How Personality Clashes Can Build Relationships

Turning personality conflicts into complements that create healthy relationships and positive outcomes is a powerful process that is within the reach of every person in every family and team.

It starts with this basic belief system. The people who are in our family are there for a purpose.  They are there to complete or balance us in some way. The people we work with in business are there to make your work and life more effective.  Because of this, it is worth investing time to understand the unique strengths and contributions each person in our family and each person in our business team can best make to create great relationships and outcomes.

Three Keys to Better Relationships in Family and in Business

Understand your own unique behavioral strengths. This is the key to personal growth and finding roles where you will be most effective.

  1. Recognize and respect the behavioral strengths of others. This is the key to effective interdependence in families and in teams.
  2. Learn to blend the differences between people in your family and on your work teams in a way that best utilizes the unique strengths of each person in each situation or project. This will result in greater harmony, productivity and effectiveness.

Core and Adapted Personality Styles

We all have a core behavioral style that comes most naturally to us and that we revert back to especially when under pressure or stress.  This core personality style does not change much from late teen years throughout life unless you experience a life-changing personal event like the death of a spouse or child.

We also have the amazing ability to adapt our behavioral style based on what we believe it takes to be successful in our current family or team dynamics.  These adaptations are generally a very healthy part of good human relationships. Be aware however, that significant adaptations in your overall behavioral style, over long periods of time, can cause personal stress and lack of effectiveness because you aren’t operating in your natural sweat spot.

Communication Adaptations

Another key to success in family and business relationships is for individuals to learn to adapt their natural communication style with others so it is most effective for others.  Without great intentionality, we tend to communicate with others based on the way we like to be communicated with.  However, servant leaders are always looking for ways to serve the people they do life with more effectively and will therefore seek to adapt their communication style to the style of the person they are communicating with.  This means that we must understand our own strengths and weaknesses and understand and value the strengths and weaknesses of others.

Ideally, this is a two-way street where both parties are seeking to understand and adapt to what the other person needs.  So consider what you might need to do to express to your family or team members how you want to be communicated with based on your personality strengths.  At the same time, take responsibility to proactively find out how others prefer to be communicated with and then communicate with them in this way.  If you do this, your relationships and your effectiveness will increase over time.

The Law of Differences to Build or Destroy Relationships

This law is as predictable as the law of gravity.  When I experience someone who has different strengths (or something that based on my strength, appears to be a weakness), I have a choice to make.  I can choose to judge that person and see that difference as a weakness.  This will lead to isolation (physical and/or emotional) which eventually leads to death in the relationship.  You may physically spend less time together, choose not to go over and talk to them at events, no longer comment on Facebook posts where you once did, stop responding the same way to texts, etc.  Judging a difference as a weakness leads to some type of isolation and eventual death in the relationship.

But we have another choice we can make when we see or experience a difference in personality styles.  We can choose to value that difference as a strength that I can learn from or that can benefit the situation or relationship. This draws people to us which leads to unity which leads to life in the relationship.

The key to the unlock successful outcomes from the law of differences is understanding.  It requires understanding your strengths and their strengths and the way these can be beneficially blended.

Think about where you are judging the different personality strengths or weaknesses of your family members or co-workers in a way that is causing you to view them as “weaker” in some way.  My bet is that this is leading to some type of isolation or diminishing of what the relationship has been or could be.  There have been times where I have needed to apologize and say, “I am sorry the judgments I was making about you that was isolating you.”

Where are you viewing the differences in others a weaker, lesser, undesirable and it is not leading to greater unity and life in the relationship? Through understanding and humility, you can move from death to life in relationships.

The foundation of this process is an individual commitment to stop judging differences and start valuing individual differences.  We want each person to be valued and be fully empowered to play to the strengths they bring to the table.  We don’t want anyone to feel like they need to change their personality in order to belong to this family or this team. And when conflict occurs we will learn to value each other’s opinions and approaches, which will bring us closer and allow us to see things we wouldn’t ordinarily be able to see.

Learning to recognize, value and blend personality difference is another key system for success in family and business.

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