Day 1: How Your Personality Shapes Your First Months as a Leader
What I wish someone had explained to me about personality as a new leader
Coming Up Today
The personality knowledge I wish I had as a first-time leader
How your personality traits influence the way you step into leadership
How to measure your exact personality trait scores
It’s Monday morning, ten minutes into the first all-team meeting you’re running, when someone asks a question you don’t have an answer to.
What do you do in this moment? Panic? Pause to think? Redirect?
How you respond is almost certainly influenced by how much experience you have as a leader or what you’ve observed from leaders in the past – but it’s also influenced by your personality type.
Today, and throughout this 5-Day New Leader Challenge, we’re going to look at what to expect as a first-time manager or leader, and how your personality plays a role in it all.
First up today, we’re diving into your unique personality traits and how they influence how you do – or don’t – show up when you are new to leadership.
Before we jump in, here’s an overview of what to expect throughout this challenge:
Day 1: How Your Personality Shapes Your Leadership (You Are Here)
Day 2: The New Leader Tradeoff
Day 3: Becoming an Emotionally Intelligent New Leader
Day 4: Why Some New Leaders Feel More Confident than Others
Day 5: Knowing Who You’re Leading
What I Wish I Knew About Personality Before Leading a Team
When I first stepped into leadership, it took me a while to realize that becoming a leader was a completely different job from the one I had been promoted out of. The strengths that made me successful as an individual contributor weren’t always the same strengths my team needed from me as a leader.
A lot of that learning happened in real time. My team was watching me navigate decisions, communicate under pressure, and figure out what kind of leader I wanted to be.
Looking back, I wish someone had helped me understand how much my personality influenced the way I showed up – especially in moments where leadership felt uncomfortable, unfamiliar, or high stakes.
So today, I’m breaking down each personality trait in the way I wish someone had done for me earlier in my career. Not as a fixed label, but as a lens for understanding our instincts, blind spots, and default leadership patterns – and how those tendencies can either support or distance the people we lead.
Here goes:
1. Introverted vs. Extraverted: how you process and recharge
If you lean Introverted, your instinct under pressure is usually some version of: let me think about it first. That probably served you well as an individual contributor. You gave thoughtful answers, sent carefully considered messages, and didn’t speak just to fill space.
But leadership changes how that instinct gets interpreted.
When you’re the person leading the room, silence can feel heavier to everyone else. Your team doesn’t always experience your pause as thoughtfulness – sometimes they experience it as distance, uncertainty, or withholding. Even when you’re simply processing.
If you lean Extraverted, the instinct is usually the opposite: think out loud, talk it through, find clarity by speaking. That energy can create momentum and make people feel included in the process.
But in leadership, people weigh your words differently.
A passing comment, a rough idea, or a “maybe we should…” can sound like a finalized decision to a team member who’s trying to read the direction of the team. You may feel like you’re brainstorming. They may feel like they just got new marching orders.
Neither tendency is wrong, but both can unintentionally create confusion when you’re new to leading people.
2. Intuitive vs. Observant: how you communicate vision
If you lean Intuitive, you probably connect dots quickly in your head. You can already see where the team is going, what needs to change, and how all the pieces fit together.
The problem is: your team can’t see the inside of your brain.
New leaders with the Intuitive personality trait might talk about the destination without walking people through how they got there. From your perspective, the logic feels obvious. From your team’s perspective, it can feel like the conversation skipped three important steps.
If you lean more towards the Observant side of this trait scale, your instinct is usually to stay grounded in what’s already working. You notice the practical details, the tested approaches, and the systems your team already trusts. That steadiness is incredibly valuable, especially when things feel chaotic.
But leadership usually asks for more than maintaining what already exists.
At some point, the role starts requiring you to pull people toward a future they can’t fully see yet. And for Observant leaders, that can feel uncomfortable at first because it typically requires deviating from what’s concrete and proven.
Both of these personality traits bring something important to leadership, and most teams need both – the pull toward possibility and stability.
3. Thinking vs. Feeling: how you weigh and deliver decisions
Thinking leaders usually begin with: What’s the right call here?
They trust that people will value honesty, clarity, and consistency. A lot of first-time leaders with this trait assume that if they explain the logic clearly enough, people will understand and accept the decision.
Feeling leaders usually begin with: How is this going to affect this person?
They trust that people will value empathy, care, and emotional awareness. Many first-time leaders with the Feeling trait carry the emotional weight of leadership decisions much longer than their teams realize.
Both approaches have their merits and both come with challenges. On Day 3 of this challenge, we’ll go deeper into the Thinking-Feeling dynamic in the context of hard conversations and difficult leadership moments.
4. Judging vs. Prospecting: how you structure your team’s work
If you lean Judging, your instinct as a new leader is usually to create structure. Clear expectations. Defined processes. Standing meetings. Templates. Timelines. Systems.
Done well, this gives your team clarity and stability. People know what’s expected of them and how work moves forward.
But new leaders with the Judging trait sometimes over-rely on structure because structure feels safer than leadership does.
At some point, it’s easy to start believing the spreadsheet, the process, or the meeting cadence is the leadership. It isn’t. Those things support leadership, but they can also become a comfortable place to hide when you’re still building confidence. (I know I’ve been guilty of this!)
If you lean Prospecting, your instinct is usually the opposite. You want to stay adaptable. Flexible. Responsive to what’s happening instead of locking into a rigid plan too early.
Done well, your team feels trusted and empowered. There’s room for creativity, adjustment, and real collaboration.
But without enough clarity, flexibility can start to feel like uncertainty to the people around you.
A lot of new Prospecting leaders underestimate how badly teams want to know: What’s the plan? Even imperfect direction usually feels more grounding than no direction at all.
5. Assertive vs. Turbulent: your relationship with self-doubt and feedback
Day 4 of this challenge is going to go much deeper into this trait pair, but I’ll cover it briefly here.
This dynamic shapes how you experience the gap between the leader you are today and the leader you think you’re supposed to be.
Turbulent leaders usually feel that gap constantly. Every mistake feels loud. Feedback sticks. Self-doubt shows up fast and often. You replay meetings afterward, overthink feedback, and wonder whether everyone else can see how unsure you feel.
Assertive leaders tend to experience the opposite. They move through leadership with more internal steadiness and less second-guessing. Sometimes so much steadiness that they miss signals their team is anxious, confused, or needing more reassurance than they realize.
Both personality traits come with advantages. Both come with blind spots. We’ll get into this more later in the week.
Your Action Item
Set aside about 10 minutes to take our free personality test – or retake it if it’s been more than six months since your last result.
Your results will reveal your personality type, as well as your exact percentage scores for each of the five personality trait pairs we covered today.
And that level of detail matters more than most people realize.
There’s a big difference between someone who’s 52% Introverted and someone who’s 98% Introverted, for example, even though both technically land in the same category. The same goes for every other trait pair.
The goal here isn’t to box yourself into a label. It’s simply to better understand the patterns you naturally fall back on when you’re leading, communicating, making decisions, and navigating pressure. Because once you can see those patterns clearly, you start leading with a lot more intention.
Up Next: We’re looking at what leaders gain – and lose – when transitioning from individual contributor to manager, and how this tradeoff differs based on your personality. Stay tuned for Day 2 tomorrow!
No way to get more specific than saying there’s a big difference between someone who’s 52% Introverted and someone who’s 98% Introverted, for example, even though both technically land in the same category?