Your personality is the lynchpin that your entire business rests on. Your personality is the reason that you’ll be able to get traffic, generate contacts, retain readers, entice partners and build a successful business. Often time’s people will succeed with certain tactics and strategies while others completely fail using those same strategies. The reason? Personality.
Your personality affects your business in so many ways, it’s hard to see its full impact. Here are some of the main ways your personality affects your business.
==> Your Readers
If you run a website that creates content on the internet, your personality is going to play a large role in how your readers perceive you. When people decide whether or not they like your site, it’s going to be due in large part to your personality.
Some people relate well with people who have strong, opinionated personalities. Others gravitate to people with more of an expert, professor-like personality. Still others love the casual, funny and off the cuff style.
Your personality will determine your readership in large part.
==> Your Co-Workers and Peers
How your co-workers and peers relate to you is also greatly influenced by your personality. It’ll determine if people trust you in general and whether they trust you when working with you on projects.
Do people perceive you as generous? If so, they’re more likely to be generous towards you. Do people feel like you’re trustworthy? Can they rely on you? If so, they’re more likely to count on you for important projects.
==> Partners
Likewise, partners look to your personality to decide whether or not they want to work with you on various projects. Remember the saying: “All else being equal, people do business with people they like. All else not being equal, people still do business with people they like.”
This applies to all kinds of partnership relationships. It applies to finding investors, it applies to getting vendor relationships, it applies to getting marketing partners.
No matter what kind of personality you have, it helps to have a smile. Even if your style is sarcastic, adding a smile makes partners much more likely to want to work with you.
==> Your Own Staff
Finally, your personality has a huge influence on how your staff relates to you. Will they be afraid of you? Will they joke with you? Will they feel a need to lie to you? Or will they fight for your company when you need their help?
When you’re hiring people, make sure to hire people that’ll work well with the personalities at the company, including yours. This is called the “cultural fit.” You want to hire people who’ll “feel” like they belong in the environment.
Personality runs everything in business. It’s the crux of your customer interactions, the key to partnership deals, the secret to winning your peers’ respect and the #1 tool in managing staff.