At first glance of my Life Styles Circumplex, there is nothing too extreme about it. There is no single dominating style, and I seem to be balanced out compared to others. Upon closer inspections I can see I am more people oriented. I lie above the 75th percentile in Humanistic-Encouraging, Affiliative, Approval, Conventional styles. I am in the 50th percentile in Dependent, Avoidance, Oppositional, Power, Competitive, Perfectionistic, and Self-Actualizing styles. The sole style that lies in the 25th percentile is Achievement. This, I believe, explains why I choose to write my paper at the last minute.
My primary management style is Affiliative, which scored in the 90th percentile. People who have an Affiliative style are more focused on the social aspects of work. I am more concerned with building interpersonal relationships with the people I work with and likes to help other people feel worthwhile. I have a need to build relationships that are meaningful and reciprocal and I have well-developed interpersonal skills. This skill makes me fit well in the culture of my place of work. I work for a national retail chain that has a mission to change the industry from a grab-and-go retail to service oriented. The company’s philosophy is, when a customer makes the effort to step foot into our store, they want something. Start building a relationship the moment they walk in, learn what is it they want, and assist them in finding it. We have to ask questions and learn about their lifestyle. By learning more about the customer, we can recommend complimentary products to the product they originally came for. Having an Affiliative style is very important in this job. I can easily strike up a conversation with anyone that walks into the store. Oftentimes I can build a relationship with the customer within half an hour that makes them want to come back to my store for their next purchase. This skill is very important because the company wants to build the business upon returning customers and having those customers recommend us to other people.
Although my Affiliative skill is great for my day to day work, it is not the best thing for management alone. I can be well-liked by my subordinates because I care about how they feel. I believe that personal job satisfaction contributes to effective job performance. My second highest scoring style is Humanistic-Encouraging, which has me encouraging people unconditionally. These skills are complimentary in that I can motivate other people to work. The rest of the circumplex shows that I am not very assertive, and I seem to have a problem motivating myself.
I don’t think there is any method in developing my Affiliative style. I am friendly, trusting, and don’t mind throwing myself out there to get to know people. I am naturally curious about people and I don’t mind sharing my experience and view with others. I think one of the starting points in developing this skill was from my public speaking class in high school. In that class I was able to overcome my fear of public speaking. From there I learned how to not get embarrassed when speaking to people. I don’t have the fear that I would say something wrong. I learned to laugh about my own mistakes. If I were to say something wrong, at worst people would ignore me. The most important thing I had to realize to develop my Affiliative skills is that if I throw myself out there and fails, the world is not going to end.
The Affiliative skill is very important to both my personal and career. On the personal front, I am able to build a couple lasting friendships. I don’t have too many friends, but I am close to the ones that are. I am only able to build a friendship with people who are willing to reciprocate my efforts. While at work, I am able to build relationships with customers as I have mentioned before, and it also helped me with my leadership skills. I like to go around the store and encourage others to do quality work. I let those people know what they do is not worthless, and their efforts are appreciated. I am well respected by my peers and the leadership team often asks for my opinion on what improvements can be made to increase moral and productivity. I am not afraid to express my opinion and point out my efforts to the leadership team. These relationships will help me in getting noticed. With these skills, I am usually being considered first when a leadership position opens up. The leadership team recognizes I am easy to work with, and I am able to help others develop. Unfortunately I had to decline those positions multiple times because of school. This is a skill I want to keep developing to further my career.
My most glaring shortcoming is in my Achievement style. In the assessment, it said that people with low Achievement scores feels any efforts they make makes little impact. It also said that people who have low score most likely suffered some setbacks in their life. That is a dead on description for me. The Affiliative and Achievement styles are complementary in creating a successful career. I definitely can see how striving towards quality work and encouraging others to do so can strengthen my career. Part of my problem is having proper motivation. I am a person motivated by results. In order for me to build this up, I need a rigid structure. If I don’t set measurable goals for myself in the sort term I usually lose interest in the subject. It may seem hard at first, but it doesn’t really take too much to motivate me. I have already started on a little experiment on myself. I have set up a couple of broad goals such as losing weight and saving money. Those things are measurable. My next step is to break these goals up into milestones. For weight lost, I have daily and weekly exercise goals. They don’t look like a lot, but when I put them together, it adds up. I am doing the same with my savings goals. I am a self-proclaimed shopaholic. The only way to curb my spending is to set a budget. I looked at my spending on Quicken and determined how much I need, how much I should save, and how much I have left in each month. I broke down this budget into categories also, so I won’t overspend on each thing so it would run into other types of spending. At the last step, I made all of my goals and milestones public on my web site. My friend commented on how all these figures made her head hurt. It is all in the efforts to build up my Achievement style.
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