Reading Other People

January 9, 2009
Interview with Tony Alessandra author of People Smart with Family, Friends & Significant Others: Using the Disc Behavioral Styles Model to Turn Every Personal Encounter Into a Mutual Win 

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Mike Carruthers:
Do you have "people smarts"?

Tony Alessandra:
The ability to size up people and adapt or adjust the way they deal with those people to make that person feel more comfortable with them.

Tony Alessandra, author of the book People Smart  

In other words, treat people the way they want to be treated not the way you want to be treated.

How do you do that? Well, you need to make two decisions about people when you meet them.

Decision number one - is the person that I'm dealing with exhibiting more open or more guarded behaviors? And number two - is the person exhibiting more direct or indirect behaviors? A more open person is more relationship oriented more outgoing whereas the guarded person kind of plays their cards close to the vest, harder to read, more controlled limited body language and facial expressions. You can feel it. You can sense it you can see it.

And once you determine which type of person you are dealing with, you adapt yourself to that style.

It's just like if you were going on a trip to Japan. If you want to increase your chances of success you better learn something about the way they do business and their culture and their way of communicating and then adjust. Same thing, even in your own household, your own office, with your customers. They have different ways of communicating, different ways of doing things and if you can pick up what those signals are and adjust, you're going to get a lot further ahead with them.

Complete interview is not available.