Transcription
There's science that basically I lean heavily on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It's what I was taught at the agency. It's what I've seen work in the field. So that's what I lean on. And they break people into 16 category types.
Would that be in your dossier? That would be in your dossier. Your Myers-Briggs, would be in the estimated Myers-Briggs Type Indicator for you would be in your dossier. Whoa. The field officer actually meets you would then be able to tweak it further because, again, public life, private life, secret life. You might—we might assume that you're an introvert, and then I meet you and you seem to act very extroverted. So now, are you the introvert that we assumed or are you the extrovert that you present yourself to be? The only way we're going to find out is by continued consistent experience with you over time. Right? Right? If I can get into your private life and especially if I can get into your secret life, then I'll know. Then I'll know whether you're introverted or extroverted, whether you're just playing an extroverted role for the societal opinion of you, right? Uh, but yeah, it takes time. So that would be in your dossier.
So I would say roughly 16 types, but then I would also double that because every type is going to have the—the true personality of who they actually are versus that public life personality of who they're trying to present themselves to be. And because each type—each of those 16 personality types are predisposed to a certain type of behavior publicly, they're also predisposed to a certain type of behavior privately. So how different would their Myers-Briggs be from? So they're presenting themselves as one personality type, but in reality—not reality, in Secret Life—they're a different personality type. Would those often be very divergent? Sometimes not. So sometimes they're very divergent. It really depends on the individual.
Let me give you an example, right? When we think about—think about personalities, let's talk through a lens of resources, right? Individual resources. So human beings—we're taught that human beings only have three resources that matter. There's time, energy, and money. That's it. Every other resource boils down to one of those three resources: time, energy, and money. For you to accomplish anything, it takes a certain balance of time, energy, and money.
So, when it comes time for you or I to live our public life, we go to a restaurant. We go to a—I was just at Mega Con, a big comic book conference, right? I was there with my kids and my wife. It takes a certain amount of money to buy the ticket, money to—to invest in the hotel room and everything else. It takes a certain amount of energy to put up with all those people and the lines and your kids going crazy for Mega Con and your wife trying to get in line to meet Beverly Crusher, right, from Star Trek. So, there's a certain amount of energy that goes into it. And then, of course, there's a time element. When you meet with somebody, you have to understand how their three—uh, those three resources are being used at any given time. So if you meet somebody at the beginning of the day, they're most likely fully resourced. You meet somebody at the end of the day, the gas tanks are at different levels. Energy might be lower. Time is probably running on empty. Uh, money might be—might be safe. That's it—helps to know the financial status of your client or your target, right? So it—you have to understand how people's resources are different. The more a person's resources are—are depleted, the closer they get to their true Myers-Briggs personality. That is interesting. When they're fully resourced, they can fake it. They can act extroverted. They can take extra time to think something through. They can be non-judgmental. But when they're tapped, when the end of the day comes and they're fried, that's when you see who they really are.
M, so a big part of the process of bringing someone from public life to secret life is to drain them of their resources systematically so that you can see who they really are because it's when they're in that low point that you can essentially replicate or mirror their core personality back to them, and then they let you into that secret life. They're not—you're not going to let someone into your secret life who's different than you. So, you have to mirror back to them what you believe their true personality to be. And then they're like, "If you like that, let me show you this other thing." Dude, that's crazy. Okay, so it's not that different, man, than what we—what you and I just did off camera when we were talking about comics.
Oh, 100%. Were you folding your arms on purpose? Uh, no. Because at one point I noticed we both had our arms folded and I was like, "Okay, are we mirroring right now?" Like, what are we doing? No, I was not. I was not mirroring you there. I was not mirroring you there. Um, I was—I'm just a little bit cold sometimes in—in these studios. But the fact that we connected on a genuine common interest and then from there—the—I don't know if you noticed how quickly the conversation turned into a very private conversation, right? And this was me predictably responding to your questions. You were the one in control of that conversation. Why did you homeschool your kids? Why do you do this? Why did you leave the agency? Like you were asking the questions. I'm responding. You're the one in control. Questions are always being asked by the person in control of the conversation. I was just responding in a predictable way because we had just connected over something that made me bring you into my private life. Private life.
