Work

Find out what to do if you have a sudden loss of a job. 

Don’t get down or depressed; look at this as a new adventure and do everything to keep yourself from being bitter or angry. 

Think about everything you learned and gained skills since you last looked for a job. It is about looking at critical areas you are interested in and your priorities and guiding principles. Think about your budget and how much money you need to live or would like to make. 

Think about this as a chance to do something you like better, make more money, or change your work area. This time might be scary, but it doesn’t have to be awful. 

Don’t burn any bridges with your last job or other people. Relationships and networking are the keys to your future employment and work. Not only is it essential for you to keep your old relationships going, but now is a time to make new relationships. Think about who can help you find another job. Bring in your team.

Figure out what matters to you in a job and what you would have changed because now is your opportunity

Decide if now is the time to get training or go to school. It is good to learn other new things unrelated to your job. Learning about new items will give you confidence and something interesting to discuss during your new job interviews. 

Spend some time visiting family and taking time to do things you can’t do while you have a job. 

Write your resume and get an elevator speech so you can talk to others about your future work plans.  We covered elevator speeches in episode 19. 

Check out job sites and other places to look for jobs to see what is out there. 

You might consider counseling or career specialists to help you find a job. Your job is finding a job and being kind to yourself. You are now working for yourself to find your new future. 

Challenge

Try to imagine if you are going to get another job. Maybe you’re not looking right now. Perhaps you’re not in danger of losing your job. But pretend for a moment that you will look for a new job. What are those career anchors that are going to make you fulfilled? What are you looking for in a new job? Would it be another schedule? Would it be another pay increase? Would it be another industry? And maybe even jot down some of these things that if you were going to get another job, what would you be looking for? Perhaps this is your chance, then to just casually look in the ads on the websites in the different places to see if any of those jobs meet your needs. But again, if you get but, doing a little dreaming will help you know what’s next.

Keep learning, keep questioning and keep your career fresh and growing.

Beginning, Middle, and End?  People often think about work as having a beginning, middle, and end but is that how work must be? Do we just go up a hill for our career and then down until retirement? It paints a bleak picture of the work world. 

Work as a Journey – instead of looking at work as this big up and down, it is a journey with easy parts, challenging climbs stumbles, and wins. We can look at an adventure with big plot turns with a trip. 

Questions and Humility – Learn how to ask great questions but not beat people over the heads with them. We want to ask questions to honestly learn what is happening, how we can solve it, and understand people better. It is the only way we can learn and grow. 

Learn, Earn and Retire – Instead of looking at work as an up and down, look at it as a continuous cycle. We must consistently learn and earn and learn and earn. That way, our careers grow. We grow! We become better and more confident and happier with our jobs. 

Now We Continuously Learn – Because jobs are higher tech and fancier machinery and knowledge industries, we must learn and learn and ask questions. It keeps us at the peak of our careers and makes sure we are ready for the next career adventures. 

Renew Your Mind, Reset Your Career – Resetting your career is about constantly learning and looking at your skills and abilities so you can decide which path your path should take. It might mean you have to stretch a bit to 

Confidence, Age, and Experience – With age, people gain confidence, and that is primarily because of built experience. Suppose you were the type of person who believed in “faking it until you make it” then you might feel less confident because you see the newer or younger employees gaining skills and knowledge and possibly taking your spot. Instead, you should build that knowledge so you can be more confident. 

Build Bridges with Everyone – Meet people in your work and office of all experiences, levels, and teams. Those bridges will help your career and will help you solve the more significant problems at your workplace because you will have learned from your great questions and your years of experience. 

Building Our Own Identities – By being both a mentor and an intern, you have the best of both worlds to ask good questions and give great advice. This identity will set the stage for your new work identity as a learner and an excellent advisor with experience. This will refresh our careers and our image work. 

Regaining our Beginners Mindset – If you get stuck where you no longer want to learn or no longer feel you can know.  To get back to a great career, you must regain your beginner mindset, which means you ask questions and trace your thinking to ensure your assumptions and experience are leading you down the right path. You will learn new things to inject knowledge and energy into work.

Foster Honesty – We can’t fix what we can’t be honest about. Creating a culture of honesty will allow people to feel free to tell you when something is wrong or what conditions something must be solved.  When you have an honest reputation, people will come to you with ideas and problems. 

Humble Inquiry – Remember always when asking questions means being humble. Asking questions with that humble attitude will allow people to be honest and let you get to the root of any issue. 

Challenge           

Think of three ways that you could be a mentor. How can you help newer people in the company do better and reach their potential? Then think of three ways that you could be an intern. How could you learn more? How could you ask better questions? What questions could you ask to bring new and creative ideas to the problem?

