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Understanding your interpersonal and work style

At work and in the business world, we come across different people with varied ideas and perspectives. People deal with their work with different attitudes and approach. Some take swift decisions, others stew in the pros and cons; some are reserved and others mingle effortlessly; some are big picture, rest are micro and yet some may be both or neither!

These differences can be refreshing, bring semblance, open our world to new ideas and make work more productive. But all too often these differences in ‘work styles’ can cause misunderstandings, gripes, mistrust and frustration. This leads to lower productivity, poor team dynamics and eventually dismal performance.

In training workshops, the objective is enabling the participant to understand one’s interpersonal and work style and learning to adapt this style to match the team members’ styles.

Based on the popular Social Styles Inventory, a popular training module these days, one can easily determine what one’s interpersonal communication and work style is. It is based on 3 dimensions: Assertiveness, Responsiveness and Versatility. Let’s know more about each of these dimensions.

Assertiveness:

This measures the extent to which others perceive you to be persuasive and convincing of your point of view. Are you a good persuader and influence others directly or use other means to achieve your objectives? A person with less assertiveness could adopt other means like rolling out new initiatives to complete a task, get supportive data, mostly to justify their stand and presenting their arguments to the wrong people to achieve his objective. According to this model, more assertive people speak and respond quickly, have emphatic gestures and can convince others easily. People with low assertiveness express by first investigating others’ opinions, are generally reserved and have controlled gestures.

Responsiveness:

This is the level at which others perceive you to either control or express your emotions. Highly responsive people are easy to decipher and their body language resonates with their emotions. Low responsive people are more difficult to read and their gestures and facial expression don’t give a clue of what‘s on their mind. They are closed in their mannerisms, take time to respond and generally don’t drop their barriers. They are more fact focussed rather than emotions.

Based on the upper two dimensions, 4 types of style emerge.

Driver: High on assertiveness, low on responsiveness, Drivers are quick to take decisions, move fast and get short with people who can’t keep up with them; they have aggressive gestures and a booming voice. Practical, focussed and demanding, they are hard to miss. Understandably they are quite easy to decipher. Could be your boss!

Expressive: High on assertiveness and on responsiveness, Expressive people talk freely and assertively about their ideas, are full of energy and are risk takers. They bring in a lot of perspective but sometimes are perceived as vague. They love attention and be the cynosure of everyones eyes. They thrive on appreciation. The best way to make an Expressive you ally is to pump him with regular doses of compliments. Ofcourse they should be genuine as he will quickly catch on if they are fake.

Analytical: Low on assertiveness and responsiveness, these are your colleagues who simply love data. An analytical person tends to be perfect, micro in approach and cautious. All decisions and actions are taken after a lot of thinking. Precision, quality focussed and detached are the hallmarks of an analytical person. To get them on your side, keep the conversation limited, fact based and task focussed.

Amiable: Low assertive and high responsiveness, amiable people are people focussed. They are considerate and supportive. They like to get everyone on board and then move ahead. They invest time in building rapport and nurturing relationships. A terrific customer service resource, an amiable employee is friendly and warm. To win over an amiable colleague, make sure you ask him about how his family doing and whether things are all right with him.

Versatility/ Flexing:

This third dimension is the ultimate aim of Social Styles training. Understanding one’s style and adapting it to suit other individual’s individual style to enrich the interaction and thereby the performance, is what versatility is all about.  Acute understanding of one’s work style and keen observation of others can enable one to do this with some practice and efforts. But once versatility is achieved, it’s a fascinating tool to extract peak performance from self and others. There is no right or wrong style, but higher versatility is always a bonus.

This tool by itself is very versatile. Through training, this tool can be used by sales people to adapt their sales pitch according to their potential customer’s style, for managers to build trust and confidence in the team and for leaders to focus on style based strengths of employees rather than weakness.

Sayli Shende

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