This episode explores how understanding personality types through “Personality Poker” can improve team synergy, build high-performing teams, and ultimately increase profits for home service businesses.
Are you struggling to build a cohesive and high-performing team in your home service business? The key may lie in understanding the unique personalities and communication styles of your employees and customers. In this episode, I sit down with personality expert Steven Shapiro to explore his innovative “Personality Poker” system. Learn how finding your team’s strengths and blind spots can help you plug profit leaks, improve collaboration, and deliver exceptional service to your customers. Tune in to learn practical strategies for building a balanced, adaptable, and innovative team that drives growth for your home service business.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- How understanding different personality types can build a high-performing team
- Why you should interact with clients in their preferred communication style
- How to collaborate with those who compliment your strengths and fill your blind spots
- How a company’s culture can create profit leaks if not aligned with people’s needs
- Strategies for validating team members who don’t perfectly fit the company culture
- Steven’s new book “Pivotal” and how it can help create stability in uncertain times
Key moments:
[06:40] – What is Personality Poker?
[08:44] – Partnering Up: Recognizing Your Blind Spots
[09:42] – Identifying Missing Suits: Finding Your Missing Pieces
[15:29] – Innate vs. Learned Strong Suits: Where Your True Energy Lies
[17:23] – Understanding the Number Cards: Shadow Sides of Strengths
[21:58] – Client Types: Understanding Who They Are
[31:16] – Playing with a Full Deck: Building a High-Performing Team
What is Personality Poker?
Personality Poker is a game that uses a deck of cards with personality traits on them, allowing players to identify their own strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of their teammates. This unique tool helps everyone on your team better understand how they contribute to the success of the team, how they may detract from it, and who they need to partner with to create the best team synergy. By understanding these differences, teams can learn to appreciate and leverage the diverse perspectives and skills within the group and build a more collaborative and innovative work environment.
Partnering Up: Recognizing Your Blind Spots
One of the key insights from Personality Poker is the importance of recognizing your own blind spots and actively seeking out team members who can complement your strengths. This concept of “partnering up” is crucial for building that sought after team synergy, as it encourages people to fill in the gaps in their own skill sets and overcome their limitations. By understanding who they need to collaborate with, team members can work together more effectively, and grow stronger together to achieve bigger goals.
Identifying Missing Suits: Finding Your Missing Pieces
Personality Poker uses suits to represent different personality types, such as analytical, creative, organized, and people-oriented. When players examine their hand of cards, they often find that they are missing a particular suit, which represents the type of person they need to bring onto the team to create a well-rounded, high-performing group. By identifying these missing pieces, teams can actively seek out individuals with complementary skills and mindsets, fostering greater team synergy and unlocking new possibilities for innovation and problem-solving.
Innate vs. Learned Strong Suits: Where Your True Energy Lies
Personality Poker also shows the difference between innate and learned strong suits, which can have a real impact on a person’s energy and motivation. Innate strong suits are the natural strengths that come easily to a person, while learned strong suits are those that have been developed through training and experience. Understanding the difference between these two can help team members learn where they can contribute the most to the team’s success.
Understanding the Number Cards: Shadow Sides of Strengths
The Personality Poker deck also includes number cards, which represent the “shadow sides” of a person’s strengths. These cards, such as “bossy” or “rigid,” can provide valuable insights into how a person’s strong suits can become problems when taken to an extreme. By acknowledging and addressing these shadow sides, team members can learn to balance their strengths, ease potential conflicts, and work together more harmoniously towards truly rewarding team synergy.
Client Types: Understanding Who They Are
Applying the principles of Personality Poker to client relationships can also be a huge win for your team. By recognizing the different personality types and communication preferences of their clients, home service teams can adapt their approaches to better meet the needs of each client. Adapting their communication style can foster stronger relationships and create a much more positive client experience. Team synergy really shines here as team members work together to provide tailored solutions that address the unique needs of their diverse client base
About Stephen: Stephen Shapiro started his innovation workover 25 years ago while founding and leading Accenture’s 20,000-person process and innovation practice. Since then, he has written seven books on innovation, including Best Practices Are Stupid, which was named the best innovation and creativity book of 2011 by 800-CEO-READ (now Porchlight) and was an international #1 business best seller. His next book, PIVOTAL: Creating Stability in an Uncertain World, is scheduled to be published in June 2024. He is the creator of Personality Poker®, a card game used worldwide to develop high-performing innovation teams. Stephen has presented at conferences in over 50 countries, and in 2015, he was inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame. He is also a Senior Fellow with The Conference Board. When he’s not working with organizations helping them make the impossible possible, he enjoys dabbling in magic.
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