CHAPTER 1

The Four Behavioral Styles

Behavioral Styles in the Business World

People are different, and those differences, while greatly enriching the never-ending process of personal interaction, also create friction.

Our capabilities and, particularly, how we apply them to deal with different tasks vary greatly from person to person and so do the expectations we have about how others deal (or fail to deal) with such tasks. This is apparent just by looking at daily work routine as it happens in the corporate environment; someone may be at the office and feel frustrated that the person at the other side of the table is just not understanding why a particular thing (a project, a process, a calculation) has to be done in a particular way. Managers may not understand why team members cannot complete an assigned task in the way they need them to, even when the reasons for it have already been explained. Or certain team members may be left scratching their heads and feeling frustrated, not understanding the instructions, so clear to some and confusing to others, that managers are delivering. Outside of work, day-to-day life is a parade of efforts in dealing with behavior types that are different to oneself. How often we get enraged because the person who is lining up in front of us is having trouble operating an ATM or is holding up the queue in the airplane aisle by trying to fit his or her luggage in a way that is obviously nonsensical . . . to us.

The truth of the matter is that, by living in society, people are destined to come across others who do not conform to the way they see things and the way they do things. And in a professional context, where performance is measured by communicational, relationship, and leadership abilities, the key to success may just be how to best broaden our own understanding of others rather than trying to change their behavior so it fits our expectations.

In fact, this is such an essential skill that it comes up immediately upon joining the professional world. In a job, any job, the initial step is always to be thrown in the midst of a group of strangers; we are not consulted about who we prefer to work with but are paired with coworkers based on skill or role, not personal compatibility. How we behave under such conditions reflects our temperament and affects, in turn, the attitude of those around toward us. Different types of people meshed together can work in harmony and turn out to have complementary behaviors, while others can become antagonistic and affect performance.

Even if we have no intention of changing the way we act, understanding what are the characteristics of our conduct, and what are its strengths and weakness, will help us develop more effective relationships (and it should be noted that “effectiveness” here is not used only in its purely utilitarian or mercantile sense; getting to know and establishing a meaningful personal friendship with a new acquaintance is as much a valid result of an effective relationship as closing a multimillion-dollar sales deal). In turn, knowing which type of behavior we can expect from those around us will remove unpredictability from our social interactions, increasing their positive effects and helping us lessen negative ones.

Such understanding is, in short, a key professional competence that allows us to work, communicate, and lead people of different characters who exhibit different behaviors, and it comes via two fundamental points of awareness:

• We need to recognize what our behavioral style is.
• We need to learn how to recognize the behavioral style of others.

The Legacy of Behavior Classification

The behavioral classification used in this book is based on the model ­developed by American psychologist William Moulton Marston (1893–1947). In a book published in 1928, Emotions of Normal People, Marston, a fascinating scholar who also developed the polygraph lie ­detector ­machine and created the comic book character “Wonder Woman,” ­explained how people’s emotions and behavior can be classified into four types depending on their predominant trait:

• Dominance (D), when there is a superiority of self over some sort of antagonist.
• Inducement (I), when there is a process of persuading someone, in a friendly way, to perform an act suggested by the subject.
• Submission (S), when there is a voluntary obedience to the commands of the person in authority.
• Compliance (C), when the subject is moving himself or herself at the dictates of a superior force.

This model had come to be known as the DISC classification and still influences research on human psychology to this day.

The book’s curious title uses the word “normal” because Marston made clear that his intention was to classify people’s standard behavior, that is, the type of actions they expressed when not under stress:

I do not regard you as a “normal person”, emotionally, when you are suffering from fear, rage, pain, shock, desire to deceive, or any other emotional state whatsoever containing turmoil and conflict. Your emotional responses are “normal” when they produce pleasantness and harmony. And this book is devoted to description of normal emotions which are so commonplace and fundamental in the every-day lives of all of us that they have escaped, hitherto, the attention of the academician and the psychologist.¹

Despite the inherent complexity of the human psyche, Marston was not the first who looked into classifying people’s behaviors into a model or chart that could be simultaneously simple and comprehensive. The Greek physician Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 BC) developed the idea that there exist four temperaments, each related to a natural element, in the rational mind, and that establish many types of archetypical personalities:

• Sanguine (air-like): Active, outgoing, and charismatic.
• Choleric (fire-like): Decisive and goal oriented.
• Melancholic (earth-like): Thoughtful, self-reliant, and analytical.
• Phlegmatic (water-like): Sympathetic, relaxed, and easygoing.