Ben, this is really useful. So, when I think about this, obviously again, uh, I understand how quickly this stuff can be nefarious, but I also understand how this can be really useful in my marriage. First of all, like understanding my wife, being able to take her perspective, understanding her perceptions, uh, that stuff is incredibly—incredibly helpful. And the times where I'm unable to pierce her—um, her frame of reference in my language, I'm like, uh, we're derailing because I can't—I can't get you to see that you have a frame of reference on this. And I often use the David Foster Wallace quote of "This Is Water." It's like, your frame of reference is so ever-present, you—you don't even realize you have one. And so the thought of there being a dossier on me somewhere that's like got there, you know, an estimate of my Myers-Briggs and that for sure—like, so I think of it not as I present a fake version, but there are—I think of my personality in slices. And so every slice that I present to people is real, but I'm only going to show my wife all of my slices. To your point that consistency is the most difficult thing. Um, I—I just wouldn't be able to be like with my wife as long as I've been with my—we've been together 22 years. I wouldn't be able to be fake for that long. Like at some point the jig is going to be up. You're going to—like slip up. And so that—like my wife sees all of my slices. Everybody else sees some version thereof. And what's interesting is as you understand more and more of somebody's slices, two things happen. You can—you can begin to predict their behavior. And I'm obsessed with—the human brain is a prediction engine. And my whole thing—like we're—we're living through a moment where Thomas Sowell has the perfect quote to sum it up, and people have—this is a paraphrase, but people have exchanged what worked for what sounds good. And this goes back to your idea of—well, you can say that a truck's not heading towards you, but if a truck is heading towards you, it's heading towards you. And so there is—there's what's really happening and then there is your perception of what's happening. And in—in a desire to look at the world through a lens of just pure acceptance, no judgment, our prediction engines are breaking and we're no longer dealing with what I'll call as close to ground truth as you can get. You and I may disagree a little bit on how much of the world is objectively true. Physics is true, but like we don't even understand physics fully, and we're still able to do like incredible [ __ ] right? So like we're—we are existing at some layer of abstraction. All right, I'll rain this back in because I could really derail on that. Uh, but in my marriage. So my ability to predict the outcome of my behaviors as they echo back off of my wife or just my ability to predict her native reaction or actions on something is extraordinarily—extraordinarily helpful. But I do a lot of this intuitively, and so hearing it like broken out—like I don't even know my wife's—wife's Myers-Briggs. I know my own, but even—I don't even remember what they mean anymore. I did it so long ago.
Um, when you think about this stuff, and I know you work with corporate clients, how—how much do you really try to get people to solidify this? And how much of it is just people play by ear when it comes to how I teach others? I know that it's like—you called me a master earlier, and I am not a master. I think the—the more you learn about something, the more you become an expert in something, the more you realize how much there is to learn. So I do not consider myself a master of human psychology or a master of human behavior. I don't consider myself a master really of anything except being a masterful student of continuing to learn more—more maybe. So when I teach a client, my objective as a service provider is to bring them maximum proficiency in the minimum amount of time. They don't need to learn how to use this 12 different ways. They hired me for one specific purpose. What I know being a business owner is that if you can meet someone's expectation once, they'll come back and they'll give you a second chance to meet a different expectation. So, when a corporate client comes to me and says, "I want to learn how to use these skills in my human recruiting process, right? My—my human resource process, then let's do it, right? I don't tell—I don't make—I don't distract them by telling them how to incentivize their high performers. I don't distract them by telling them how to improve their relationship. I don't distract them by telling them how to improve themselves. You want to use this skill in your human resource sourcing and staffing. Here's how we do it. Right? And then when they have success doing that, that's when they come back and they're like, "That was amazing. How else can I use this or where else can I use that?" Or here's my next problem. My suite doesn't get along. How do I get my suite to get along? How do I increase communication between my program management team and my budget and finance team? Right now, they bring you specific problems, and you solve those specific problems. That's how I end up teaching it because people understand their problems. People don't necessarily have the consistency or the self-discipline it takes to master multiple areas of a certain skill. It's not a luxury many of us have. Is there a question?
And so going back to your HR example, do you think there are universal questions that will prompt people to reveal themselves—in general would be my ideal, but we can limit it to HR if we have to? So I would—my instinct is to say yes, but I'd have to think through what those questions would be and how we—buy you time to think about it. Here's the one that I use in interviews because this is—so culture is everything to me. Like you might be really smart, but if you're not a good cultural fit, then we have a problem. And this goes back to what I was talking about. We're living through a cultural moment where people go—they're—they're not—not—um, they are so trying not to upset or offend anybody that they don't realize that people are predictable—like you were saying that they fall into certain categories. Boys and girls is the easiest one for me as somebody who writes comics. Like I just had to realize, oh, 12-year-old boys are into this, 12-year-old girls are into this, and they are wildly divergent desires. And look, that's on average. It's not everybody. And of course, there—going to be some 12-year-old boys that prefer the girls' comics and vice versa. Um, but in an interview, the question that I ask is, "When was the last time you were offended?" Okay. Now, that matters to me a lot.
What are you hoping to discover from that question? I am trying to figure out what their—um, if they have thick skin and very specifically, what was it that triggered you? Because that to me gets me their frame of reference because I think everybody's offended by something. Mhm. And the question is what? And if that—if what you give me is something small, then I know, okay, there's no way—like you're going to—in a business where it's—it's just data. Like it's either working or it's not. We're not competing against each other. We're competing against the market and competitors. And this is—running a business is the—the closest that most of us will come to a quote-unquote life and death situation where you can literally go out of business. Nobody has a job. The company is now dead. Uh, and as the person, you know, that started the company, that's like real stuff. Like that's really high stress. And so I need to know if in that dog fight if I'm going to have to worry about—overly worry about how I say things. It's a fair question.
