It takes all kinds
This is a post from the series ‘Common mistakes of first time managers’
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
This seems like a good principle to live by, but as a manager this will put you in trouble.
That’s because despite some universal aspects, what drives people is different. To be able to effectively manage people, you have to become familiar with various aspects of human psychology.
Read up on Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, Big Five, or any other personality type classification system. Maybe one will speak more to you than the other. They are all on the surface simplistic caricatures of personality traits, but they provide different mental models for various ways people interact with their environment. This should help you understand how someone can approach a situation in a completely different way than you yet be effective at it.
A corollary is that as a first time manager, you may think that your team is just like you. That their needs are similar to yours when you were in their position. That is probably not true, not matter how close to your team you feel.
If you catch yourself having thoughts that you believe are universal, such as “Obviously, everyone wants to…” or “Who would ever want to…”, it is time to read up on other personality types.
As an illustration, here’s an example classification from the Enneagram
Maybe one (type 1) person’s perfectionism leads them to point all the flaws in their colleagues’ code, but that can be channelled into doing the “right” thing instead of trying to be perfect. Another one (type 2) may need more attention and praise to feel like they are contributing. A (type 5) person may disappear for hours until they become an expert in a subject before they can start working on it. A (type 9) person is great at bringing everyone together when a meeting raises conflicting point of views.
While you should not fall victim of pigeonholing people in well-defined buckets, I find these classifications great at giving a different perspective of seeing the world and cultivating empathy for others.
So read up on this ! The Wisdom of the Enneagram is a great book that’s very readable despite its length, but don’t be limited by this. Seek to understand others as it is key to successfully manage a team.
