Succeed In IT By 'Reading' People Massachusetts

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Originally published at Internet.com

This may smack of that sordid business called selling. It is a very powerful sales technique, but we all sell in other ways, every day: asking your boss for something; joining a project team; persuading a workmate; explaining a purchase to a spouse. If your style is mismatched to their preference, it will grate. You risk annoying them and failing to communicate effectively. So everybody should understand something about profiling.

There are two kinds of people: those who divide people into two groups and those who don't. Me, I'm one of the latter: I divide people into four groups. For day-to-day encounters with people, it is very effective to quickly classify them into one of four groups in order to determine the best way to interact with them. Much as I am a fan of the Rule of Threes - people like to have three of anything - in the case of people, three is not enough. To usefully categorise people, you need four. I can hear the howls of protest now; "you can't lump the endless variation of the human race into four groups - people cannot be pigeon-holed, and especially not into so few categories".

Well, you can. Try it. It is imperfect and sometimes difficult, but it can also be startlingly effective.

As to what four categories to use, that doesn't actually matter that much so long as you have a model that works for you, and some predetermined rules for how you will respond to each of the four categories.

A well-known four-way categorisation is DISC® Profiling. DISC goes further than just putting people into four buckets, but at its heart there are four main types of people, arranged in the model as four quadrants.

Wikipedia says:

DISC is an acronym for:

Dominance - relating to control, power and assertiveness

Influence - relating to social situations and communication

Steadiness (submission in Marston's time)- relating to patience, persistence, and thoughtfulness

Conscientiousness (or caution, compliance in Marston's time) - relating to structure and organization

These four dimensions can be grouped in a grid with D and I sharing the top row and representing extroverted aspects of the personality, and C and S below representing introverted aspects. D and C then share the left column and represent task-focused aspects, and I and S share the right column and represent social aspects. In this matrix, the vertical dimension represents a factor of "Assertive" or "Passive", while the horizontal represents "Open" vs. "Guarded".

DISC allows you to look at someone's environment that they surround themselves with, listen to them speak, watch them behave, and then categorise them in order to predict their preferred mode of behaviour from you. At least, that is how I use it. It results in some very crude simplifications, but it works for me. "He's high I: better encourage him to talk about himself for a while. Make sure I show what's in it for him". "She's an S: I'll need to get a few more team-members on side first". "He's a C: don't rush him - settle in for a long and detailed discussion of every bit of information I have with me". If you want to be able to walk into a stranger's office and quickly think "Oops she's a high D - better present the facts as quickly and orderly as possible then cut to the chase" then get yourself some DISC training.

But the really interesting thing is that it does not have to be DISC.

Continued on Page 2: The Situational Leadership Model

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My greatest teacher, Art Jacobs, created a categorisation system in the earlier versions of Target Account Selling (TAS) which classified IT people by what motivates them: money, technology, relationships or business. So - crudely - you know whether to sell to them on price, features, trust or ROI. That model has worked well for me too.

I also like the Situational Leadership model (Hersey, Blanchard & Johnson, Management of Organizational Behavior, 9th edition 2008) that modifies your style of leadership based on the employee's readiness or maturity: from Directing through Coaching to Supporting and finally Delegating. While on the surface it categorises the leader's style, it is all about selecting one of the four styles by profiling the employee.

Probably the best known profiling system of any sort is Myers Briggs, or more precisely the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI) "personality inventory". The basis of MBTI is two four-way models, which are combined to produce 16 possible categorisations of people. This is very powerful for working out group dynamics, where you have the luxury of a day to workshop what your profile is and how to relate to your teammates.

But I'm wary of people who say they can meet someone and quickly determine that they are INTJ. Certainly I cannot deal with 16 levels of categorisation while meeting someone for the first time, or trying to predict the response of someone who I have met twice. Four is enough.

Incidentally, the Myers-Briggs results can be spookily accurate - once you get to a granularity of 16 the fit can almost be too close for comfort. Mind you, sometimes astrological profiles sound like a good fit too, and every bone of my scientific being tells me they are crap. So I do approach Myers-Briggs skeptically. It lacks any rigorous scientific background, but it seems to work. The same is true of just about all models for classifying people; they arise from someone's insight not from scientific measurement.

And if they work for you, that is all that matters. That is what they are for. It doesn't matter if some of the time you can't get a good match, and other times you are wrong, so long as fairly often you can modify your own behaviour successfully to get the result you need from someone else.

So find one or more profiling classification models that you are comfortable with. Learn how to quickly categorise people. Work out which category you are in. Learn the rules for how your type should interact with the others. Especially know what not to do, or what to do to avoid potential difficulties. Then apply the rules and see for yourself how useful they are.

The alternative is to charge in and just be yourself. Often enough this will be wrong for them. If four really is the magic number for categorising people, then you'll get it wrong about three times in four. With profiling, you might do better than fifty/fifty.

Rob England is a self-employed IT consultant, commentator, and entrepreneur living in New Zealand.