A colleague pointed me to an interesting and quirky article about managing personalities at meetings. The article lays out psychologist Dr. Sharon Livingston’s case that the group members a leader might encounter at a meeting fall into seven general categories, which she discovered bear an uncanny resemblance to the personalities of the Seven Dwarfs. Dr. Livingston then offers ways to engage each of these personality types. Readers can even go to a website to find out which Dwarf most closely coincides with their demeanor.
For example, Sleepy is rational and logical and becomes bored quickly. Dr. Livingston suggests appealing to this person’s logical side as well as asking Sleepy types to use their daydreaming to scare up ways to solve problems the group is facing. Doc, on the other hand, is driven and competitive. She suggests letting this person offer their opinions, but on paper so you can retain control of the meeting. Also, Docs should be approached for problem solving and recognized for their contributions.
While it may be somewhat useful, not to mention fun, to identify the basic interactive styles of your team members, I wonder whether it makes sense to use different approaches for each of seven different types during a meeting. Perhaps Dr. Livingston is suggesting that it could be useful for focusing on a specific team member that you’re having trouble drawing out in meetings. Because if this approach is not focused on one or two team members, that’s an awful lot of communication strategies for a manager to keep straight while trying to go through the business at hand.
Besides, most consultants and members of highly effective teams will tell you that it’s less important, and even distracting, to deal with differing personalities within a team, and more important to focus on rallying around shared goals, a belief in the approach and respect for one another’s talents. In other words, paying attention to what the group shares rather than its differences. However, her approach could make more sense in a working group, or leader-led team, where individual efforts are the focus.
On a real team, it is important to take team members out of their comfort zone and encourage them to make a commitment to a common approach. It is through agreement on the task, roles and guidelines for behavior that teams build trust and shared acccountability — that’s Doc and Sleepy alike.
