Chapter 4
Recognizing Each Style
The Behavioral Cues That Might Indicate Another Person's Style
Before we can begin to apply our knowledge of interactive styles, we must learn to recognize the behavioral cues that others provide us that alert us to their preference. We become much better leaders, sales professionals, service providers, colleagues, spouses, and friends when we can adjust successfully to other people's communication needs. And to do this, we must understand our own style as well as recognizing others'.
I suppose the easiest way to do this would be to give the other person the assessment. That might work for friends and family, perhaps even colleagues and team members, but handing your current or prospective customer an interactive style inventory to complete would be, well, odd—creepy, actually.
“Good morning, ma'am, and welcome to ABC Supply. Before I assist you, please complete this brief metacognitive assessment. The results will allow me to adjust my service approach to maximize your customer satisfaction. Ma'am? Ma'am? Where are you going? This is important! Really . . .”
Nope; that's just not going to work.
A better strategy is to develop your own cognitive schemas to recognize some of the telltale behavioral cues, both verbal and nonverbal. For the purposes of identifying style, we will focus only on the other person's preferred style—not the combination of primary and secondary preference that determines his or her Hollywood movie character. If you are able ...