Links

https://chipconley.com

Older Workers Have Fears – Older workers are worried about becoming forgotten or laid off for costs, or just missing their opportunities to advance. Statistics show that if you are over 50, the next time you change jobs, it might not be the worker’s choice. Their next job might not be as good or interesting as the old one. 

Younger Workers are Frustrated – Younger people worry that older people are taking the jobs, preventing them from moving up. They might feel like they have imposter syndrome or can’t make the new job work. All the stress keeps people siloed. 

Older Workers Get Attached to Their Experience – But older people can feel attached to their experience and best practices. Of course, they have experience and have seen situations before, which gives them confidence. But can they be too attached to that and become too rigid and not open to new ideas or trying something outside of the experience? 

Younger Employees Want to Create an Impact with Fresh Ideas – Younger employees who wish to make an impact and have education and ideas that are new and cutting edge. But maybe they reject the experience because they think new is better or the new idea is their ticket to becoming known in the company. 

Generational Wars can Occur – This conflict of worries and conflict of experience and new ideas puts generations at work in conflict and can cause mistrust and competition. This War between the generations can even be cold and silent as the stress mounts. 

Be a “Mentern” – There are experienced mentors who help others. Some interns are younger and newer and hoping to get experience. But what about trying to be a “mentern”? You can teach. You can learn. You can help and all the plusses and minuses of all experiences in the company and make everything better

Tips for Everyone – Everyone should learn to ask questions, learn from each other, and have gravitas. Be serious but friendly and take every opportunity to grow and help. This will make workers stand out at any age or experience. 

Don’t Stereotype People – Stereotypes don’t pay off. Not every experience worker is smarter or better, and not every newer employee is lost and unsure. Give everyone a chance to show you who they are and what they offer.  

History Shows Mentors Pay Off – If you follow, you see many famous people with mentors and mentees. From Socrates to Plato, Aristotle, Warren Buffet, and many modern tech giants. History is filled with this relationship. It’s a meaningful relationship that makes everyone better.

Challenge

Figure out which stage you are in your company. If you’ve been in our company for a while, you might be more in that mentor phase. If you’re new to the company, you might be in that fresh idea, learning stage, and figure out where you’re. Give three examples of what you bring to this job. What is it that you have that other people don’t have? If you’re newer to the organization, maybe you have experienced learning something directly in college that other people didn’t know. You can bring a lot of good ideas. If you’ve been established in a company for a long time, you may have the experience that helps other people improve.

Links

https://chipconley.com

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspod

Make Your Personality More Appealing – After examining your personality, see how you can make it work more smoothly.

Build on Strengths – Instead of trying to dig yourself out of the holes created by your weaknesses, build up your strengths. Let your team help make your talents complete. If you need to work on weaknesses, then just understand it will take a lot of work and make you uncomfortable for a while. 

Personality Backup Style – when people get stressed, the dominant, assertive style takes over. If a person has a more assertive style, they can become argumentative or a tyrant. If they have less, they can get -quiet or give up. They can even go the opposite way, and the driver can just give up and walk away. 

Observe, Plan, Act, and Monitor – Check the relationships around you and see how you relate. How could you do better? Then come up with a plan and check how you are doing. 

We Can’t See Thoughts – Remember that you can observe behaviors but can’t see inside another person’s head. You don’t know why they are doing what they are doing. Look to see how we can use behaviors without reading their minds. 

Respect, Communication, Manners – Always remember that respecting others and having manners and good communication goes a long way to making teams and relationships work. 

Challenge

Take your quadrant, take some of the people around you and try to guess what quadrant they’re in, and see how you have clobbered each other in the past. For example, have you been passive-aggressive and just refused to answer the question? Do you not talk at all? Or do you talk so much and fast, you’re talking over everybody? Try to figure out how the pluses and minuses of the people on the team are helping or hurting the relationships with each other. And then see if there are ways to be more flexible so that we can work together better as a team.

Links

https://hcleadershipessentials.com/blogs/leadership/the-people-styles-model-for-gaining-selfawareness-as-a-leader

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to the podcast. This is Jill. Have you ever wondered how you can take your style at work and turn it into an advantage and do great things? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

Making a difference in your work is not about productivity. It’s about people. you focus on others and connect with them, you can work together to accomplish great things. John C. Maxwell. T

