The Big Two

I guess you’ve all heard of the ‘Big Five’ personality factors, or the five fundamental factors that help to describe most observable individual differences – namely, Openness (to experience), Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. You probably also know that when they are combined in various ways they help to frame all manner of other things like emotion and motivation. I suspect you also have an idea about what happens when you try to break them down into smaller units. For example, that Extraversion is composed of facets that include warmth, gregariousness and excitement-seeking. And that there’s a debate about whether, when you look at all five factors, you end up with 16 ‘bits’, or 30, or 32… But have you ever thought about what happens if you go the other way? What, if I can put it like this, happens before the Big Five?

The Big Two

It turns out there are two higher-order factors. The first brings together Emotional Stability (the opposite of Neuroticism), Agreeableness and Conscientiousness; the second Extraversion and Openness. These new groupings are called Stability and Plasticity, respectively. So what? Well, these two meta-traits capture the two basic human requirements. These are the need to maintain a stable social structure in order to get things done, and what is in some ways the flip-side, the need to be able to cope with change and the unknown (and learn from it). This is quite an elegant distinction as at various times either stability or plasticity is likely to confer a competitive advantage. It’s also useful because it ties in nicely with the action of the neurotransmitters Serotonin (stability and the generation of feelings of ‘well-being’) and Dopamine (plasticity and reward-driven learning).

From a business perspective the tension between maintaining a dependable social structure in order to ensure steady progress and being able to cope with unpredictable change also has a familiar resonance.

More information from Colin DeYoung’s website.

In defense of personality measurement

BTW if you’re ever asked to defend the use of personality questionnaires, this article by Robert Hogan is a good place to start:

http://www.hoganassessments.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/resources/research-articles/journal-articles/Indefense.pdf

Twitter and personality

Ever wondered if Twitter could tell you something about a person’s personality? ‘Analyze Words’ helps reveal personality by looking at the use of words. It’s based on research connecting word use to who people are. Enter your Twitter name and find out what it says about your emotions, social & thinking styles… Better still pop someone else’s handle in and find out what it reveals about your favourite celebrity, boss, friends or loved one!

Try it here: Analyse Words.

You are what you do!

… And you do what you are!! I’m interested in different ways of finding out about people’s personality. That’s because personality questionnaires can only take you so far, and to be fair they rely on you having sufficient self-insight to answer the questions accurately, and of course, in being honest about yourself. What if there was a different way of doing it? What if your daily behaviour also said something about your personality? Well, it would make sense, wouldn’t it? Check out this questionnaire by James Pennebaker…

• The LIFE project

And as I’ve no doubt mentioned in a previous post, you may also like to read Sam Gosling’s intriguing book:

• SNOOP – What your Stuff Says About You.

You’ll never think about Facebook, your website, bedroom, office, and behaviour in meetings in quite the same way again!

Investigating the personality of companies

“When we think about other people, we do so in terms that can be boiled down to five discrete personality dimensions: extraversion, introversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness and agreeableness (known as the Big Five factors). A new study suggests that a similar process is at work in our perception of companies and corporations. Google and Apple have personalities too, it seems.”

Read this post from the BPS Research Digest, Investigating the personality of companies, to discover the four fundamental dimensions…

Fairy tales and predicting good leaders

“A common phenomenon and problem in leadership practice concerns undue reliance on popular fads without sufficient consideration given to the validity of those ideas…” Click on the link below to read a very good review from Amazure Consulting for the evidence on cognitive tests, personality, situational judgement, emotional intelligence and interviews being ‘effective’ predictors of leadership ability.

http://www.amazureconsulting.com/files/1/39199746/FairyTalesFactsPredictingLeadershipEffectiveness.pdf

Seven personality traits of top salespeople

So what distinguishes the top sales dog from the rest of the pack? It seems that high-performers are conscientious, achievement orientated, have high levels of curiosity, don’t get discouraged easily, and don’t suffer from being overly self-conscious. No surprises there then. However what’s rather more counter intuitive is that successful sales types are more modest than their pushy, in-your-face colleagues (hype and bull(dog) seem to put customers off); and, even more surprising, they are less gregarious. What’s going on here? Well it could be that being too friendly gets in the way of establishing dominance in a sales scenario – and you do need people to go into ‘obedience’ mode to get them to say ‘yes’. Anyone for walkies?

Want to know more? Read Steve Martin’s post on the Harvard Business Review blog.

Photo credit: Maggie Smith/freedigitalphotos.net

How to change your whole personality

Have you noticed there’s a Wiki for practically everything, including the highly informative WikiHow. However I think they may have gone too far this time… in this article they tell you how to change your whole personality! Although to be fair, in the final step, they do mention that you may be better off with your old self . Take a look:

http://www.wikihow.com/Change-Your-Whole-Personality

It reminds me of those old Monty Python sketches. Want to learn to play the flute? Pick up a flute and whilst blowing across the opening move your fingers over the keys. Next week: how to create nuclear fission using some everyday chemicals you’ll find under your sink.

Personality and health & safety

It was only a matter of time! Read this article from the OH&S website linking Hogan personality ‘types’ with safety concerns. Defiant, panicky, irritable, distractible, reckless or arrogant – which one are you? Sometimes I feel like all six!

Why don’t meetings work?

Every time I attend a meeting I am struck by the fact that most of what goes on is an utter waste of time. What is it about the situation that just seems to bring out the unproductive in us? Something I have to say which is aided and abetted by the curse of the PowerPoint presentation. A method of boring people that is surely without rival. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a picture and a thousand words, that’s something else entirely.

The reason that most meetings flounder can also be attributed to Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (that’s C.Northcote Parkinson of ‘Parkinson’s Law’ fame). Put simply this draws the distinction between the amount of time that’s spent discussing complex and difficult issues, such as business strategy, as opposed to simple and ultimately unimportant things like the location or colour of a bike shed. Hence the alternative name for the law, that of ‘bike-shedding’.  

Bike-shedding

We all feel comfortable talking about the bike shed (or the colour scheme to use on the website, the type of water cooler to have etc) because we think we understand what’s going on, and this limits are chances of appearing stupid. But when it comes to strategy there’s far more scope for seeming to be ignorant, if not a complete noodle. Thus the result is one hour discussing the ‘bike shed’, and ten confused and nervous minutes contemplating the strategic direction of the business. There’s also something else going on…

So to add to the Law of Triviality, and Parkinson’s other laws, the famous first law: ‘work expands to fill the time available for its completion’, and the less well-known second law: ‘expenditure rises to meet income’; I would like to add my law of meetings.

Parkinson’s Law of Meetings

Having studied meetings over the course of many years I can report that the ‘law of meetings’ states that there are only three types of people who attend:

• Type A: This person does all the talking but knows none of the answers.
• Type B: This person does none of the talking but does know the answers.
• Type C: This person doesn’t know why they’re at the meeting.

These types map neatly onto three second-order personality factors: Type A is Extraverted (a ‘do-think-do’ sort of person); Type B is Neurotic (a ‘think-think-maybe do’ sort of person); and Type C is clearly Psychotic (detached, and angry and resentful about having their time wasted).

And this is why so little is achieved, because A+B+C≠Decision.

Oops, must go, I’ve got a teleconference in a few minutes…