You know what, there are always 2 types of people. Which type are you? and how does that interact with your stakeholder?
- Motivation: Do you promise heaven, or fear the consequences of hell? Read about Move towards and move away from motivation
- Feedback: do you know you’ve done a good job without even having to ask for feedback, or do you in fact need someone to point out what you’re doing well (or badly)? Check out locus of control and frame of reference
- Approach to change: Read chapter 4 of Consulting Mastery here; or buy the whole book: Consulting Mastery
- Approach to task: Options or Procedures? Read chapter 1 of Consulting Mastery here
- Learning styles, based on the work of Berenice McCarthy (4mat – Why, What, How, What if)
And here’s another one of my posts on people types.
Here’s a great overview of MBTI, Enneagram, OCEAN/Big 5, Self-monitoring and a few others. There’s not a lot of love in the academic community for MBTI.
- Listen to Adam Grant’s WorkLife podcast on Your Hidden Personality (Apple / Spotify / Transcript)
- Check out Brian Little’s TED talk and book, Who Are You Really?
- Take a free, scientifically valid personality assessment: Big Five (short 538 version or 300-question NEO version), the Hogan Personality Inventory, or PrinciplesYou,
This post from Yale University “debunking” VAK learning styles (or VARK as they call them) also lists a series of metaprograms applicable to learning, which is very cool. I particularly like convergers vs. divergers, verbalizers vs. imagers, holists vs. serialists, adaptors vs. innovators, assimilators vs. explorers, non-committers vs. plungers, inductives/successive processors vs. deductives/simultaneous processors. I’m not a big fan of their A versus B style, it’s sometimes a continuum, not a black and white thing. But then that’s just my own metaprograms coming through, isn’t it?
Here’s a recent article from Olga Kazan’s book Me, But Better, which talks about how to change a metaprogram. She refers to an idea called episodic future thinking (which sounds lot like what Neuro-Linguistic Programming calls Future pacing, or even the Swish Pattern
I love metaprograms so much, I’ve made a tag for them. Go look!