Today we’re going to talk about a book, People’s Styles at Work and Beyond. So in the last podcast we talked about identifying some of our styles at work. Last time we broke down our styles into more assertive, less assertive, and more responsive, less responsive. And then by breaking people down into those four quadrants, we got the less responsive, less assertive analytical, the less responsive, more assertive driver, the less assertive, more responsive amiable, more assertive, more responsive expressive people. And we talked about some of the character traits that are associated with those and how we really need all four people in management, in not management to make our workplace better. We have to note that all of them have strengths and if the people really go with their strengths and use their strengths it’ll be beneficial to them, it’ll be beneficial to the company and the job they do, it’ll be beneficial to their customers. And so we have to take all those gifts those people have and really work on them and it’s a true benefit to themselves and everyone around them. And some of the styles that they see in those people, analytical people have a lot of logic, they’re very detail-oriented, they’re very dedicated to getting everything right, and they can be a little bit of a stern person, but that helps to keep projects on target. The driver is very quick to make decisions, they’re very good with details and making sure the details are practical, they can work by themselves, they’re very honest and they get things done. I know people in my work that are drivers and they are amazing at really getting the thing that needs to get done, done. Aimable people are team players, they’re supportive, they’re very good at dealing with situations where people are fighting or not getting along and trying to come to a good settlement in that. They’re very patient with other people, and they also tend to be very loyal to the company. And people like that are great. I will say offhand that when I see people like that at work, I will say that a lot of times people don’t notice them. They don’t notice the contribution that they’re making at work, and they’re forgotten. And sometimes those people are the most loyal people you have in your company. People will come and go but amyville people will stick to you and stick to doing a dedicated job to you day in and day out the expressive people are Really charmers. They’re the people who like to have fun. They can go with the flow Like I said when times come or something doesn’t quite go right at a conference I’m the person who gets up and tries to make it work and i’m not worried about being self-conscious I’m up there telling jokes and being silly and making things happen. And I try to be very exciting and energetic. I try to bring that out when it needs to come out. So public speaking is really good. I love public speaking. I do a lot of it, but at least before the pandemic. And they’re good spokespeople for the things that you’re trying to get done. You want to make sure that if you have someone being the face of your company, the expressive people are really good at it. They suggest that when you’re looking at your style and trying to figure out how to either build on your strengths and take advantages of the things you’re good at or try to add to your style so that it works better with other people, is first of all, look, observe, try to see how it is you’re actually dealing with other people. That’s really what worked for me in sort of of adapting my own style. I noticed I could run over people. Sometimes I talk so fast, I could talk over what they’re saying. And so for me, I observed that I could be a little bit too energetic, too expressive, and really by observing how I was interacting with other people, I was able to adapt that. Then they say that you’re supposed to do practice, which means how can you actually act? Now that you’ve observed some of your personality, now that you’ve actually taken into account some of the things that are going right and some of the things that are going wrong, what can you do to change your actions so that it better fits within the team personality? And in reality, we hope that when people get jobs, they are drawn to the types of tasks or the types of jobs that are really great for them, which I think when you can get there is really amazing. And so it’s worth taking some time so that you can see what you can do to be better at your strengths. So some ideas you can take in the book are some ways of strengths and weaknesses. And I always believe that strength and weaknesses are two sides of a coin. You get one because you have the other. It is not sometimes where you could say, well, if you could be more independent, but also collaborate with people more. Sometimes those are on opposite sides of the piece. Maybe Jill, if you could quiet down a little bit, but still be a people person. Huh, not sure how that works. So sometimes you get one because the other side of that coin is the weakness. And so you have people who are candid, can also be abrasive. You have sometimes people who are very good at getting things done, can sometimes really run over other people and not take their view into account. Sometimes you have people who are visionaries, not very practical, and they don’t get things that are realistic in place. So you have to take a look at the fact that when you’re looking at some of your strengths, there’s a opposite side of the coin, which is the weakness. And if you can identify some of those, that’ll help you. They bring up a quote by the Gallup organization, which is the team that is responsible for the book, Strength Finders 2.0. Quote, “You will excel only by maximizing your strengths and never by fixing your weaknesses. You only get anywhere leaning into the things that you’re great at.” I mentioned this before. I think it’s because I spent decades trying to fix all my weaknesses. I was trying to be like this person at work or be like that person at work and emulate their actions and their details. And in fact, I’ve had managers when I told them that I was trying to emulate a particular person, they would say, “Great, I think that’s good advice.” But I never really got anywhere until I just started looking at being the best Jill possible. How can I go into the things that I’m great at? I don’t think that that’s a write-off to say, “Well, my weaknesses are just my weaknesses, and you’re all just gonna have to live with them because I’m working on my strengths.” You do have to take down those weaknesses you have and try to mitigate them, try to make them less of a weakness. The reason that they talk about in Gallup about how you have to really focus on your strengths is it is so hard to change personalities and it takes a great deal of time, effort, emotional interrupt, because