Reading people QUICKLY

Being able to read people quickly is the gateway skill to being influential.

It's the skill that unlocks many other skills: motivating your team, negotiating better, persuading others to change their minds.

It's incredibly important for both INFLUENCING and LEADERSHIP.

The only problem?

Most treat it like a skill you're either born with or you'll never have it.

Yes, some people are incredibly skilled at reading people from an intuitive level.

But that doesn't mean you can't learn to do it better…

The corporate answer: Personality Tests

Corporations recognize their workers would work better if they could read people faster.

Their answer to the problem is training people on some personality test methodology that then gets rolled-out to their whole management team.

You've seen it. Perhaps you've even been trained in one or more of these methods.

MBTI, DISC, the Enneagram.

They're fine. They're helpful.

But they have a problem: they work more effectively if you know what the other person's archetype is.

Back when I worked at McKinsey, a widespread ritual was to, at the start of the project, sit down with everyone in your team and tell them what your MBTI is.

This was honestly helpful.

Everyone had their particularities (as we're all human beings that can't be fully captured by a model or framework), but it was a great start.

We'd know from the outset if someone was more or less extroverted, detail-oriented or deeply caring than others.

But again, it just worked with your own team.

To read people quickly, you need a more fluid model. One that doesn't require you to put the other person in a box, but quickly judge individual qualities quickly.

Bridging the gap with the Big 5

All of these "corporate models" have bridges between them.

They all relate to each other in some way, because they're all different frameworks to describe the exact same thing: human personality.

So, is there a more "base level" framework that you can work with to make judgements about other people more quickly?

I'm no psychologist, but I started to be able to read people way quicker when I started using the Big 5.

I won't go into the statistics of how this framework was built, but basically it was built so that each of the 5 dimensions are independent of each other and so that by having the 5 variables, you have a pretty good understanding of the other person's personality (what they like/dislike).

If you keep this list of 5 characteristics in your head and get into the habit of running through a few of them when meeting a new person, you'll quickly be able to understand someone's motivations.

Using the Big 5 to read people quickly

Ideally, you'll want to learn a big more about each dimension to make good use of this framework (which goes beyond the scope because it'd turn this email into a book).

What I've found works is to:

1. Understand the main "tells" of each dimension (e.g.: conscientious people tend to use checklists, have near workspaces and be a bit more formal/hierarchical) so you can understand how they fall in each scale within a few minutes.

2. Understand the main implications of each dimension (e.g.: extroverts tend to think better when talking to other people, while introverts prefer to think before they speak).

3. Ideally, understand the sub-dimensions of each dimensions (the more widely used model breaks each down into two sub-dimensions – for instance, Opennes to Experience breaks down into a sub-dimensions that's more related to intellectual ideas and another that's more related to art/aesthetics).

The good thing about using the Big 5 to read people's personalities quickly is that you can evaluate each dimension individually.

Unlike the other frameworks, that put people in a box (so you'd need to evaluate their whole personality to know what "kind" they are), here you can make piecemeal assessments.

For example, suppose you're dealing with two different clients – one is high in agreeableness and the other one, low.

The highly agreeable person will tend to avoid conflict, complain little (even if something makes them upset) and also be more hurt if you introduce conflict into the equation.

(They'll also tend to be much nicer, btw.)

The low agreeableness client will not run from conflict, though. They won't necessarily be mean, but they won't be overly nice either. You can expect to deal with them in a more direct way and even value a compliment more if coming from them.

But you'll also probably find them harder to please.

Once you get some practice, you'll be able to quickly assess in which 2-3 dimensions is someone's personality "stronger" (that is, leans towards the extremes) and to which side.

I, for example, am quite neutral in Agreeableness and Emotional Stability, but obviously high in Extroversion and Openness to Experience, while being quite low in Conscientiousness.

If you can take this read quickly as you meet me, you'll probably know how to deal with me better than most.

The "Big 5 Boss" exercise

Because this is a complex topic to dive much deeper, I want to invite you for an exercise:

• Try to map your boss on the 5 scale of this framework

Right now, intuitively.

If you need some help understanding the dimensions better, the wikipedia article is a fine place to start.

I think by doing this exercise, you'll (1) understand your boss a little better, which is always useful, and (2) get enough familiarity with the model to start reading people quickly.

Keep working smarter.