What Is Personality?

Awakening Your Leader Personality

Like the young Merlin of legend, before all the amazing successes, every manager begins as a simple human being shaped by habits, upbringing, and circumstances. When managers are promoted, usually it is because they are better at a skill than others. Yet many stumble in this new role as high performance in a skill has nothing to do with being a successful manager. Unless you shape your personality, success in management is elusive.

What Is Personality?

Personality is often mistaken for the “this is just who I am” explanation that managers sometimes use to justify their behaviour. Personality according to psychology is an accumulation of patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours shaped by both biology and experience (McCrae & Costa, 1999).

In organisations your personality might move from an employee to manager to a leader. In all three levels you will think, feel, act and walk differently. Research suggests that while traits offer stability, personality also evolves, especially when people engage in conscious self-development (Roberts et al., 2006). Personality is not fixed but a living instrument and learning to play it with intention is the first act of mature leadership.

Personality Can Be Shaped

Managers who assume “that’s just who I am” miss the chance to transform the very foundation of their leadership. Psychology has long moved beyond the idea of personality as an immutable set of traits. While models like the Big Five (Costa & McCrae, 1992) suggest relative stability, research also shows that personality evolves with deliberate effort and life experience (Roberts et al., 2006).

Conscious personality development begins with awareness. Carl Jung (1953/1990) described individuation as the process of bringing unconscious patterns into light. For managers, this means recognising that the way they speak in meetings, handle conflict, or inspire their team is not simply natural law : it is a construct, often unconsciously learned, that can be reshaped.

The Aha Moment

I remember that during an NLP training session I received, our facilitator gave us a tool where I could change my state of emotions. In that minute I said, wow , I can change the way I feel? If you think your personality cannot change ask yourself:

Your personality at 5 years old, is it the same personality you have now?

The answer to the question will always be no. This awakening can feel like a crack in the armour. However for those who seek to grow, is obvious. The reason being is that the first question to ask when seeking to be a manager is:

Who do I want to become as a manager What traits do I want to embody? Who will be my role model? What mistakes I saw previous leaders do will I avoid?

In education that is why we would make sure that people have different lecturers. First because it takes different mindsets and approaches for students to learn. However there are times you would want to help students see the positive and the negative of a personality. For instance I know of a leader that embodies authoritarianism (in its good and bad). He was an important lecturer as people could experience first hand what it means.

Your Team's Personlity Is A Reflection Of Your Personality

One of the hardest things I had to accept was that the team's personality impacts me, and vice versa. I remember when an under-performing employee was replaced by a higher performer. It was like the fog in my mind left and started thinking better. I realised that personality of the team and my personal personality are intertwined.

However this feedback stung. It also meant that the team’s weaknesses mirrors my own blind spots. Far from failure, this moment is the threshold into conscious leadership. This is the place you can weave your magic like Merlin did. For by changing your personality, you will start shifting the personality of your team.

Personality as Leadership Technology

In management, personality is not a side effect of leadership: it is leadership. Research in organisational behaviour consistently shows the impact of leader personality on team performance, cohesion, and resilience (Judge et al., 2002). The leader’s personality sets the emotional climate; it is the field in which strategies either thrive or falter.

By becoming conscious of personality, managers start managing their habits with intention. To be clear, we are not changing who you are but rather unlearning all the crap you learnt. Personality is a problem when you fix it e.g. 'I always get angry at failure'. This is not who you are but who you learned to be. By being spontaneous and aligning to your true self, the freer and lighter you will be.

Here is a simple process to support you move from a victim of your personality to moving to shape it. :

Process of Becoming

Merlin did not become a wizard overnight. He began as a boy with ears open to whispers of another world. Likewise, managers begin their transformation by awakening to the realisation that their personality is not a fixed essence but a living instrument. Here is a set of steps to move from ordinary human to conscious leader:

1. Self-Reflection: first stage requires mangers to take time to do daily journaling or post-meeting notes. This can help managers notice patterns in how they show up. “Why did I snap at that question?”

2. Feedback Loops: structured feedback, whether through 360-degree reviews or mentoring conversations, acts like a mirror. It allows managers to see themselves through the eyes of others, often revealing unconscious behaviours (Atwater & Waldman, 2008).

3. Mindful Awareness: developing the discipline of presence interrupts autopilot. Managers who pause before responding model clarity, and in doing so begin shaping their personality as a leadership tool.

4. Identity Choice: consider choosing your identity as a strategic necessity. However when choosing who you are find identities that resonate. Trying to be something you are not might work in the short term but not in the long run.

5. Identity Shifting: create a plan of how you are going to move from who you are today to whom you chose. Again this is about integrating and becoming who, not becoming someone you are not.

It is important that the aim here is to find aspects of yourself that you have not been discovered. It is not about faking it till you make it. It is about unlearning who you think you are and letting go of identities that do not serve. you.

References

Atwater, L. E., & Waldman, D. A. (2008). Leadership, feedback, and the open communication gap. New York: Routledge.

Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) professional manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.

Judge, T. A., Bono, J. E., Ilies, R., & Gerhardt, M. W. (2002). Personality and leadership: A qualitative and quantitative review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 765–780. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.4.765

Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E., & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.1.1

Jung, C. G. (1990). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1953)