Um, I would, now that you've given me time to stall and—and—and think through it, I would start with a question that has more to do with how they process information. I would start with a question like, "How would you plan your ideal—ideal vacation?" That is a good universal question for me because it's going to tell you how they process information, how quickly they responded to tasking, um, the time and resource demands that will go into any future tasking you give them while they're on the job. Um, and the reason I come up with that is there's a—there's an exercise at the CIA that they put us through called the Four Temperaments. And they break these four temperaments down into four different animal categories basically. So the four animal categories are lions, foxes, cheetahs, and bears.
Interesting, right? Tell me more. So your lions are people who have a temperament to organize. Your foxes are people who have a temperament to create ideas, to create. Your cheetahs are people who have a temperament to take action. And your bears are people who have a temperament to build relationships.
So why those animals? None of those seem self-evident other than the cheetah. The fox is also relatively clever, right? I don't know why. Um, I was just taught and I just do what I'm told. Yeah. Yeah. So what ends up happening is you ask—in a high-performance team, a high-performance team is a four-block team, right? If you can imagine a square with four blocks inside it and each of those blocks has—is rep—is—is representative of one of those animal temperaments. You need each of them in a high-performing team. You can have a good team that doesn't have all four, but if you want a truly high-performance team, you need all four present: somebody to organize, someone to create ideas, someone to build the relationships, someone to execute. When you are looking to source somebody into HR, you already know who you're looking for. We need bears, we need cheetahs, we need lions, we need foxes. You should already know because you can run the temperament of your existing staff. And if you want to build a high-performance team, you need all four blocks present. So you just find the missing block and then you start sourcing for that. The questions that you want to ask, you want to ask questions that disarm the person interviewing because guess what? Every person you interview is in what stage of their life or they're in what—of their very public—public life. I need this job. I want this job. I'm super—I'm prepared for this job, right? I'm prepared for this interview. Public life. So, you need to disarm them if you're going to find your way into their private life. If you want to see how they actually behave, you can't ask them questions about the job. You also can't ask them questions that go against HR policy, you know, federal policy about what you do in an interview. So, you have to ask these elicitation questions, these parallel questions. And a question like, "How would you plan your perfect vacation?" is completely disarming to somebody. So, if they say, "Well, the first thing I would do is I would make a list of all the places I want to go and how much it costs to be there and you know what the high season and low season is," now you know you're talking to a lion. Lions want to organize, right? If you talk to somebody, "What's your ideal vacation?" "Oh man, I'm just going to jump on the next plane to Fiji." You know, you're talking to a cheetah. Cheetah just wants to take action. "What the hell are you going to do when you get to Fiji?" "I have no idea, but I'm on the next plane." Right? If you ask somebody what they're going to do for their ideal vacation, and they come back and they're like, you know, "I've thought about this a lot, and I'm either going to Antarctica or I'm going to Africa or I'm going to, you know, Saudi Arabia because there's all this cool stuff going on in all three places and they've got fantastic reviews," you know you're talking to a fox because a fox is full of ideas. And if you ask somebody, "Where are you going on your perfect vacation?" "I'm going to go anywhere my husband wants to go. I'll go wherever my best friend takes me," you know you're talking to a bear. It's all about the relationship with the bear. Nothing else matters, right? So, when you ask a one-off question, you disarm the person. You already know they're coming in armed up because they're in their public life. So, you've got to disarm them to get into their private life. And then you need to ask something that's going to give you some insight into how they're going to react on the job. I don't disagree with your question about asking somebody the last time they were offended, but you run the risk of making an assumption that isn't accurate because you're asking them about something that—that they are publicly—their public life is going to influence their answer significantly because they know they're trying to get a job. So, they might say, "Oo, well, uh, I don't really want to admit that I was offended when my son, you know, ate the last bowl of Cheerios because that's going to sound childish, so I'm going to say something else instead. What can I say that's really smart?" Yeah. Yes.
I hear all of that, and I haven't gotten any of the really cool like Cheerio answers, but Pete, one, I never asked that question in the beginning, so we're going to be deep in the interview by the time I pull that one out. Uh, but when people speak, they cannot help but reveal themselves. And so no matter what lie they're trying to tell, like even the fact that they stumble and hem and haw is like already information. Now maybe it's because they're not easily offended. And so they're like, "Jesus, wow, I really have to think about that." Um, but usually within the context of the interview, it becomes pretty apparent by the time we get to that question whether they're stalling to buy time trying to come up with something. But then other times, and I don't know if people just are—they're so caught off guard that they'll give you a real answer, and it's like, whoa. Uh, yeah, it's pretty—pretty revelatory. The one that I do along the lines of "What's your vacation?" is "Describe your closet. How do you organize your closet or what does your closet look like right now? Don't give me your ideal closet. I want to know what does your closet actually look like?" Uh, and that will get—like if I need somebody that's super detail-oriented and they're like, "Okay, my closet is organized by color or designer," or it's like, "Okay, cool." Like this is somebody that really—there's a method to the madness. Um, that can be pretty useful.