Month: May 2020

What am I good at?

I am good at communicating with others and making things happen. I am a natural leader who can motivate people to push themselves and inspire them to reach their maximum potential. I am a fast learner and always willing to try new things.

What do I value?

I value honesty and integrity. I want people I associate with to be truthful to themselves and others. I want people and organizations that I surround myself with to treat others how they would want to be treated.

How did I get here?

I got to the place I am today because of the support from my friends and family. My loved ones have always believed in me and been confident in my success. Sports have also played a huge role in my life and pushed me to work well on teams and helped me gain a competetive edge.

Where am I going?

I am going to be successful in whatever industry I decide is best for me. I want to be a project manager where I can push people to do their best every day. I love maximizing the potential of others as well as myself.

My top trait that the personality test identified was extroversion.  This talks about how I tend to be enthusiastic, action oriented and how I am likely to say yes to many situations.  My top categories under extroversion are excitement seeking and activity level which I think matches up pretty well with my personality. The category that I least matched up with was openness. This seems to have to do with how likely I am to try new things and push my comfort zone.  Openness also talks about enjoying art and being interested in learning which I think are two things that I lack in.  It is not that I do not like any art and do not want to learn, but I do not enjoy all art and only enjoy learning about specific things that I am interested in at the time. 

I think that a potential employer might think that it is a good thing that I am extroverted.  Depending where I end up applying for jobs this could be a good thing for different reasons. If I end up applying for a job where I am interacting with customers, this is great because I will not be afraid to ask them if I can help or give them some information on what I know. If I work on a project management team my extroversion will also benefit me.  It will help me to reach out to people I know and resources to help get things done.  I will also be able to use these skills to ask for help when I need to instead of wasting time trying to prove my autonomy like someone who is more introverted would.  As far as my biggest weakness determined in this personality test goes, I think that it would not be too much of a problem for the fields I want to enter.  The category of openness seems to be needed in fields like phycology and is less important in working as a project manager.  I do think that it is helpful to see that this is one of my weaknesses so I can work on being more open in the future. 

To choose between top talent and consistency is a very difficult thing. As a manager I would recognize the importance of matching talent to the right job. Some people have natural, innate skills that allow them to succeed at a certain profession over someone who dedicates themselves to try as hard as they can to be successful at the position. If I needed to fill an essential opening for a position in my company, I would go with the person with the highest performance ceiling, Avery. To me, having the best talent is the most important thing. It is something that cannot be trained, everything else can be managed and worked on.

A job where it would be more beneficial to hire a high performing person like Avery would be one that is of a specialty job. This type of job has roles that require certain skills and not just any average person could be successful in. These jobs are more unpredictable and require critical perspective and decision making. For example, forestry, craftsmanship, designing, and construction. A job where a person like Avery with lower performance potential but high consistency would be better is one that has predictable work, particularly physical work. These jobs include ones such as welding on an assembly line, food preparation, packaging of objects, or other work that is team based and includes line work. These types of jobs hinge on the expectation that work inputs form employees will be the same every time to effectively predict and calculate what needs to be done on each shift. Often times these jobs are not one specialty position but contain multiple positions of one type of job to be filled by different people. In this case, talent is still, but key operations cannot take place without the predictability and perfected routine that happens in such jobs