The People Puzzle


by Dr. Tony Alessandra
One of your most valuable skills in any business is the ability to “read” people. The people you interact with each day send you signals on how to work with them most effectively. If you learn what to look and listen for, each person will tell you exactly how to treat him effectively.
So what is there to read?
Dozens of signals–verbal, vocal and visual, tell you when to speed up or slow down, when to focus on the details, or when to work on building the relationship with the other person. But why does your technique work sometimes and not at other times? Mostly because people are different.
Personality Needs
Everyone experiences the same basic human needs, but with each person some needs are more dominant than others. The four major groupings of needs are results, recognition, regimentation, and relationships.
For example.
One person may be the type who measures his success by results. To him, the finished product is the most important thing, and he’ll do whatever it takes, within reason, to get the job done. His dominant need is for accomplishment.
Then there is the sensitive, warm, supportive type of person whose dominant need is relationships. This appeal that would work well with a results-oriented person might be totally inappropriate for the person interested in relationships.
A third type of person usually places high value on recognition and measures success by the amount of acknowledgment and praise he receives.
Conversely, another person will be more concerned with the content than the congratulations. The primary need appears to be for regimentation. In other words, things must be put together in neat packages that can be clearly understood.
You can quickly see that a different type of appeal is necessary for each of these four “personalities.” Recognizing this is very important because once you’ve learned the needs of each major behavior pattern, you will know how to work more effectively with each type of person.
Behavioral Style Characteristics
When people act and react in social situations, they exhibit clues that help to define their behavioral styles. You can identify behavioral style by watching for the observable aspects of people’s behavior – those verbal, vocal and visual actions that people display when others are present.
Undirected, you could observe and try to catalogue thousands of behaviors in any one person. That would quickly become an exercise in futility. But identifying behavioral style is possible by classifying a person’s behavioral on two dimensions: openness and directness.
It is much like measuring a foot for a shoe; make it wide enough for the widest part and long enough for the longest part, and the rest of the foot will fit someplace in between.