Personality Types Among Us

Hours: 16 / Access Length: 180 Days / Delivery: Online, Self-Paced

Course Overview:

This course explores how personality traits, emotional intelligence, and decision-making strategies impact leadership effectiveness, team dynamics, and professional growth. Through lessons that examine influential traits like dominance, deference, grit, and empathy, you’ll gain insights into how behaviors shape workplace interactions and outcomes. The course covers frameworks such as the Big Five Personality Model, LMAP 360 feedback, and Crew Resource Management to help you assess both self and team performance in a variety of settings. Each lesson equips you with techniques to navigate complex organizational challenges. You’ll learn to enhance collaboration by fostering transparency, open dialogue, and trust, and to adapt these skills to high-stakes environments through clear communication, structured feedback, and constructive conflict management. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to leverage a blend of emotional intelligence, assertive communication, and reflective practices to support cohesive team environments and resilient leadership.

Students will:

• Evaluate the importance of strategic guidance and funding in transforming a small venture into a scalable business. 
• Recognize how grit and emotional intelligence complement each other in developing well-rounded, high-performance leadership skills. 
• Explore the significance of the Big Five Personality Model (OCEAN) and its dimensions.
• Identify strategies to foster a culture of trust, transparency, and open dialogue within teams. 
• Apply lessons from Crew Resource Management (CRM) to other teamwork settings.
• Distinguish between self-assessment (identity) and 360 feedback (reputation) as methods for evaluating personality. 
• Understand the concept of Level 5 leadership and its blend of grit, humility, and a results-focused mindset. 
• Reflect on the role of humility in supporting servant leadership and long-term success. 
• Develop strategies to "prepare to be wrong," fostering flexibility and readiness to adapt if conditions change. 
• Develop gratitude and self-awareness as foundational elements for becoming one’s best self. 

Course Outline:

Lesson 1: The Two Steves

In this lesson you examine how diverse personality traits and cultural influences drive innovation and teamwork in early Silicon Valley. You’ll uncover the impact of supportive learning environments on skill-building and explore the steps of creating prototypes and strategic guidance for small ventures, assessing how formative experiences shape professional approaches and ethical perspectives.

Lesson 2: Silicon Valley Grit

This lesson explores how grit, conscientiousness, and emotional intelligence influence success and leadership. By analyzing dominance and deference, you’ll understand how these traits shape teamwork and career paths. You'll cover the importance of self-awareness to manage these tendencies for cohesive collaboration and recognize pitfalls arising from high levels of dominance or deference.

Lesson 3: Personality Traits and Profiles

In this lesson, you discover how foundational personality traits influence individual behavior, focusing on the Big Five Personality Model and the Interpersonal Circumplex. You’ll evaluate the LMAP 360 model, distinguish high-value leadership traits from derailers, and consider how task mastery traits, such as conscientiousness and achievement drive, foster individual success in the workplace.

Lesson 4: Team Process and Personality

Here, you examine how leadership styles influence team morale and performance. You’ll explore strategies to promote transparency, open dialogue, and trust within teams, and analyze how biases can impact decision-making. You learn how constructive feedback maintains motivation and strengthens collective problem-solving and innovation within high-performing teams.

Lesson 5: Personality Profiles and Effectiveness

This lesson helps you analyze how personality profiles impact leadership effectiveness. By exploring high, mixed, and low-effectiveness profiles, you’ll examine traits like grit and teamwork’s role in productivity and understand how to leverage high-value traits while mitigating limitations in team and organizational contexts.

Lesson 6: Flying Lessons—Crew Leadership, Teamwork, and Communications

This lesson introduces the role of effective communication in high-stakes environments, focusing on Crew Resource Management. You’ll analyze aviation case studies to understand communication breakdowns and error management and explore strategies to balance inquiry with advocacy, fostering assertiveness and situational awareness across teams.

Lesson 7: Personality Is Behavior—Self-Ratings and 360 Feedback

This lesson helps you learn how self-assessment and feedback shape professional relationships and leadership. Explore self-perception biases and the influence of feedback in identifying growth areas. You’ll practice translating insights from feedback into actionable changes that enhance leadership and interpersonal effectiveness through improved self-awareness.

Lesson 8: Things Are Crazy at Work

Here, you will understand personality disorders’ impact on workplace relationships and performance. You’ll distinguish personality disorders from traits that derail performance, assess how stress can amplify challenging traits, and explore strategies to manage these behaviors, enhancing teamwork and professional dynamics.

