Psychological Type

Knowing Personality Preferences

Step 1 of your strategic plan remains knowing our adversary or counterpart’s basic drivers (“what is in it for them” and when are they likely to walk away). The next level is knowing how they tend to behave or what resonates with them. The Call Out Meeting (where the team meets prior to the negotiation to get a bead on all dynamics, positions) helps your team prepare for the objective facts and probable positions, but knowing a person’s preferences lets you prepare for how they are likely to react.

Dr. Carl Jung pioneered the idea of “psychological types”[i]. Later Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers developed an “Indicator” during World War II, and its criteria follows from Carl Jung’s theories. The Myers-Brigs®[ii] methods speak of preferences, not absolutes. The system has eight preferences[iii] and 16 personality types based on the combinations of the preferences. The 16 types involve logical combinations of the preferences, see 4×4 matrix below. Negotiators often use the eponymous four quadrant grid to plot where their adversary’s fall on the scale. Remember that these are soft sciences and Myers-Briggs has been called “astrology for people with a graduate degree.” That said, it can give us some insights.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (or “MBTI”) includes four personality types described by McCauley.[iv] Appling this to the negotiation context we can get the following:

Attitude

Perception

Judgment

Orientation

These four types combine to form 16 personalities types in a four by four matrix. This matrix may be used at table to get a fix on the opposition in order to better deal with the team regarding their preferences.

Attitude

Extroversion (E): seeks engagement with the environment and values external events observed in negotiations.
Introversion (I): seeks engagement with the interior, values concepts and ideas to explain observations in negotiation

Perception

Sensing (S): engaged in what is real, immediate, practical and observed by the senses during a negotiation.
Intuition (N): engaged in future possibilities, implicit meanings, and symbolic or theoretical patterns.

Judgment

Thinking (T): rationally decides through a process of analysis of causes and effects.
Feeling (F): rationally decides by weighing relative importance or value of competing alternatives.

Orientation

Judging (J): enjoys organizing, planning and moving quickly to a decision, a “closer.”
Perceiving (P): enjoys being and open to changes, preferring to keep options open in case something better turns up.

Myers Briggs Grid

If in your interactions you can determine the personality preference of your adversary, or if they tell you as an intelligence gathering exercise, you can get a limited amount of insight to what they find persuasive and influential.

Let’s say there is a negotiation happening with four people. Based on their behavior they infer the personality type preferences. The four-quadrant matrix may look something like:

Classifying the Adversary at Table Example

Adversary Grid

Analysis in Other Terms

Stoic

Howard thinks like an engineer or financial analyst, which he may be, he is very analytic

  1. Be accurate, be prepared to give non-secret details
  2. Talk about his interests (ego)
  3. Present all the facts first, as advocacy without facts is ineffective
  4. Stoics listen after asking questions

Mary is Pragmatic

  1. Give a few key facts and don’t overwhelm with information
  2. Don’t try to sway her, but present facts that support your position and let her decide
  3. Comfortable with Quick decision-making
  4. No questions
Emotional

Joe is Empathic

  • No Pressure or sense of urgency
  • Invest more time in the relationship, wait until trust is built
  • Show with overt acts that you care
  • Emotional types ask questions, but may not listen well.
  • Let him find the answer you want by allowing him to find “his” conclusion

Suzie is an Extrovert

  1. Present idealized picture of the benefits.
  2. Be sensitive.
  3. Talk about interests (organization, children, sports.)
  4. Drama – tell of triumph / disaster stories
  5. No Questions
  Internal External

Exercise: Personality Type Preference

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  1. Team Up. Select a group of friends to determine preference type. Ideally, they know their official Myers-Briggs[v] test or one of the similar ones that appear in books, other sources that are professionally administered.
  2. Your Type. If you know your personality type write it down on the box below. If you don’t, agree with a person’s guess of your type, discuss the reasons.
  3. Choose Roles. Choose sides with one side being the buyer of a house and one being the seller. Get everyone to talk as much as possible as authentically as possible as if they were doing the negotiation themselves.
  4. Analysis and Discussion. Try to analyze and predict the personality type preferences using the matrix. How does your type fit in, what should your role be?

Your Personality Type preference.

Your Personality Type: _____________________________

NegotiatorTeamNamePreference Guess
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    

TIP: While this personality matrix is the darling of many a management coach, consultant and manager, it falls short if you do not use the rigorous proprietary tests offered by experts in the field. For example, while the Myers-Briggs® methods are attacked academically, they may be essential in various contexts where many psychological data points are investigated. The method is a poor replacement for creating a culture of negotiators. What happens if we cannot “read” the other side, the other side sends false and deceptive signals, or the interpretation is wrong? While this is a helpful tool, most negotiators do this in the hallways at a break, asking “who is the weakest link on their team that gives us an advantage?”

NOTES:

Worksheet: Personality Type Preference

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Use this to estimate personality types of a group.

Worksheet

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