Treat differently people differently

If you are a leader, manager or salesperson, or if you are human, you should understand personality styles.  Why?  Because you have to treat and talk to people differently based on their personality style to understand, connect and, influence them best.  

There are four personality styles.  No one style is better, they are just different.  Here are the stereotypes –

Director – They like to be in charge, don’t like to waste time with small talk, are task-oriented.  They are direct and self-contained.  They will give you information if they think you need to know it and be direct about it.  They are no nonsense get things done people.  Steroetypical vehicle – a big black SUV – something that shows status and power.

Socializer – They are direct and open.  They are open books; they will tell you anything, often even if you don’t ask.  They like to tell stories, and use a lot of body language and voice inflection.  They want attention and like to have fun and great experiences with others.  They often don’t pay attention to details and make decisions quickly.  Stereotypical vehicle – a red sports car – something that says “look at me”.

Relater – They are open and indirect.  They are warm and caring and patient, and their voice tells you that.  They want others to be happy first.  They value family and relationships. They won’t call you out, they don’t like conflict.  They will only make decisions if it’s good by the people they care about.  Stereotypical vehicle – a minivan that you can get the whole family in – white or light blue.

Thinker – They are indirect and self-contained.  They don’t use a lot of body language or voice inflection and are hard to read.  They value information – lots of it.  They fear making a wrong decision and do a lot of research and analysis to prevent it.  They make decisions slowly. Stereotypical vehicle – a consumer reports best buy – something practical and reliable – gray or silver.

Which one are you?

Which personality styles are the people you work most closely with? 

How about your family members?

We will talk more about this in the next Think Daily for Businesspeople.

“Chief Resource Allocator”

Your name is on the sign.  You “own it”, whether you like it or not.

When money comes in, it’s “yours”.  But is it really?

Mostly you have to pay the bills to get labor, materials, services and other resources to continue.

Mostly it’s not yours – just yours to allocate to the best most efficient uses to keep going and create a better future.

As the leader, you need to know what you are doing when deciding what to do with the revenue.

Do you know your labor and how it is performing? 

Do you know your materials and the cost/waste/effectiveness?

Do you know where all the money is going and are you making the best of it?

To do great things – focus your mental energy

To do great “legacy projects” that will make a positive difference for your organization far into the future, you need to extract your best thinking and creative energies.  While you can’t go into a quiet place and dig in all day or every day, you have to make time for it.

“If a large diamond is cut up into pieces, it immediately loses its value as a while; or if an army is scattered or divided into small bodies, it loses all it’s power; and in the same way a great intellect has no more power than an ordinary one as it is interrupted, disturbed, distracted or diverted.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

Who is NOT your customer

Get clarity on who your customer is and isn’t.  

Trying to make everyone happy is a mistake.

If you try, then when a non-customer criticizes your offering you think you need to change what you are doing to earn their business.

Imagine if people said “Tiffany’s jewelry is too expensive” and Tiffany’s made a cheap line to satisfy those people.  

Or if you were a contractor who offered finished basements that would never get moldy of water damaged and someone said they wanted the cheapest job possible using drywall, and you said ok. Or someone said they wanted their kitchen remodeled upstairs and you said ok.  

After a while you don’t know what you stand for.  Your customers don’t either.  Your brand is confused.  You aren’t good at anything because you are trying to do everything.

Pick a niche and master it.  What does your company do?  What does it NOT do?

Know who your customer is, and who they are not.  

Wealth is a whole person project.

Being a successful entrepreneur is not about money like we think in the beginning. 

If we are to do it well and succeed long-term, we need to become better people.

We need to face our own weaknesses and thinking flaws. 

We need to develop our character and live with virtue.

We must learn how to understand and work best with other people – all kinds of people.

We must bravely push outside our comfort zone over and over again, expanding it each time we do.

And we need to be perpetual students and learn a lot about a wide variety of subjects.

Wealth is a whole person project. 

And on this quest, we come to truly understand that it is about what it made of us. 

Nothing else.

Earn trust through action

When people know you will do what you say, and when they know you can get things done and make things happen, they will trust you.

You will get more responsibility and more opportunities because they know you will jump on it and can get results.

What do people know about you based on what actions you have taken (or not taken) in the past?

Decide

“We might not need more time; we simply need to decide.” – Seth Godin

I found this idea very helpful.  Sometimes we procrastinate.  We think projects or decisions will take a lot of time and deliberation.  We labor under things we have to do.  

But it may be that we just haven’t made a clear decision, and that is what is really dragging on us.

If we just make a decision, we can execute on it now.  

Sometimes it’s just about breaking the steps down and deciding what needs to be done first, second, and then third.  Once we decide on that, we can do it with less dread and drag.

Thinking is great.  But you have to make a decision.

Make it and move forward.

Avoiding check fraud

Its better to not write checks and ACH everything.  One person initiates an ACH, another person in your company clears it.

Never take ACH instructions by email.  Never believe it when anyone emails you or your accounting staff and says, “I got a new bank account”, or “because of fraud, we have changed our bank account.”   Call to verify.

If you are going to write checks use a service called “Positive Pay”, available from your bank. You report to the bank the check number, payee, and amount of all the checks you write.  When the bank is presented with a check to cash or clear, they have to match up the information with your list or they don’t clear it.

It adds another step, but these days mail theft and check washing/altering and phony check printing are rampant.

When it comes to wiring money – Beware of the wiring instructions – verify very carefully!  Watch out for changes at the last minute – even from your attorney!  The bad guys are monitoring your email and make changes at the last minute to get you to wire money to them!

Gratitude is more useful than anger

Some things go well and some do not.

You have emotions about these things.  

You want to move things in the right direction.

Anger will have a short-term effect that may or may not be useful in this moment, and a long-term effect that will not be helpful to you at all.

Gratitude is a more useful fuel than anger, short-term and long-term.

Ignore sunk costs

“Sunk cost bias” is when you say, “I have come this far in this direction, so I have to keep going”.  

“I have spent this much effort on this project, so I have to finish.”

“We have spent so much time and money trying to make this work; we are going to continue, we can’t abandon it now.”

But what if you realize it’s the wrong direction, the wrong project, the wrong hire, the wrong product, the wrong machine, the wrong business….?

If you realize it’s wrong, ignore the time, money, and effort you have put into it. 

Abandon it and start working on the right thing instead.