Personality Profiles – Part One

Recently, Gordon has been doing a lot of writing about his personality type, and about personality classifications. Having taken a number of these, I thought I’d write a couple of pieces over the Easter weekend about them from my own perspective.
Belbin would class me as a “Shaper”, which is apparently someone who is “Challenging, dynamic, and thrives on pressure. Has the drive and courage to overcome obstacles.” – with the downside that I can be “Prone to provocation, and liable to offend others.”. Pretty much spot on, then. My favourite part of the report, though, is this :

Should thrive in a pressure environment where tough decisions have to be made. Needs to be given a clear remit of responsibility. Lyle can be expected to work at his own pace. So set up the job within a specified time frame and do not press for continuing and periodic feedback on progress. Judge Lyle by the final results. The answer is likely to be clear-cut in terms of success or failure.

Now that is absolutely spot-on. I don’t handle being managed – as can be seen all over D4D™, but left to my own devices, projects and plans normally come to fruition. If they don’t, they screw up in a truly epic fashion – there’s no grey area in my working profile, it has to be said.
What’s interesting (to me, anyway) though is the bit that Belbin misses out. Maybe it’s just because I’m primarily a Shaper, and not the (rather more expected) Resource Investigator. In fact, Belbin doesn’t rate me that highly as an RI at all. But there’s one part of that personality spec that is me to a tee – “Can lose interest once initial enthusiasm has passed.” That is a personality facet of mine that’s been commented on many times – I get interested and enthused about an idea and/or a project, work on it, then something new comes along, and bang, the old project dies off as my interest flits on to the new one.
Over the last five years, I’ve actually worked quite hard to take that personality trait into consideration, to take a project through to its conclusion, and to work through the bored bit, to get things finished – and in some cases to not even start new ideas just yet, because other things need completing first.
To a degree, it’s actually been quite successful so far – the new ideas still float around my brain until they’re ready, but I don’t just moth around, flittering between projects while not finishing any of them. (There’s going to be a lot more about this in Part Two)
I think that so long as I’m aware of that trait, and try to handle it, things will be OK. It’s only when I lose that awareness that things have the potential to go tits up at warp speed…