Management Mistakes to Avoid in 2025
Promoting people out of the area in which they excel. Consider a highly effective accountant. Someone who is able to process invoices and other financial…
The patience trait measures a person’s need for established processes and procedures, how people handle predictability and manage priorities, and their openness to change and new ideas.
Patience tells us why some people enjoy the pressure of being busy and having multiple priorities and deadlines, while others enjoy a more routine, stable environment.
More specifically, patience quantifies a person’s preferred scope of activity, their priority management, how they feel about change in their environment, and their need for deadlines.
The higher someone’s measured patience, the more planned and deliberate their behaviour is. They tend to be more relaxed, easy-going, and accepting of others.
The lower someone’s measured patience, the more impatient and intense their behaviour is. They tend to approach activities with a sense of urgency and are quick to react to changes in priorities.
At work, highly patient (High P) people approach activities with a steady, methodical style. They are comfortable concentrating on an individual task requiring repetitive behaviours for an extended period. They tend to prefer to concentrate heavily on a single project to its completion, rather than switching priorities throughout the day. High P people enjoy having regular routines and coming into the workday knowing what is expected of them.
People high in patience often thrive in technical/specialist roles, accounting roles, quality assurance, information technology, and other analytical fields.
Conversely, people low in patience (Low P) approach work activities with a fast pace and sense of urgency. They tend to embrace and initiate change and are naturally drawn to roles involving a variety of different responsibilities.
People low in patience often thrive in fast-paced roles like project managers, outside sales, and corporate/managerial roles.
The purpose of this article is to provide a sketch of the differences between High P and Low P people to illustrate the meaning of the patience trait, one of the 7 factors measured by the TRAITS assessment. With a better understanding of the trait, you will begin to recognize behaviours in others that reflect high and low patience, and by extension, which roles those people are best suited to.
In addition to predicting natural behaviours, an understanding of someone’s patience (and other TRAITS) can also be used to understand their motivations.
As with all factors measured by the TRAITS assessment, the higher (or lower) the level of patience, the more intense the behaviour.
Those who are closer to the average on patience can display a degree of both high P and low P behaviour, but with considerably lower intensity than those who are strong in either direction.
People closer to the average on patience often thrive as financial controllers, executive assistants, or administrative assistants, which tend to involve a mixture of High P and Low P behaviours.
Those with stronger traits are more consistent in their behaviour but have their own sets of challenges.
When deciding the appropriate level of patience necessary for a particular role, it is important to reflect on which behaviours are essential for the role, and which behaviours may be detrimental to that role. We hope this blog has provided some helpful insights you can incorporate into your personnel decisions.
Interested in learning more? Check out the other guides in our free introduction to the 7 work traits.
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