There are two kinds of people: those who divide people into two groups and those who don’t. Me, I’m one of the latter: I divide people into four groups. For day-to-day encounters with people, it is very effective to quickly classify them into one of four groups in order to determine the best way to interact with them. Much as I am a fan of the Rule of Threes – people like to have three of anything – in the case of people, three is not enough. To usefully categorise people, you need four. I can hear the howls of protest now; “you can’t lump the endless variation of the human race into four groups – people cannot be pigeon-holed, and especially not into so few categories”.

Well, you can. Try it. It is imperfect and sometimes difficult, but it can also be startlingly effective.

As to what four categories to use, that doesn’t actually matter that much so long as you have a model that works for you, and some predetermined rules for how you will respond to each of the four categories.

A well-known four-way categorisation is DISC® Profiling. DISC goes further than just putting people into four buckets, but at its heart there are four main types of people, arranged in the model as four quadrants.

Wikipedia says:

DISC is an acronym for:

Dominance - relating to control, power and assertiveness

Influence - relating to social situations and communication

Steadiness (submission in Marston's time)- relating to patience, persistence, and thoughtfulness

Conscientiousness (or caution, compliance in Marston's time) - relating to structure and organization

These four dimensions can be grouped in a grid with D and I sharing the top row and representing extroverted aspects of the personality, and C and S below representing introverted aspects. D and C then share the left column and represent task-focused aspects, and I and S share the right column and represent social aspects. In this matrix, the vertical dimension represents a factor of "Assertive" or "Passive", while the horizontal represents "Open" vs. "Guarded".

DISC allows you to look at someone’s environment that they surround themselves with, listen to them speak, watch them behave, and then categorise them in order to predict their preferred mode of behaviour from you. At least, that is how I use it. It results in some very crude simplifications, but it works for me. “He’s high I: better encourage him to talk about himself for a while. Make sure I show what’s in it for him”. “She’s an S: I’ll need to get a few more team-members on side first”. “He’s a C: don’t rush him - settle in for a long and detailed discussion of every bit of information I have with me”. If you want to be able to walk into a stranger’s office and quickly think “Oops she’s a high D – better present the facts as quickly and orderly as possible then cut to the chase” then get yourself some DISC training.

But the really interesting thing is that it does not have to be DISC.

Continued on Page 2: The Situational Leadership Model