Perfecting Completer Finishers

Like I am sure many of you I have over the years participated in profiling exercises that determine individual strengths and weaknesses in our character and personality which influence how we are likely to perform in various professional work situations. With some assistance from AI (Microsoft Copilot) here are some examples many of you will recognise and will I am sure have applied to yourself and your teams.

There are several well-regarded personality profiling systems used by professionals to enhance team dynamics, improve productivity, and support personal development.

1. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI): This is one of the most popular personality assessments.  It categorizes individuals into 16 personality types based on preferences in four dimensions: Introversion/Extraversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving.
2. DISC Assessment: This tool focuses on four primary personality traits: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Compliance.  It’s widely used in organizational settings to improve communication and teamwork.
3. Big Five Personality Traits (OCEAN): This model assesses individuals based on five broad dimensions: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. It’s highly regarded for its scientific validity.

4.Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI): This assessment is designed to predict job performance by evaluating normal personality characteristics that are relevant to occupational success.

1. StrengthsFinder (CliftonStrengths): Developed by Gallup, this tool identifies an individual’s top strengths out of 34 possible themes.  It’s used to help people leverage their strengths in their personal and professional lives.

6.16PF (Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire): This assessment measures 16 different personality traits and is used for a variety of applications, including career development and employee selection.

One that is not in the above list is the Belbin Test see The nine Belbin Team Roles (With examples and definitions). “First devised by Raymond Meredith Belbin through a study at Henley Management College, the Belbin Team Role Inventory test is a behavioural test to assess how an individual operates in a team environment and their preference for any of the nine team roles.” The nine team roles are:

• The Plant
• The Monitor-Evaluator
• The Specialist
• The Resource Investigator
• The Team Worker
• The Co-ordinator
• The Shaper
• The Implementer
• The Completer/Finisher

We will all identify with various of these roles and personality strengths in our professional work (and probably also if we are honest in our private lives). One of a number that I particularly associate with is the last. “Completer / Finishers are meticulous and detail-orientated, ensuring that the team's work is completed to the highest standard. They are vigilant about deadlines and quality control, often pushing the team to meet its objectives on time.” There is though also a downside (as there is with most of these traits). “However, their perfectionist tendencies in the Belbin team role system can make it difficult for them to delegate tasks, leading to potential stress and anxiety over the team's work”. So this characteristic is both good and bad for a lawyer as attention to detail is essential, but in the context of say negotiating an outsourcing contract can be more challenging because it means a tendency to want to push forward to completion of the entire task all the time. I naturally want to bring matters to a conclusion and get the contract as a whole signed. This can have a negative effect on quality and taking the necessary time to get everything right for all aspects of the deal.

What I have been thinking about more recently is the way this character trait can be applied beneficially in practice, in the context and taking account of the multi-stage nature of these transactions. I have become more aware that almost every transaction we face can and should be broken down into its discrete phases to each of which we can contribute our professional skill set. So an outsourcing contract negotiation by way of example, will broadly have the following distinct component parts each of which will in turn have different aspects for the customer and the supplier

• Conception – defining customer need and identifying supplier capability
• Planning - working out how to procure and agree a contract
• Creation - development of a draft outsourcing contracts
• Engagement - both parties working together to negotiate and agree a contract
• Signature – conclusion of governance and contract signature
• Hand over to delivery team.

Once I start thinking about each of these distinct phases as opposed to the transaction as a whole, I find it enables and empowers me to utilise the positive aspects of completer/finishers - working to get things concluded for each phase. At the same time this means I can manage the less positive aspects like an inevitable tendency to rush to complete something just because it has to be done.
It strikes me as well that this is generally how to approach and apply our inevitable personality traits at work: first be honest and appreciate them, but then see how best these attributes can be made to work positively for us in our daily work. We can use these various psychological tools to understand ourselves and our colleagues better and then apply them, but with care and as appropriate to the task in hand. See, for example, this Forbes article How To Get The Most Out Of Personality Assessments In The Workplace which advises as follows.

• Don’t conduct a pre-hire assessment.

Confronting candidates with a pre-hire personality test may come across as aggressive.

• Don’t make assumptions based on results.

Personality assessments typically indicate a person’s dominant traits, but it would be a mistake to assume that’s the end of the story.

• Do help staff leverage results.

Personality assessments aren’t just helpful for managers and trainers—they should be helpful for the individual as well.

• Do use assessments to support development and growth.

Personality assessments are ideal for helping you better understand how to manage each individual, what motivates and engages them and how you can leverage their strengths while developing their areas of weakness.

For me this is good advice and contributes to understanding and using character traits at work beneficially. Too often we go through these exercises and they are very helpful and inciteful at the time – but they are a sort of one day wonder and their deeper understanding and benefit for ourselves and indeed our colleagues wears off simply too quickly. I suggest we can and should be more assiduous and thoughtful in integrating the results of these tests into our day-to-day work as they apply to each of us.
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As Oscar Wilde shrewdly observed “Be yourself: everyone else is already taken”.

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