your brain wants to work in a certain way and you’re telling it to stop working in this way. It is distracting. It crushes your productivity when you’re working on Overcoming flaws. It’s one of those things that’s going to take you being on top of it almost for the rest of your life So they said it’s important that before you decide that you’re going to try to overcome a weakness That you take into account how much time it’s going to take how much effort it’s going to take and how much I think Is it’s going to interrupt your brain Acknowledge that sometimes when you look at your weaknesses, there’s a cost there to doing things in a different way that is outside your normal flow. And you’ll have to take into account whether that particular item is important enough for you to do. And the other thing to keep in mind is a lot of times we work as teams, which means something that is a strength of mine, maybe a weakness in other people, and something that is a strength in my teammates might be a weakness in me. And so a good manager, a good team lead will bring us together and make sure that we’re working where our strengths are and we’re avoiding those things that are not exactly our strengths. So I have a great manager at work and he does a fantastic job. And the vice president above me, she’s amazing too. And they all work very hard to make sure each of the people on their teams is doing the thing that they’re very good at. that they like doing and that they’ll be great at getting them done. They say that there is a personality backup style and the backup style is something that when we get stressed or angry or we’re put into a corner that we don’t want to be in, that we back into this and sometimes we’ll react in a way that is not very productive and not very team building. and we have to watch out that we don’t get into those situations or that we react in those ways. So an analytical person might actually start avoiding their work because they can’t get enough details down to make sure that it’s perfect to make sure that it’s exactly what they want to do. If they were going to be starting a podcast, they may never get to doing the podcast because it can never be good enough. I can never figure out enough details before getting it done. The driver can become what they call autocratic, meaning they’re going to rule. They’re going to be a tyrant on these jobs and these tasks and these projects, and they’re just going to trounce all over everybody. They may get the project done, but it may not be as good as if they brought in other opinions and it might really burn many of the relationships they have with the people around them. The amiable person will just give in. They’ll give up. They’ll lose their voice. They won’t say the thing that’s on their mind. And they may have an opinion that’s important, that actually means something to the team or means something to the customer. If you take like a software company and the amiable person recognizes that by doing a particular aspect of the software in a certain way, it is not how the people in the real world do it. And if the software developers are a little bit more strong or more assertive than they are, they’ll say, “Nope, it’s the way we need to get this done.” And the Ameable person might be like, “Okay, that’s all right.” But it’s not okay because if this feature comes out and it’s not useful to the customer, that Ameable person lost a chance to make their software better, to make their company better. The expressive person might just start attacking. Remember, they’re high energy, high enthusiasm, and a lot of words come out of their mouth in very fast ways. And so when they attack, it is like getting hit hard from all sides. And it can be a bit blinding to other people. So it’s important for the expressive person not to start attacking others. These are automatic reactions that we have from our gut. And what we have to do is take a step back and make sure we’re not doing the automatic reaction. We’re thinking about our reaction and what it’s going to do to our teamwork, our structure in our company, maybe even our jobs. If we go around attacking people or if we go around and just give up on everything, we might not be in those jobs for very long. And so what we have to do is make sure that first of all, we don’t fall into any of these backup styles, but they also say that sometimes there’s a secondary backup style, which means that the person is going to do the opposite end of their assertiveness continuum. Meaning that if they were attacking before, now they’re just giving up. Or maybe if they were autocratic before, they’re just gonna avoid the project altogether because they can’t get anything done on it anyway. So they may switch to the other assertiveness level. But what we, again, we wanna make sure we do is we stay away from the automatic behaviors and try to derail anything that’s gonna break our team apart. So they said the best thing we can do in order to keep these backup styles at bay is to first of all, make sure that we never get into that stressed area where now suddenly we’re starting to react. But if you can keep your stress levels from going overboard before that happens, that’s probably the better way to go. The second skill that you’ll need to do is to identify the different kinds of things that happen that trigger you and that make you react in the way you don’t want to react. Is it personal attacks? Is it someone taking on your work? Are you someone so sensitive that someone gives you constructive criticism on any task you do? You take it the wrong way? Try to figure out what it is that’s making you so angry or so upset that you have to use those backup tactics. And the best thing too, then is to take time out. Next thing is make sure that you avoid decisions or anything that’s big impact. Don’t rage quit your job. Don’t immediately just say something again that will, that relationship permanently damage. Make sure that you take into account that other person and their feelings and try to avoid anything, avoid any decisions or actions that’s really going to come down to it. They said that the problem with all these styles is, quote, “When people of a different style don’t get along, the problem isn’t incompatibility. The problem is usually inflexibility.” And so that means it’s not so much that we’re different people. It means that we’re not willing to back down on our style at all. We’re not really willing to adapt so that we can get along with other people better. We’re being inflexible, and we’re not trying to make that other person feel more comforted, work within their own style better, or for us to work as a team better. We’re really not doing that well at all. And so the important thing is that we take all our strengths and we work on them so that we can improve our relationship. And