"So, how was your weekend?" 😂

I read an interview with a female CEO in the The Australian Financial Review the other day (unfortunately paywalled so I can't share it), and she was asked what was the most valuable career advice she'd ever received. Her answer - "treat people the way they want to be treated."

This reminded me of a workshop I attended in the early 2000s, run internally by the global software company I worked for at the time. All the project managers were put through Myers-Briggs and DiSC assessments and spent the day learning how to apply that understanding when working with others - not just to understand themselves but also to learn to recognise what other people actually needed from an interaction.

The instructor started with a story I've always found amusing. Like a lot of us, he'd grown up being taught to treat others the way he wanted to be treated - "do unto others" - and he'd recently worked out that wasn't quite right.

He was a chatty guy, the type who liked a bit of small talk and would ask about your weekend before getting down to business. He just got a new boss, who was logical, direct, always on the move and clearly just wanted to get sh*t done. The working relationship was proving challenging and the instructor was starting to think about moving on.

Then he did this same workshop and worked out he was a high "I" in DiSC (Influence), and his boss was quite likely a high "D" (Dominance). So he changed his approach. Instead of the friendly small talk, he started opening his boss's door and saying "Morning - about that report - do you want option A or B? And then should I do C or D?" The relationship improved almost immediately.

A few weeks later he was at his desk on a Monday morning when his boss came over, leaned casually on the edge and asked "So, how was your weekend?". Yep - the boss had just done the same workshop. 😂 

I've thought about that story a lot over the years, and told it a few times myself - particularly to IT teams, where the "us and them" dynamic with the rest of the business can take on a life of its own. It's a really effective way to demonstrate the point about how to get the best outcome from an interaction. It helped shape how I approach leading teams, work with clients and navigate organisations - by trying to work out what someone else actually needs from an interaction, rather than defaulting to what I'D want. I realised much later that's basically the foundation for Design Thinking, although we didn't have the name for that then.

Happy Friday 🍷 

This article was first published on LinkedIn 

Cover image: By User:JakeBeech - MyersBriggsTypes.png, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link