Hippocrates noted that those positive traits could be taken to their extreme and develop into negative behavioral patterns, which accounted for social and interpersonal frictions. The sanguine become risk-taking, the choleric become dictatorial, the melancholic become reclusive, and the phlegmatic become pusillanimous. As per the classical conception of physiology, displaying one or another behavior was ultimately attributed to varied humors of fluids present in the human body, which, in different combinations, determined a personality type. Hippocrates understood, however, that the human character is not always so easily explained and that there existed mixtures between the different types so that individuals could present at the same time characteristics of two or more of them.

The Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875–1961) also looked at the different personality trends present in each human being and how they “determine and limit a person’s judgment.” In his 1921 book Psychological Types, he identified two attitudes for the control of consciousness, introversion and extraversion, and four basic psychological functions:

• Thinking, the intellectual comprehension of things.
• Feeling, the judgment of the value of things based in a sentimental function.
• Sensing, the sensorial perception of the world.
• Intuiting, the adding of meaning through a deeper perception process.

Later, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers developed the “Myers–Briggs Type Indicator,” based on Jung’s approach. Still widely used today, the indicator takes the form of a personal questionnaire where, by answering different questions, the participant profile is aligned with one of 16 different personality types that organize Jung’s principles into a list ranging from the ISTJ (Introversion + sensing + thinking + judging) group to the ENTP (Extraversion + intuition + thinking + perceiving).

When looking at the lessons that result from applying martial arts fighting mentality to business and business-related interactions, this book divides individual behavioral patterns into one of the four following groups, derived from Marston’s original classification. Each name looks to represent a behavioral type that can be intuitively recognized in a professional environment:

1. The Controller
2. The Analyst
3. The Promoter
4. The Supporter

These four basic behavioral patterns are initially defined according to where they sit in a graph that defines human behavior as points articulated along two basic parameters or axes:

1. Formal/informal behaviors: Refers to the degree to which a person is task-oriented and likes to work under clearly stated rules, or is people-oriented and prefers a more fluid, unstructured environment.
2. Proactive/responsive behaviors: Refers to the degree to which a person uses a direct, take-charge type of approach or an indirect, more supporting one.

Understanding these two axes is the first step in learning what the individual behavioral patterns are.

The Vertical Axis: Formal/Informal Behaviors

In 2017, a conference took place in San Francisco hosted by the technology and media company Facebook. Following the informal and loose Silicon Valley style, the organizers chose an unusual venue, the Palace of Fine Arts, where a large warehouse had been conditioned with sofas, Wi-Fi service, chairs, barista coffee counters, and meeting rooms. There were two stages, one at each end of the large location; the first one, wider, was dedicated to business and sales presentations, while the second stage, narrower, was there for the engineering and technical discussions.

Over the course of 2 days, a pattern showing differences not just ­between the programs in both areas but about their style quickly emerged. The speakers on the sales stage were smartly dressed, used slides with a simple, evocative sentence, and pitched their ideas in an emotional, passionate manner. They talked about “partnership collaboration” and “synergy” and “market impact.” The speakers on the technical stage were mostly engineers, dressed in comfortable, casual outfits; their slides had an abundance of detail, and although many of them seemed not very used to public speaking, their presentations were structured and logical.

It would be simplistic to say that each type of presentation style that day was exclusive to a certain work role; not all businesspeople were fast-talking salespersons, nor were all engineers social recluses who spoke in incomprehensible technical lingo. But it is true that an alignment of behavior with job roles could be felt: the business area was informal and people-oriented; the engineering one was ­formal and task-oriented. It certainly stands to reason: salesmanship requires a degree of gregariousness because results will be determined by the ability a person has to engage with clients and prospects. Similarly, technical jobs need, by definition, accuracy and attention to detail if a new program or machine is to work properly and without hitches.

In the classification of behavioral styles, these two broad types correspond to the gradating axis line, which goes from formal to informal:

1. The formal behavior style is task-focused and refers to people who follow a disciplined and structured working style. They are precise in their communication and present ideas in a less emotional way, staying close to facts and figures to support their arguments. In some cases, such formality can come across as obdurate.
2. The informal behavior style is relationship-oriented and refers to people who follow a less organized but more intuitive working style. Their communication style is less organized but more approachable, showing emotion that appeals to the listener’s gut feeling rather than the intellect. In some cases, this informality can come across as fickle.