so what can you change? What aspect of your personality or style can you change that would make you get along with people better? And in the end, they said it’s important for us to realize that we don’t wanna manipulate other people, we don’t wanna back down either. But the goal of this is flexibility, meaning that we need to know what it is we need to adapt a little bit so that we can work better with the other people on our teams that are different than us. So they said the first step in working together better with other people is first of all to observe, how are you doing? How are you working with other people on that team? Are you doing pretty well? Are you overriding that person a little too much or are they overrunning you? Or is that person never speaking up and never really talking? Have they checked out of the situation? And step two is to make sure that you plan for how these behaviors or how these things are going to go into effect. Can we assign different tasks? Can we change the plan up a little bit so that we’re leaning into the things that we’re good at and avoiding the things that we’re bad at and avoiding situations where we get on each other’s nerves so that we can do better. Maybe the person like me, who’s louder, talks faster, can do a little bit better listening, can do a little bit better being quiet, and maybe not talking quite so fast. I’ve been trying that on the podcast for months now and I don’t know that it’s getting better. Step three is to implement, And that means how you take the plan for making sure that your behaviors are working better and actually do them, turn them into action. And then the last step is, they said to evaluate and take a look and see how you’re doing on trying to correct or be flexible about some of your behaviors. Are your communications going better? Are people not getting overrun? Are the quiet people starting to talk? Are the loud people starting to listen? and see how you’re doing when it comes to your new plan to make your relationship on your team or on your projects better. Some steps that you have to look at afterwards is to monitor it, make sure everything’s going right, keep at it, and keep making sure that the struggles that you’re having with that other person is in fact getting better. After you’re having a conversation or a meeting, do a little bit of critiquing, a little bit of analysis. What went well? Where do people come out and talk about good things? Where could have been better? Maybe if we had done something a little bit different, we could have gotten some of the people out of their shell a little bit to give their opinion. Make sure you’re looking at other people. Make sure you’re not missing something big. Sometimes it’s easy when you have boisterous people, ’cause a lot of times they will argue and bicker and fight. It’s the quiet people that suddenly stop talking. And so it’s harder to notice when they’re struggling on a team because they practically disappear from a project. How can we make them not disappear? They may have amazing viewpoints that’s not getting built in to this particular project at all. They say it’s important that we understand that things that are inside of people, we can’t observe them. We don’t know what’s going on inside. If a person has checked out of our project, we don’t know if it’s because they’re angry or they’re bored, or they’re just not interested in this project, or they didn’t get enough sleep last night and they’re just really tired. You can’t mind read, you can’t build into that other person what you think is going on. You just know the outward behavior. They’re being quiet. They’re constantly attacking everything. All you can do is look at those outside behaviors and then try to figure out what we can do to get around that. Or maybe it’s just a bad day to meet. If this person’s attacking everyone, but they don’t typically do that, maybe it’s best that we meet next week and see if we can do a little bit better job when people are feeling a little bit better about what’s going on. And he said that you can even put people on a grid, draw out that quadrant and put people’s names where you think they may lie on that grid so that you can understand your team and be more respectful of everyone. Make sure that you see them as individuals and that you communicate in such a way that’ll make sense. In the end, they suggest that manners and respect and communication is everything. Because if we don’t have those things, we’ll never get into a good team relationship, regardless of personalities. We will always be at odds with each other if we don’t do at least that. So my challenge to you is now to take your quadrant, take some of the people around you and try to guess what quadrant they’re in and see how in the past you have clobbered each other. Have you been a passive aggressive and just refuse to answer the question? Do you not talk at all? Or do you talk so much and so fast you’re talking over everybody? Try to figure out how the pluses and minuses the people on the team are helping or hurting the relationships with each other and then see if there’s ways that we can be more flexible so that we can work together better as a team. And the fun entertainment advice of the week comes from the movie Steve Jobs. You were saying things about the Apple II and the way you were treating the team. Boss, you get a free pass for life. I gotta get back on stage. We got like two minutes of rehearsal time left. Do you understand how condescending that just was? Maybe you don’t. I don’t want to see you get dragged off on a plane at Plastic Handcuff. I get a free pass for life from you. You give out the pass… You give them to me. You’re gonna have a stroke, little buddy. What did you do? What did you do? Why has Lisa not heard of me? Man, how many fourth graders have heard of you? You can’t write code. You’re not an engineer. You’re not a designer. You can’t put a hammer to a nail. I built the circuit board. The graphical interface was stolen from Xerox PARC. Jeff Raskin was the leader of the Mac team before you threw him off his own project. Everything, someone else designed the box. So how come ten times in a day, I read Steve Jobs as a genius? What do you do? I play the orchestra. And you’re a good musician. You sit right there. You’re the best in your role. I always like using Steve Jobs as an example in a lot of these podcasts because he is such a strong personality type. Is there the company that became Apple without the people around him including Steve Wozniak who was a completely different kind of human being. We need other people in order to make our products and our work great. Alright everyone, thanks so much. I hope you have a great week. Please remember to tell a friend and subscribe, because we can do great at work by taking small steps. [BLANK_AUDIO]

