How Can You Best Manage Those with Different Personality Types?

As a manufacturing plant manager or supervisor, you’ve likely come into contact with differing personalities on the plant floor. Employees under your supervision and working alongside you, although talented professionals, require different approaches to training and day-to-day tasks to achieve their maximum potentials. But how can you help them improve if you don’t start with yourself?

Lead to meet their needs

You likely know the best way for you to learn and work, and understanding that your method won’t work for everyone on your team is the first step toward becoming a better manager or supervisor. You can begin by improving your management style for everyone’s benefit — yourself, your co-workers, and your business.

Big names

You have many options to choose from when it comes to refining your managerial style. From Carl Jung’s Personality Type system to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and more modern methods such as Deloitte Business Chemistry and Talent Plus, ways of identifying skills have longevity and are varied. But you don’t have to invest in a complex system to improve what you do on the shop floor every day.

A realistic approach

As a plant leader, you can take steps to improve how you interact with employees by better understanding yourself and your own style. In fact, you can focus on four leadership personality traits and work to improve upon those that are lacking to better nurture your employees and lead them to greater success.

1. Empathy and awareness — Are you aware of your employees’ greatest strengths? If you’re interested in them and their abilities, you’re better able to help them succeed and earn their respect in return.
2. Equality — Do you have “favorite” employees on the plant floor? Spending extra time or paying extra attention to some employees can leave others feeling left out. Instead, treat all employees equally with a fair and firm approach. Don’t forget: Always be honest.
3. Positivity — You work better in a positive atmosphere, and your employees probably do, too. Keep their spirits high with encouragement when they need and a glass-half-full mentality when things get difficult. A simple attitude adjustment can mean improved communication, camaraderie and rapport among all on your team.
4. Accountability — Strong managers hold employees accountable for mistakes and errors so the team can improve, but they also hold workers responsible for success. Rather than taking credit for achievements, pass the kudos along to your employees. This can remind them of their importance, improve company and team morale, as well as more firmly establish you as their leader, further gaining their trust.

When you take it upon yourself to be a better plant manager, you give yourself the opportunity to nurture employees to their full potentials. Better managers mean better employees, and, as their manager, the first move is yours.