Personality and Learning Styles in Communication and Collaboration

There are four personality types:   they are the Organizer, Giver, Adventurer, and Thinker. There are eight learning styles, or intelligences they are: Verbal/Linguistic, Musical/Rhythmic, Logical/Mathematical, Visual/Spatial, Body/Kinesthetic, Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Naturalistic (Carter, Bishop, & Kravits, 2007).

Of these traits there are an unlimited number of combinations, a person would need to take a brief survey to determine or reaffirm their own traits. Each one of these traits have distinctive characteristic.   Once a person understands what the specific characteristic are, then the communication exercise will have a much better result.   Of the personality styles, take a look at two, the Giver and the Thinker and how these styles can impact the communication and collaboration efforts of a team.

A Giver can have a calming effect on a team, as a giver will express thoughts and feelings with clarity and honesty.   A Giver will seek out peaceful and harmonious resolutions; they will negotiate with great passion looking for that perfect compromise, often convincing people of different mind sets to agree.   A Giver often has creative solutions that are not immediately apparent to others. On the other side a Giver can be extremely disruptive to the team effort, as they are idealist, and overly emotional in their desire to resolve the immediate the problem, often missing the big picture.   A Giver can be overly sociable, bringing in too much personal information, which has no real relevance to the project at hand.   They can easily cause side-bar dialogue, distracting team members from the team agenda (Carter, Bishop, & Kravits, 2007).

A   Thinker is an asset to any team, the thinker will analyze the available information in a dispassionate, logical, scientific manner.   A Thinker is a person who sees everything in a literal, realistic view, giving the team a clear cut, precise and logical plan of action to resolve the situation.   Thinkers are people...