Managing Different Types of Employees

From a calculating business perspective, your objective is to get the most out of your employees. But it’s also important to understand that your employees are looking to you for a variety of things. Their happiness, how fulfilling they find their work, and their own personal careers are also important. In fact in a healthy work environment with a good workplace culture, these things should be more important.

Luckily enough, knowing how to deal with and communicate with the different personality types you encounter accomplishes all of these things simultaneously.

Simple Methods of Communicating with Different Employee Types

Very Ambitious Employees

That “go get ‘em” attitude can be very valuable, but ambitious employees are often prone to becoming bored. This can lead to inaccurate work as they try to multitask or take on group-oriented tasks alone.

Keep your ambitious employees happily busy, but temper their urge to take on too much. Just because they are willing doesn’t mean that they can, or that it’s healthy for them to do too much. If you struggle with keeping your ambitious employees away from boredom without giving an excessive workload, provide them with a useful distraction. Perhaps set them to brainstorm over ways to streamline the work process of your team.

Functional but Introverted

Most functional introverts do just fine in the workplace. They often don’t require much monitoring—it’s quite likely that they’ve done plenty of their own homework. The danger with an introvert mostly lies in the fact that they’re unlikely to notify you when they are feeling frustrated, overworked, or stressed. This can result in an introvert being one of your best employees one day, and then being a no-show out of the blue.

If you work with introverts in your team, be sure to offer plenty of safe avenues for communication. Encourage emails, one-on-one conversations—even an anonymous drop box can provide an introvert with the communication they needed.

Sufficient but Not Stellar Employees

Clock in, clock out. These types of employees are content with doing the bare minimum. You don’t want to lose their reliability, but you do want to see them realizing their full potential.

When it comes to chronic “good enough” employees, your best bet is to engage with them as much as possible. The majority of the time this personality type does the bare minimum because that is either all that was ever expected of them, or they were taught that going above and beyond was worthless by an employer that refused to recognize good work.

Angry, Aggressive, or Frequently-Upset Employees

They’ll work, but you’ll hear a gripe every single step of the way. Perhaps they are frustrated with a co-worker, or there is a policy they find difficult—maybe the job they are doing is not the one they are best suited to.

To deal with consistent anger it is important to discuss – not confront – the issue with your employee directly. Do your best to be calm and friendly, and try to figure out what is really bugging them. If there is a workable solution, go for it. If there isn’t, then you may need to find this employee another team.

As an employer, manager, or a team lead it is exceptionally important that, when you look at your employees, you see that they are individuals. Not everyone learns the same, not everyone applies the same—we all have different strengths and weaknesses. Understanding how to communicate with different personality types is vital – and not just to your business.