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6 Understandings Of Growth #3
This is number three of the Six Understandings of Growth. The third understanding is the understanding of exactly how to communicate, and I mean the word exactly. There are four personality types. This has been proven over the last 600 years. There are hundreds of studies on this. The reality is we’ve got to look at this from a sales standpoint. When you’re communicating, you’re selling. Who has sold somebody on dating them, on marrying them? Who has sold a child on listening to them? Who has sold a coworker on their idea? Who has sold a banker on loaning them money? We are all salespeople. We’re always selling. The person we’re selling the most is ourselves, that we’re a good person. If we’re always selling, wouldn’t it be great to understand some fundamentals on how to sell? That is the fundamentals of communicating and it goes like this. Simply put, there are four types of people walking on planet Earth. It doesn’t matter what language you speak, it doesn’t matter what country you live in, it goes like this.
First, a choleric. These are the driven, dominant, wills-things-to-happen type of people. They’re just phenomenal like getting things done. They upset a lot of people but they get things done. They will things to happen. Some of their negatives, they’re not so hot in relationships. Some people have a temper. There’s the sanguine, the life of the party, the people person, the social butterfly. They love to talk. They love to joke. Some of their negatives, they’re a little bit aloof, not that orderly, not that neat. There’s the melancholy. It doesn’t mean sad. It means the deep thinking, analytical. Quite often, they become the engineer, the accountant. They love numbers. They’re very left brain. Some of their negatives, they take absolutely forever to make a decision. However, positive is once they make a decision, they stick with it sometimes to the doom of even if it’s a bad decision.
Finally, the phlegmatic. That means peace at all cost. They’re very uncomfortable in a room full of strangers, very uncomfortable in an elevator of strangers. They just want to be left alone. They want to be quiet, phlegmatic. Some of their negative, they’re just simply invisible. The reality is if you want to sell something, imagine you have a coworker where you have someone that works for you or you want to sell an idea to your boss or a vendor or a child or your cousin or your spouse. What if you’re a choleric and they’re a phlegmatic? Do you want to talk in your fast-paced, loud, quick tone or would they not care for that where they mentally shut down?
If you want to grow a company fast, you have to be able to relate to every employee working for you. Click To Tweet
The way it works is this. If a choleric walks into a room and there are five phlegmatics sitting around the table and the choleric starts to present, those five phlegmatics, consider them bricklayers. They’re going to get the bricks and mortar and immediately build a brick wall because they’re going to believe, “All this guy’s going to do is just shotgun ideas at us. They’re not going to take the time to go slow, talk slow and talk with an even tone. We won’t be able to absorb what they’re saying at the pace we need to.”
What if you’re a phlegmatic or a melancholy and you walk into a meeting and sitting across the table are three cholerics? You walk in and you start to present. You do your presentation and you take your time. You got your notes and you got everything prepared. They’re also going to build a brick wall because they have an agenda. They have 55 items on their to-do list. They’re already 30 minutes late to their next meeting. They can’t hear you because you’re talking so painfully slow, you’re actually bothering them. If you want to communicate, meaning sell something, you might want to model the other person’s behavior. If you ask yourself, “My mom, my dad, my best friend, my cousin, my coworkers, what personality are they?” For the people closest to you, you can peg someone’s personality immediately. Take your best friend. Write their name down, put their personality. I bet you know it, choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic or melancholy. Are they driven dominant? Are they a social butterfly loving to talk? Are they nice and quiet? Are they analytical, deep thinking?
A lot of people are two-thirds of one and a third of another. I’m a choleric-sanguine. I’m driven and dominant. I will things to happen but I’m also very empathetic towards people and I’m a people pleaser. That’s another trait of a sanguine. They’re a people pleaser. From now on, why don’t you take out a notebook every time you get on the phone and have a conversation, every time you text someone, I’d like you to start keeping a journal when you get on the phone and start pigeonholing these people into their personality type.
As soon as someone gets on the phone, if they’re talking rapid fire and they’re loud, write down choleric. Now you know the next time you reach out to them, if you’re a melancholy-phlegmatic and you want to sell your idea, you have to quicken your pace and you have to raise the tone of your voice. On the flip side, if you’re a choleric or a sanguine and you’ve already pegged someone to be a melancholy-phlegmatic and you really need to get your idea across, you have to sell them on your idea, you’re going to want to talk slower. You’re going to want to lower your voice. You’re going to want to put a lot of space in between each part of your sentence and definitely between sentences. When you’re talking to a phlegmatic-melancholy, one way to show them respect is to put a lot of space between what they say and when you speak next. It shows you’re listening. It shows you care. It shows you respect them. On the flip side, if you do that with a choleric, you’re going to drive them nuts.
Number three of the Six Understandings of Growth is if you want to grow a company fast, you want to be able to relate to every employee working for you, every vendor, every JV partner and every one of your board of directors. I’m going to urge you to understand this third point in depth. You might want to get a book, Your Personality Tree by Florence Littauer. Many consider it the greatest book ever written on personalities. Study this, become a master of it and when you can walk up to someone and immediately speak to them on their model, on their level and in their tone, they listen to you and quite frankly, they fall in love with you. It’s almost immediately because they know you care. You’re paying attention. You’re not shot-gunning them if you’re a different temperament. It works. Number three for hypergrowth is the understanding of exactly how to communicate. I hope this helps. Take care.
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