Personality and Manager Skill

In taking the online assessment, I found that my results listed me as an ENTJ also known as a Field Marshal (Extroverted 44%, Intuitive 62%, Thinking 38%, Judging 89%). This result overall did not surprise me, but there were some traits listed that caught me off guard. ENTJ’s make great managers and are particularly career and performance focused and have the ability to harness/gather people and direct them to achieve short and long term goals. However, ENTJ’s have a tendency to become harsh when their patience is tried; they do not like repetitive errors and don’t feel that they should tailor their judgments in consideration of people’s feelings. A quote by an ENTJ summed up the flaw of their non-compassion pretty well when they said “I’m sorry that you have to die”.

This assignment scenario was interesting to me given the fact that I’m a manager in real life. I’ve had similar situations when dealing with employees, so I’m quite certain of the steps I would follow to correct the scenario described in the assignment. It’s key that you preserve the integrity and morale of the team at all times as employees can be the key to your success or failure as a manager. As an ENTJ, I see this particular $300K sales goal as one of many goals to achieve and it would admittedly be difficult for me to have an employee behave in a manner that was not cohesive to the team’s success. The assignment did not indicate whether the two prior warnings were given verbally or written but I’m assuming by content, that they were verbal. Warnings between managers and employees should never be verbal. At the first sign that corrective action needs to take place, a written warning should be issued describing the offense and what action is necessary to correct it. The written warning should provide clear communication of expectations and define the consequences if expectations are not met. Possible consequences can include probation without pay, temporary demotion or completion of anger management classes (or some other health/psychological help class depending on situation). If the employee still does not correct the problem, the final action would be to dismiss them.

These are the steps I would take per the situation outlined in the assignment:

1. Meet with all 6 members of the sales team and let them how much their efforts are appreciated and valued, describe how important it is that we achieve the sales goal and then give them an incentive plan to achieve the goal. This could be a reward/monetary plan. For example; once the first $200K is reached everyone is rewarded with dinner on me and when the entire goal is accomplished, everyone receives a monetary award.