The Horizontal Axis: Proactive/Responsive Behaviors

In the 1938 comedy Bringing up Baby, Cary Grant plays David Huxley, a mild-mannered paleontologist who gets entangled with the young heiress Susan Vance, played by Katherine Hepburn. Grant’s quiet academic life is upset when he is taken away by the energetic Hepburn in a series of antics and adventures, which include jail, a leopard, and a collapsing dinosaur skeleton.

The 1978 musical romantic comedy Grease saw these roles reversed when rocker Danny Zuko (John Travolta) falls for prim and proper Sandy Olsson (Olivia Newton-John) and manages to win her heart with a mixture of roguish charm, 1950s car races, and Travolta’s trademark dance moves.

Nowhere is the at-times-opposing, at-times-complementary dynamic between active and passive temperaments more apparent than in romantic comedies, where writers and directors love to pair couples of opposite personalities and play them against each other for jocular effect. In the case of Bringing up Baby, Hepburn’s vitality ends up impressing on Grant a joy of life he didn’t know he had been missing. In Grease, Travolta’s bad-boy persona reveals a wilder side in Newton-John, a transformation she exteriorizes at the end of the film.

Both pairs of characters are a simplified and extreme depiction of the proactive and responsive behaviors. Travolta and Hepburn are impulsive and energetic—they are the ones who move the plot ahead—while Grant and Newton-John are conservative and easygoing, and it is their transformation that gives a satisfying end to both movies. While in cinema the positive attributes of the proactive style in this dualism are highlighted to add drama, there is no inherent advantage to having one or another behavior. Both present merits and demerits and are balanced out by other traits that come together to define the full individual.

In the classification of behavioral styles, these two broad personality types correspond to the gradating axis line, which goes from proactive to responsive.

1. The proactive behavior style is, by definition, a more forceful one; it processes information in a direct manner and states that information with certainty. It is prone to challenging the status quo when taking action, and this often enables a more directional business style and out-of-the-box thinking. In some cases, such proactivity can come across as domineering.
2. The responsive behavior style is less vehement. Instead of issuing statements, it asks questions, which may be designed to lead to assumed answers. This is a thoughtful, indirect behavior, which can seem indecisive and works better when, as the name indicates, it reacts to an external stimulus. In some cases, this responsiveness comes across as indecision.

The Four Behavioral Styles: Natural Behavior
and Adapted Behavior

Based on where along these two axes a person’s conduct falls, four basic types of behavioral styles emerge:

1. Formal and proactive types result in controlling behavioral styles.
2. Formal and responsive types result in analytical behavioral styles.
3. Informal and proactive types result in promoting behavioral styles.
4. Informal and responsive types result in supportive behavioral styles.

Although simple looking, this chart is a powerful tool for categorization. Once people identify and understand the behavioral style to which they belong, the chances of meeting somebody with the same characteristics are much smaller than meeting someone who doesn’t share them. Roughly only one in every four other people² will have a similar understanding of how things should be done, while everybody else will hold a different set of priorities and a different understanding of what is important.

How do we align our wants and needs with such a large number of the population? How do we manage to work together to achieve a common goal when every aspect in this sentence (work, achievement, and goal) can have and often does have different connotations for everyone?

The key, again, is to understand others as much as to understand oneself.

Of course, personality and behavioral styles are just indicators of more complex individual traits, and being assigned to one or another is not an ancient Egyptian curse from where there is no escape; the objective is simply to learn how to be more effective in communicating and connecting with other styles as well as to accept our own personal limitations. Furthermore, there are two important mitigating factors when identifying assignments to the four behavioral styles that reduce the determinism of the chart:

1. Everybody has a primary style but also a highly relevant secondary one.

   Traditional analysis offers a simplified layout for personality behavior styles because that makes it easier for individuals to self-examine their actions and find their predominant behavioral traits. Most people, however, share characteristics of all four styles to one degree or another. As a primary analyst, an individual may be comfortable analyzing data in order to reach a decision, but how the person takes action on that decision and how he or she communicates it can vary a lot. An analyst with a secondary controlling type will act quickly, while an analyst with a secondary promoting style will choose a different path and develop a more creative solution. While both fall within the analytical range, their behavior will be notably different.