Learn more about your work style and the work styles of others. The model can help you learn how to do better with your team.

Peoples Styles at Work by Robert Bolton and Dorothy Grover Bolton

Don’t Pigeonhole Others – It is OK to look at other people’s personalities but not pigeonhole them or decide that they are exactly like them. 

Model Behavior to be Predictive – Using a model of behavior is helpful to work with others in a better way. 

The Style Grid – The grid is less or more Assertive and less or more Responsive. More Responsive and More Assertive is type Expressive. They are open and enthusiastic, and energetic. If they feel stressed, they can attack others. More Responsive and Less Assertive is the Amiable type. They are friendly and the people who hold a team together. When they get stressed, they give in. The third type is Analytical, who is less Responsive and Less Assertive, and they love data and getting things right. When they get stressed, they avoid things. The last type is less Responsive and more Assertive and is called Drivers. They love to get things done correctly. When stressed, they start to rule over things and people without getting their input. 

Who Are You? – It is a great idea to determine which type you are and ensure you can use your type to the best ability. You should also think about what others think you are. They may not be the same. Determine what others on the team are and plot them on a grid. 

Challenge

Look at these categories and try to list a few of the pros and cons that this particular style has for you.

Links

• https://hcleadershipessentials.com/blogs/leadership/the-people-styles-model-for-gaining-selfawareness-as-a-leader

