Leadership Tioga: Personalities in the Workplace

Although class was pushed out a week due to the major snowstorm that hit the Southern TIer, it was definitely worth the wait. Meeting in the beautiful new boardroom of the Owego Apalachin School District building, Kathy Hamilton, senior vice president of Admissions for EBI and Kim Bahlatzis, instructor at EBI, brought the class together through group exercises. 

These eye-opening, laugh inducing, thought provoking exercises shed light on how leaders identify the variety of personalities in the workplace.

The class was broken up into groups. Each group chose a lemon from a basket passed around by Hamilton. Their goal was to identify the positive and negative traits of the lemon as if it were a person. After some time, the lemons were collected and a representative from the group pointed out their lemon’s positive and negative traits. 

This activity brought to light that everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and as leaders it is important to identify them and learn how to work with those traits. (As a side note, after this discussion each group was able to pick their lemon out of the basket).

Bahlatzis explained that according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator there are 16 different personality types. The class then took a short version of the Myers-Briggs test as well as a few other personality tests. They were amazed at how spot on the results were. Plus they had a good time seeing who else in the group had their same personality type.

For the final exercise, the class was split in two. Each group was given a hula-hoop and asked to hold hands. The race was on to see which group could pass the hoop down the line in the fastest time. Through the laughter, many ingenious ways came through to pass that hula-hoop.

The Leadership Tioga class definitely went back to their offices armed with some new insights into relating with others.

For more information on Leadership Tioga, contact the Tioga County Chamber of Commerce at (607) 687-2020.