Personality, Perception, and Performance:
Turning Awareness into Action

Awareness, separated from practice, remains ineffective.
— Erich Fromm

COURSE DESCRIPTION

With the goal of improving personal and team performance, many companies – 80% of Fortune 500 firms, for example – invest in personality assessments to help people recognize what they bring to their role, a conversation or meeting, or their work relationship. But all too often the information they provide is more interesting than useful. There is a wide array of assessments available, and while they provide thought-provoking data, they regularly fall short when it comes to practical strategies for putting that insight to work. This is a problem, because, as the psychologist Erich Fromm pointed out, “insight, separated from practice, remains ineffective.”

This is where conversational capacity comes into play. It creates a rigorous, skill-based bridge between heightened awareness and competent action

Integrated Learning and Development

When used together, a personality assessment and the conversational capacity framework create a more integrated and elegant approach to personal and team development. Learning to balance candor and curiosity under pressure provides a more structured, actionable way to put insights from a personality assessment into effective practice. But the assessment returns the favor by providing a heightened awareness of what you bring to the table in a conversation – personal traits, cognitive tendencies, and patterns of behavior – which helps you ratchet up your conversational capacity.

Personality is a set of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral traits that distinguish how a person interacts with the world around them. It’s a general pattern of thinking and behaving that predicts how a person may respond in a particular situation. Personality, however, is not destiny. So, the important question is this: do you want to let your personality and perceptions drive your conversations, or do you want to learn to use your conversations to manage your personality and perceptions?

This workshop is for people who choose the second option. In this interactive session participants will review their personality assessment, and then learn how to use the awareness it creates in every conversation and meeting. This highlights why these typologies are useful. They can help us recognize not just our personality, but how our personalities differ from those of others. They highlight our differences. But just knowing your differences provides limited value. We also need the capacity to put that awareness to work.

Learning Objectives

In this interactive, customizable workshop, participants will learn to

  1. View their assessment not as a set of labels that define them, but as a thought-provoking set of ideas that can inform their interactions with others.
  2. Acquire a sharper focus on the unique filters and tendencies they bring to every conversation and meeting
  3. Turn that newfound awareness into consistently constructive action by learning to conduct themselves in a way that makes every conversation and every meeting smarter
  4. Create a virtuous cycle of planning, action, reflection, and learning that improves both personal and team performance
  5. Systematically prepare for any important conversation.
  6. Leverage different perspectives in a more mindful, disciplined way
  7. Dramatically ratchet up their curiosity about themselves, about others, and about the important issues with which they’re grappling together.
  8. Boost their team’s ability to think and work together more effectively when dealing with complex, novel, adaptive challenges.
  9. Reduce instances of counterproductive conflict by helping people reframe their differences as an opportunity to learn rather than a barrier to performance
  10. Improve how people interact with each other in intact teams because A) heightened awareness of what each person brings to the table, and B) a set of skills for turning those differences into a source of team strength, rather than team weakness
  11. Participants will create updated personal and application plans with an even more focused and integrated approach to their professional, team, and organizational development

In short, moving beyond greater self-awareness, participants will gain a heightened ability to put that greater awareness to work in every conversation and meeting.

Note: The course is typology agnostic, so we can help you turn the learning from whichever assessment or assessments you are using into more constructive action.

COMPLEMENTARY WORKSHOPS

This course works well in conjunction with these courses:

  • Length: 3 hours +

  • Format: Virtual or in-person