Transcript

[Music] Have you ever wondered how differences with people at work can make things better or make things worse? That’s what we’ll talk about today. [Music] Who am I and what, if anything, can I do about it? Aldous Huxley. Today we’re going to talk about a book, People’s Styles at Work and Beyond, Making Bad Relationships Good and Good Relationships Better, by Robert Bolton and Dorothy Grover Bolton. Work is hard enough, but then when you mix up all the relationships involved in work, that’s where it gets really difficult or interesting or better. And how can you make those relationships with people better? I have worked in the past with people who are amazingly sensitive about the things that they do and not open to change really. I had a person, and this was funny, on her first day of work came in and basically tore apart all the different pieces of work I’d been working on for almost a decade, reorganized them, redid them. Okay, that’s fine. It could have used some improvement. But I don’t think she realized that that was a good bulk of the things that I had been working on and really took pride in at my job. She had a different vision. It was now her area. That’s fine. But the funny thing about it was, as steamed as I was, because I think our personalities clashed from time to time, another person later came into that same office and did the same thing to her. A1 tried to just change everything. The new person was just trying to come up with good ideas, just trying to help things out a little bit, but didn’t realize the amount of time and effort and heart and soul she had put into that project. And so sometimes we all have the same vision. You know, my company, it’s helping customers. We are a very customer-focused company. But how we do it and the personality traits we bring to the job are really important. We talked in episode 7 about the book Strength Finders 2.0 by Tom Rath and that book was about driving out what your particular strengths are. It wasn’t a personality test as much as it was trying to figure out what you’re really good at and trying to build on that. In this particular book, this is more about your work style or how you like to display your work, how you like to act in your work job. And I thought it was interesting because sometimes those relationships at work are the hardest thing to get right. We can have a job we like, we can do a great job at our job, but then suddenly we’re finding that we’re butting heads with someone who shares the same goal we do, helping customers, but just has a little bit of a different way of expressing how they do their job. The bottom line of the book is is that people are different. They have different ways of manifesting their personality, different ways that they interact with people, and different responses to tasks that they have to do. Are they really just into analysis or are they about the people and communicating? And that difference can really make a difference to how we do on the job. And they said that if we don’t get along at the job, We’ll have a difficult time working with other people. We won’t be able to get the things done that we hope to get done or convince people when we have something we believe is urgent, that it is urgent, and just fail at communication in general. We will get on each other’s nerves, kind of like what I was talking about with the relationship I had with that person who first came into my office. We got along in the end, but it took work, and it took some understanding for us to come to a place where we were friends and really enjoyed each other’s company by just understanding how we are different from each other. And these differences in our styles really help us to understand each other if we can categorize them a little bit better. The book warns against trying to pigeonhole people into a corner, oh, that person’s just difficult, or this person is just this or that. And the reason we want to categorize people according to the book is so that we can better relate to them and maybe also better predict what they’re going to do in response to our work. And they call this a model. In the end, we’re trying to build a model for people. And models aren’t perfect. Models are meant to be a simplified reduction of the real thing. So when we put people into models, we’re really sort of reducing them to the core of how they work. The purpose, they believe, is that it will help us interpret and observe people better, understand exactly where they’re coming from, and work with them in a better way. So in this book, they say, quote, “A people style is a cluster of habitual, assertive, “and responsive behaviors that have a pervasive “and enduring influence on one’s action.” Meaning this is long-term. This is kind of how we act. It’s not acting in a bad way to a bad situation, or it’s not really having a one-off occurrence. You know, maybe if we have this really bad situation and we flip out, and that’s not what pervasive is. This means just day in and day out, we’re acting in a certain way. So we have styles, that’s how we act. Behavior is how we actually do things, what we do to get things done. And in the end, these behaviors will help us understand each other. They give a quote from a federal judge that says, “A man’s life, like a piece of tapestry, is made up of many strands, which, interwoven, makes a pattern. To single one out and look at it alone not only destroys the whole, but gives the strand itself a false value.” So that means that when we’re looking at these models these people. We can’t just reduce people. “Oh, that person is just angry.” No, they’re much more complicated than that. A person isn’t just a thing. They’re the tapestry. And so this model at least tries to give us a hint at how this person does at work. They also go on in the book later to mention how the person will do in marriage and with children and other situations. But the part we’re going to talk about is the part where they’re talking about work specifically. It’s up to you then to think about how other areas of your life are affected by this and maybe even read the book and take some advice about how you can help those other areas when dealing with other people. They think that in the end it is hard for us to change behaviors or styles and it’ll be again pervasive meaning it’ll go over many years and And what they say, quote, is you’d be wise to accept and celebrate it. And that’s important. I’m a firm believer in taking the things that we’re good at, taking the things that we enjoy and that we have strengths in and building on that, fixing a little of the things that we’re weak at, but really going in and looking at how we can celebrate the gifts we’ve been given, the strengths we have in order to make us better. So the first thing that they look at, and this is going to be a cross section, is assertiveness, which is either less assertive or more assertive. And this just means how forceful or directive you may be as a person. And they give some test questions to kind of help you sort out exactly where you are. But basically, this person will use more forceful ways to get their goals. And And people who are less forceful will not necessarily be less directed than the other person, they just may use different techniques than force to get their goals. So it’s certainly not an assertive versus submissive. They say that some ways that you can tell what a more assertive person looks like is they gesture a lot. They have good eye contact. They move more and with more energy. They’re more direct, they speak louder, they speak faster, and they also make decisions more rapidly and they’re more confrontational. What’s funny is if you have listened to this podcast more than a few times, you know, I talk way too fast. I do talk too fast, I’m trying to work on it. The next category, which is our up and down, is responsiveness. And that’s going to be how aware they are of their own emotions, they say, and how are they with emotions from other people? It’s not necessarily that the person feels or doesn’t feel. I have met some very stoic individuals, silent, and you wouldn’t have guessed they had a single emotion in their body, but there’s a phrase, “Still waters run deep,” which means there’s a lot more to the inside of a person than what most people realize. A lot of people who you might think are not very emotional or not very tied to their emotion, are like big