According to BuisnessDictionary.com, Type A Personality is defined as a “Temperament characterized by excessive ambition, aggression, competitiveness, drive, impatience, need for control, focus on quantity over quality and unrealistic sense of urgency.”
During your career (regardless of what career path you end up pursuing), you will likely end up dealing with all types of bosses, including those with Type A Personality. Having a Type A Personality Boss can be both good and bad. Good aspects of working for a boss with Type A Personality include the final results, high standards, and growth orientation, to name a few. On the other hand, negative aspects of working for a boss with Type A Personality include them being very demanding, employees being held accountable for everything (big or small), and your boss’s low tolerance towards failure and mistakes.
Now, with all of that being said, listed below are 10 Signs That Your Boss Has A Type A Personality:
Besides being highly independent and having a driven personality, people with a Type A Personality are also blunt and love to get directly to the point. A Type A Personality’s direct honesty may seem intimidating, but remember not to take every blunt statement your boss tells you too personally. Your Boss’s honesty is meant to help you evolve and grow in whatever it is you are doing for your career!
As mentioned in the introduction earlier, one of the main traits associated with Type A Personality is Impatience. If your current boss strongly detests delays, wasting time, and/or becomes restless with the pace at which you and your fellow co-workers work, they definitely have a Type A Personality.
Impatient People tend to get irritable easily and the best way you can help eliminate some unnecessary stress at the workplace is by completing everything your boss assigns a day before it is due. Any failure to turn in or complete tasks on time will result in not only your boss getting angry, but a possibility of you losing your job too!
As the title of Hannah Montana’s song “Nobody’s Perfect” implies, there’s no such thing as a perfect person. In fact, the opening lyric of that particular single is “Everybody makes mistakes”. However, in the world of a Type A Personality, they must be perfect in everything they do, whether it be inside or outside of the workplace. If your boss has a goal-oriented mindset, an intense drive to succeed, and a reputation as an overachiever, those are typical signs of a perfectionist; meaning that your boss has a Type A Personality.
Your boss’s desires to be perfect (see #3 above) plays a role in their competitive nature. One key part in identifying this sign of Type A Personality is seeing how much your boss pushes themselves to their limits to try and achieve as much and as quickly as possible.
Every competitive person values more than anything in the world, and those with Type A Personality value winning (ie., being #1) more than anything in the world. If you have noticed in the past that your boss will due whatever it takes to win, regardless of whom the competition is, they definitely have a Type A Personality.
If your boss is a perfectionist, they most likely have a set of high standards to which they would like the work to be completed. This set of high standards is one of the more positive aspects to take from a Type A Personality as they will help reshape your own standards as you strive to get or submit the best quality of work possible.
As a result of a Type A Personality’s Perfectionist and Win At All Costs Nature, said person will most likely have a low tolerance towards failure and errors, no matter how big or how small. Anytime you have witnessed your boss throw a hissy fit or overact over a teeny, tiny error, is one of several signs of Type A Personality.
People with Type A Personality have already mastered the art of multitasking and have a reputation with their fellow peers of doing a gazillion different things at once. In order to become adept at multitasking, one must have great organization skills, time management skills, and a sense of urgency.
While multitasking, a Type A Personality feels the urge to keep on grinding, often at times without any breaks as they feel that ‘There is never enough time’. This trait leads to some people with Type A Personality to earn a reputation as a ‘workaholic’.
Another one of the best qualities possessed by people with a Type A Personality is that they are always ambitious and passionate about what they do. Your boss will likely be the same, as both the head honcho’s ambition and passion stem from his/her competitive nature (see #4 above) and desire to be the best.
Your boss probably expects everyone on the team to be all-in and give 110 percent effort on whatever it is that the company is doing. If a person isn’t passionate about a task, the chances of completing it are very slim.
This ambition and passion can be applied in contexts both inside and outside of the workplace.
Although people with Type A Personality are known for their high levels of confidence, they are also known for being constantly stressed out and anxious too. Depending on what the situation is, your boss’s anxiety and stress levels are bound to be high, especially if it is close to a major deadline or a big case.
In general, a person with Type A Personality (this includes people who aren’t the boss of their workplace), stresses about both the past and the future. Stress plays a prevalent part in their life and can either drive them to work harder in achieving their goals or add more pressure and turns them into a workaholics.
One of the worst traits associated with people with Type A Personality is that they are prone to having angry outbursts! The roots for your boss’s previous angry outbursts can stem from various factors, including their impatience, employees not finishing tasks by scheduled deadlines, errors (both big and small) being made, or not satisfying their own high expectations, to name a few reasons. High Amounts of Stress can also be the source of past and future angry outbursts too.
Now, as an employee working under a boss with Type A Personality, it is important to remember to not to be too sensitive and to not take things too personally. As Forbes Magazine notes in its article “How To Work Constructively For A Difficult ‘Type A’ Boss”, your boss’s angry response (most of the time), “Isn’t about you; it’s simply the way Type A individuals relate to the world around them.” The best thing you can do is get your tasks done before they are due (preferably 1-2 days prior to the deadline) and have open communication with your boss.
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