HR department, they can create workplace policies that ensure business goals are achieved while fostering employee happiness.
You can gain different perspectives when you have people with different personalities in a single team. You might find some employees looking at the big picture and others focusing on the details. How does that help the company? When faced with a problem, you can see the problem from different angles and therefore develop more varied potential solutions.
For instance, let's assume sales aren't doing so well. A team with a diverse range of personalities and different perspectives will offer various solutions. In other words, when you have multiple interpretations of a single problem, you can have a holistic view that can help you come up with a better solution.
In addition, people with different perspectives often have different approaches. An analytical person and a creative person working together can complement each other. For example, if you're running a marketing campaign, the creative might design your marketing funnel. Meanwhile, the analytical person could review performance and suggest changes. Working side by side, individuals with different perspectives help companies achieve challenging goals.
Believe it or not, personality diversity can also help improve productivity. When you have a balanced team creating company policies, you ensure humane policies that don't compromise business goals. The result is a healthy working environment that keeps employees happy. When employees are happy, they are productive.
If all the team members are happy-go-lucky, the chances of your team meeting deadlines are not so high. If you include the doers and enthusiastic people in that team, they can take it upon themselves to meet those deadlines and even motivate the happy-go-lucky ones towards action.
A good manager should not only plan shifts effectively but also ensure that each team is composed of people with personalities that complement each other despite their differences.
Empathy is the ability to understand what other people feel. It's the ability to put
yourself in someone else's shoes and understand their emotions, thoughts, and responses.
When you have people with the same personalities in a team, they will tend to think the same way, feel the same way, and respond to situations the same way. In a sense, there is empathy: teammates do understand what their other teammates are feeling, thinking, and doing in response to a situation because, well, that's what they would have felt, thought, and done in the first place.
However, if you have different personalities in a team, chances are each one would respond differently to similar situations. When optimists get exposed to pessimists frequently and vice-versa, they end up understanding why they feel, think, and act the way the other side does –genuine empathy.
Genuine empathy is critical, not just in the workplace but also outside it. With genuine empathy, you have a broader perspective about life in general. Ultimately, where there is genuine empathy, there is harmony.
Personality diversity is critical in the workplace. When you have people with diverse personalities in a team, you gain a more holistic understanding of a specific problem, allowing you to develop the best solution to address it. Personality diversity also ensures balanced teams and productivity. It encourages genuine empathy, thereby ensuring harmony in the workplace.
So, the next time you hire new people for your company, don't just look at whether or not they have the skills needed for the job. Their personality is just as important. Remember, if they're different, they might have something different [and amazing] to bring to the table, too.
