What Supervisor Qualities Do You Contribute to Your Team?

I’ve listed 16 words. Each is a hallmark of a particular personality type and is used to describe that type’s unique contribution to a team. For a highly effective team, all of these qualities should be present.

Which supervisors qualities do YOU contribute to your team? Which are missing from you AND from your team?

16 Valuable Supervisor Qualities You Can Contribute:

1. Dependability
2. Ingenuity
3. Energy
4. Decisiveness
5. Commitment
6. Sensitivity
7. Enthusiasm
8. Affiliation
9. Integrity
10. Idealism
11. Imagination
12. Responsiveness
13. Vision
14. Logic
15. Initiative
16. Drive

As I write this, I am traveling to a meeting with an executive team that is made up of nearly all one personality type. They have plenty of drive because all but one team member is the sale personality type.

What this means is that this team has limitations. Having an excess of drive without some of these other team essentials could even turn their strength into a weakness.

How do you bring out in your team the qualities you're missing?

Consider the consequences of intense drive without logic or vision or sensitivity. What happens when you have drive but are not responsive to others or lack imagination? Pretty soon, the work being driven could feel like a meaningless grind.

So what’s this team to do? In order to become more effective, they could consider:

• Inviting others into their discussions and decision-making. This includes making sure that the one team member who has a different personality type has opportunities to share and be heard rather than the majority moving on without her. Surrounding themselves with people who contribute stabilizing factors will help prevent drive from becoming over-drive.
  
  

• Frequent checks and balances that they can bring themselves. Gaining awareness of what may be missing in their team and then working to compensate will also mitigate the tendencies to accelerate into hyperdrive.
  
  

• Purposefully slowing down. Since driving comes naturally to most members of this team, they move fast and are comfortable doing so. By forcing themselves to slow down, they will be able to recognize what they may otherwise miss.
  
  

It’s easy to prescribe fixes for this team because their gaps are so pronounced. For most teams, though, there are less obvious gaps. Certainly, though, every team has them -- if all 16 personality types have something unique to contribute, then any team without representation of all 16 types has an inherent gap.

Assess Yourself & Your Team

If you use MBTI personality assessments, the work of making those determinations is largely done for you. If you don’t have that insight, you can use these qualities to check on how in or out of balance your team may be, regardless of personality type.

An abundance of any one contribution – no matter how positive it seems – can limit a team’s effectiveness. A severe lack of any one factor can do the same. The optimum composition of a team starts with people who can contribute different things, who bring different teamwork skills to work.

Incidentally, which of these do you contribute in a team? How can you increase your value by stretching to contribute additional supervisor qualities?

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Editor's Note: This post was originally published June 2013 and has been recently updated.