gooey chocolate chip cookies. They’re crunchy on the outside, but all soft and gooey on the inside. They just don’t put it out there for everyone to see. So they said a more responsive person expresses emotions freely. They’re talkative in a more emotional way. They like small talk. They like reaching out and talking to people. And they’re also very worried about how their own actions or actions of the company are going to impact other people. I like some of the characteristics. It says, prefers working with others compared to being alone, dresses more casually. Boy, that’s me right there. I just love dressing casually and I love being with other people. It’s my two favorite things. Also, they mentioned that they’re less structured in their use of time and they’re a lot more open to being with other people when they have the ability to be alone. So now that we have the less assertive, more assertive, less responsive, more responsive, they break those characteristics into four quadrants. The person who’s less assertive, less responsive is analytical. The person who is less responsive, but more assertive is the driver. The person who is less assertive, but more responsive, is amiable. And the person who is more assertive, more responsive, is expressive. And the thing they say to remember is that there is no bad character here. They all have their pros and cons. And placed in the right job or the right task, they will thrive. What do you think you are? You probably have a pretty good idea of what you are. You can look at this book and read a little bit more about it and decide better about what you are But here’s the other question. Who do other people think you are and that’s what I think is really interesting. I believe That I’m expressive I tend to be a little bit more assertive and a little bit more responsive if something goes wrong in a conference I’m the person on the stage immediately trying to tell jokes Keep people interested and make sure that everyone’s doing well and is really happy I am all over the place at conferences and in meetings trying to make people more Comfortable or take whatever action it is. They need to do over the course of years I find that being expressive all the time Can really wear people out if you’re always all over the place if you’re always very directive You’re always, you know looking people in the eye and being very Emotional or being very open with things people can get worn out about that And so I have really learned to tamp that down and maybe use these in a little bit better way And so I bet you that if you ask some people around me or work people, they’d probably put me in the amiable category But for the most part I range somewhere in that expressive and amiable range most of the time So it may be you’re not coming off Quite in the same way you probably are inside your own skin and that might be because you learn lessons over the years that taught you to take some of the negative aspects of your personality or your style and Bend them a little bit more to being open for other people Just talking about the different characteristics. They say that drivers are quick They’re quick to act and do things and walk and they are delegating and they are getting things done and making it happen at work sometimes the problem with them is that they may not listen to other people or If they’re driving action and there’s something wrong that is preventing action Sometimes they don’t stop to make sure that those actions are getting cured before they go on They like to set goals that are realistic, but also very high They want to get things done and that’s the most important thing Then the expressive people those are the responsive but also assertive people they tend to like bright colors and be loud and flourishing and Be visionaries and take those bold moves and look at the castles in the air boy that wraps up me in the 20s I was always having these huge visions and these huge plans and all these things I was going to do without really an idea of how I was going to get them done. And again, that’s me now Moderating my style a bit so that I can actually get things done. I can actually Not be so many castles in the air, but look at maybe a solid cabin on the ground something I could actually accomplish that is worth doing that is realistic and Be a little bit less in that expressive style just because I’ve learned over the years I could do better says that they can get bored quickly boy. That’s me right there and They can be impulsive at times quote from their book says from someone who is in this category First I dive into a pool and then I look to see if there’s water in it Boy, you want to talk about what I was in my 20s. That’s it right there. The AMEO people are very People-oriented they’re very easygoing. They like working with people and they have good relationships with people They’re really the person who brings teams together a lot of times They’re getting a lot of the tasks done because they’re trying to help out They’re trying to be a team player and so the book says that they’re the unsung heroes of a lot of team tasks that have to get done and The problem is it says that if the amiable people if they don’t stop and take time and actually stand up for something say something is important, they will lose credibility with the people around them. And as someone who’s tried to sort of migrate towards the more amiable person, I can tell you that’s true. And the last category are the analyticals. They are the perfectionists. They want to analyze everything, they want to get everything right, they don’t want to work on hunches, they don’t want to work on the best guess, they want the data correct. And they will make people do things over again if they feel that their standards aren’t being met. And that can be great for a project. It can make a project fantastic, but it also can strangle a project so no one can get anything done. And sometimes it may mean that they may not come out with a decision. They may be waiting for more data, for a better situation, to make it more perfect, to keep going. And that means that the thing that they’re trying to do may never get done because they’re always looking for more data, more analysis, or a better way of doing something. And at some point you got to get something done and you have to get your projects done at work, even if they’re not going to be perfect. So this is going to be the first part of our podcast. We talked about how we have these different personality styles and a little bit of the characteristics of them. On the next episode, we’re going to talk a little bit about what can we do now that we know what our style is, how can we use them, and how can we actually help build those relationships with other people at our work so that we make them stronger and we get along with people who are quite different than us. So my challenge to you is to look at these categories. Try to list a few of your pros and cons that this particular style has for you. And then next week we’ll talk about what we can do about them. And our fun entertainment advice of the week comes from Office Space. Would you walk us through a typical day for you? Yeah. Great. Well, I generally come in at least 15 minutes late. I use the side door. That way Lumber can’t see me. And after that, I just sort of space out for about an hour. Space out? Yeah. stare at my desk, but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too. I’d say in a given week, I probably only do about 15 minutes of real, actual work. Peter, would you be a good sport and indulge us and just tell us a little more? Oh yeah. Let me tell you something about TPS reports. “The thing is, Bob, it’s not that I’m lazy. It’s that I just don’t care.” “Don’t… don’t care?” “It’s a problem of motivation, alright?” I mean, really, how can you talk about work and not talk about the movie office space? See, he’s talking about… not a style. He’s talking about the fact that he’s actually pretty lazy. He doesn’t want to do his job, and he doesn’t care about the fact that he needs to do his job. that people are relying on him to do his job and even paying him to do his job. So this is not a style. This is a problem. All right, everyone. Thanks so much. I hope you have a great week. And if you remember to tell a friend that they can have better relationships with the people around them by taking small steps. [MUSIC PLAYING] you [fart]