   Environment also plays a part. Although primary styles are quite stable through all contexts, different secondary styles come to the fore depending on particular situations. A relaxed home environment may enforce a supporting behavior, while a more challenging business setting calls for a controlling style.

2. Everybody can learn how to develop other personality traits.

   Human adaptability has a remarkable ability to deal with changes, and this extends to behavioral styles. A style can be modified or trained, either consciously or unconsciously, to expand its range and go well beyond its theoretical limitation, effectively moving along the formal/informal and proactive/responsive axes. If analysts find themselves in a position of leadership, they may develop a way to interact with their team so that they promote communication and team spirit, as a supporter or a promoter would do. Similarly, Supporters who have to tackle data-driven tasks can develop the analytical attention to detail that will allow them to work in that role.

The Four Business Behaviors and the Four
Fighting Styles

Since the four behavioral styles, controller, analyst, promoter, and supporter, are defined according to their alignment with the two axes, formal/informal and proactive/responsive, it is necessary to classify the corresponding martial arts along the same lines.

Formal/Informal Axis

In the next chapters and when applied to martial arts, the formal/informal axis will have the following reading:

1. Formal fighting styles refer to those that follow a highly structured catalog of movement and apply them within the confines of drill practice or free sparring. Formal styles leave narrow room for personal adaptation of the techniques and require the practitioner to re-create the blueprint moves as closely as possible. Furthermore, these styles have a test-based process in place that regulates the progression through the ranks.

   The two formal styles selected in this book are karate and judo because of the following reasons:

   • They both have a clearly defined syllabus of techniques for each belt rank and a formalized exam that tests proficiency in that set of movements before moving on to the following rank.
   • They both use as a learning tool a set of movements or practice forms called kata which the practitioners employ to refine their ability.
   • They both require that all moves learned through practice are applied to free sparring with strict adherence to the standard.
2. Informal styles refer to those that use a loose set of movements built around a set of basic techniques; such moves are prone to be adapted by the practitioners based on personal style. Because of this, the progression through the ranks is not determined by the perfect re-creation of the standard but, rather, through the overall ability of the practitioners to seamlessly integrate the moves into free sparring.

   The two informal styles selected in this book are Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) for the following reasons:

   • They place reduced emphasis on replicating a standardized syllabus of movements. The progression of the practitioner is based on performance rather than knowledge. Basic techniques are doctrinal nodes around which personal style is developed.
   • They both dispense with the use of practice forms (kata).
   • They place great emphasis on sparring practice because the objective is to demonstrate effectiveness when applying techniques against a live, resisting opponent.

Proactive/Responsive Axis

The proactive/responsive axis will have the following reading:

1. Proactive fighting styles will be those that initiate the action. This is particularly relevant with striking combat forms—those where hands, feet, elbows, and knees are used for attack, starting in an upright position. Even though these styles have a wide range of techniques that are used in response to an opponent attack (called counters), those too require a change of initiative and for the fighter to take the offensive.

   The two proactive styles selected are karate and MMA because of the following characteristic:

   • Their techniques require the application of explosive energy, both for attack and defense and for the submission of the opponent by inflicting impact trauma. Energy is generated not by balance or leverage but by using both body mass and weight distribution.
2. Responsive styles will be those that rely heavily on the opponent’s action to apply their techniques. These are usually grappling fighting styles, where submission happens by unbalancing and throwing the opponent or by driving him or her into a position where he or she can be controlled.

   The two responsive styles selected are judo and BJJ because of the following characteristic:

   • They don’t rely on the use of movement to generate explosive power but rather on balance changes and leverage, as well as redirecting the force of the opponent.

The correspondence between the four behavioral styles and the selected four martial arts is, therefore, as follows:

1. Formal and proactive types result in controlling behavioral styles, which align with the martial art of karate.
2. Formal and responsive types result in analytical behavioral styles, which align with the martial art of judo.
3. Informal and proactive types result in promoting behavioral styles, which align with the martial art of MMA.
4. Informal and responsive types result in supportive behavioral styles, which align with the martial art of BJJ.

¹ W.M. Marston. 1928. Emotions of Normal People. London: Kegan Paul Trench.

² Population split is not equal between the four types and varies according to some considerations, including the strength of the primary and secondary behavioral style. Here, 25 percent is assigned to each type for simplicity’s shake.