Lesson 9: Deference—The Right-Sider

This lesson explores the traits of the deferential “Right-Sider” profile, analyzing their impact on team dynamics, communication, and leadership. You’ll consider the role of grit in leadership effectiveness and evaluate strategies to support assertiveness, initiative, and career satisfaction in deferential individuals within organizational settings.

Lesson 10: Leading with Grit and Assertiveness

In this lesson, you identify factors that lead to career derailment for deferential leaders and learn strategies to build assertiveness and self-confidence. You’ll analyze the role of decisive action and assertive communication in leadership and discover techniques to manage conflict, fostering resilient and effective team environments.

Lesson 11: The Dominant Personality of Our Time

This lesson dives into the complexity of dominant leadership styles and their influence on team productivity. You’ll explore how competitiveness and control can drive or inhibit team dynamics, evaluate how humility and self-reflection sustain effective leadership, and apply insights to cultivate a balance of vision, teamwork, and adaptability.

Lesson 12: The Toll of Hostility

Here, you analyze the effects of hostile behaviors, such as bullying, on organizational culture and team collaboration. You’ll examine the physiological and psychological toll of hostility, develop strategies for managing aggressive tendencies, and explore how constructive behaviors improve team cohesion, productivity, and personal health.

Lesson 13: Dominance Is Not Leadership

Here, you discover how dominance-driven behaviors impact workplace relationships. You’ll learn to balance task-oriented and social intelligence skills, develop empathy and patience, and evaluate how a dual focus on individual and team goals enhances collaboration, improving both personal effectiveness and team dynamics.

Lesson 14: Leadership EQ and Teamwork Behaviors

This lesson will help you recognize the role of emotional intelligence (EQ) in effective leadership. You’ll explore constructive communication techniques, humility, and a “we” mindset to build trust and engagement. You will practice empathy, curiosity, and mindful communication. You’ll enhance teamwork and create a collaborative, supportive team environment.

Lesson 15: Leadership in Action—Qantas Flight 32

This lesson helps you understand crisis leadership in high-stakes environments, focusing on communication, composure, and delegation. You’ll explore strategies for managing information overload, prioritizing tasks under pressure, and preventing groupthink through independent oversight. You'll also examine the psychological effects of crises and the value of post-event support for teams.

Lesson 16: Your Best Self—the LMAP Method

This lesson explores the value of 360-degree feedback for leadership growth. You’ll learn to set Leadership Development Goals (LDGs), align self-perception with external feedback, and leverage the unfreeze-transition-freeze stages of behavior change. It also covers strategies for sharing goals and consistent follow-up support positive, sustainable changes.

Lesson 17: Red Teams and WRAP

Topics covered help you develop sound decision-making skills by exploring Red Teaming and the WRAP model. You’ll learn to widen options, reality-test assumptions, maintain emotional distance, and prepare for errors, creating flexible decisions that balance team judgment and individual biases, enhancing collective problem-solving.

Lesson 18: Insight in Action

In this final lesson, you learn to transition from insight to action by developing a “bias for action” approach. You’ll explore design thinking techniques like prototyping, reframing, and recognizing latent opportunities. You also learn strategies like empathy, flow, and self-awareness foster continuous improvement to help you engage in proactive personal and professional development.

All necessary course materials are included.

System Requirements:

Internet Connectivity Requirements:

• Cable, Fiber, DSL, or LEO Satellite (i.e. Starlink) internet with speeds of at least 10mb/sec download and 5mb/sec upload are recommended for the best experience.

NOTE: While cellular hotspots may allow access to our courses, users may experience connectivity issues by trying to access our learning management system.  This is due to the potential high download and upload latency of cellular connections.   Therefore, it is not recommended that students use a cellular hotspot as their primary way of accessing their courses.

Hardware Requirements:

• CPU: 1 GHz or higher
• RAM: 4 GB or higher
• Resolution: 1280 x 720 or higher.  1920x1080 resolution is recommended for the best experience.
• Speakers / Headphones
• Microphone for Webinar or Live Online sessions.

Operating System Requirements:

• Windows 7 or higher.
• Mac OSX 10 or higher.
• Latest Chrome OS
• Latest Linux Distributions
  

NOTE: While we understand that our courses can be viewed on Android and iPhone devices, we do not recommend the use of these devices for our courses. The size of these devices do not provide a good learning environment for students taking online or live online based courses.

Web Browser Requirements:

• Latest Google Chrome is recommended for the best experience.
• Latest Mozilla FireFox
• Latest Microsoft Edge
• Latest Apple Safari

Basic Software Requirements (These are recommendations of software to use):

• Office suite software (Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or LibreOffice)
• PDF reader program (Adobe Reader, FoxIt)
• Courses may require other software that is described in the above course outline.