The networker's and contact's respective values aren't the only factor affecting rapport; the basic personality style of each person you meet will have a marked impact as well. If you can understand and recognize some fundamental patterns of how people learn and understand, make decisions, and relate with others and the environment, you'll be better equipped to foster rapport and consistently produce constructive encounters.
According to clinical psychologist, David Keirsey, the general population, at least of the United States, breaks into four basic groups: intuitive feelers, intuitive thinkers, sensing judgers and sensing perceivers. Since the four types are not distributed evenly throughout the population, you're much more likely, during the course of your networking, to encounter some types more than others.
Intuitive Feelers: Upbeat, Big Picture, Intensely Personal
Intuitive feelers are what other, less affective types tend to label as "touchy-feelers." Their lives and their work focus are strongly on human beings, human values, and the process of personal growth and self-actualization. Clear intuitive feeler types usually aren't hard to spot. When you walk into the office of an intuitive feeler, the surrounding pictures, family snapshots, plaques, prizes, and knick-knacks, a disheveled desk, and some evident chaos and disorganization will proclaim: "I'm a human being! I'm an individual! I want you to know and understand me."
Intuitive feelers are "people people." They tend to be empathetic, friendly, and helpful in all things, including networking meetings. They motivate others, put themselves out for others, and tend to take on responsibility for others' well-being.
Intuitive feelers are excited by career change: they support and reinforce the desirability of constant growth, constant movement, and new challenges. Your meetings with intuitive feelers will be fun and upbeat, but there are a few caveats when soliciting their advice and cultivating their friendship. Intuitive feelers sometimes aren't the greatest reality testers or the most objective sounding boards of what's feasible and what isn't. Their enthusiasm is infectious, but their tendency to think and understand things at a highly abstract level means that the details of actually implementing your career change may get short shrift. This is why there are many more intuitive feelers in "staff" positions than in "line" or general management jobs. They frequently are much better at envisioning and focusing on process than at producing results; their focus is more on means than on ends.
Intuitive Thinkers: What's Your Theory and How Will You Do It?
Intuitive thinkers are visionaries and creators, but their natural penchant for theory and design extends to how to translate theory into action and measurable outcomes. Intuitive thinkers are turned on by competency and the mastery of new skills and knowledge. Ask an intuitive thinker whom he respects most, and he'll say, "I respect people who are good at what they do. Good intentions and grand dreams are nice, but what really intuitive thinkers admire is achievement. How are you going to get the power to the road?"
Intuitive thinkers have little need to share their personal psychology with anyone, and their rational nature may make them seem aloof and distant. You can capture their imagination, if not their hearts, with well-conceived visions, concepts, and strategies. They are idea people. When encountering a career change, they lean toward neither indiscriminate enthusiasm nor cautious pessimism. They'll want to understand your theory, "Why are you making this career move? Why now?" and your plans for translating that theory into action. It's in translating concepts into reality that they can be of most help. They love to be asked, "How did you do it?" and to give advice about creating action plans, setting priorities, and measuring results.
Intuitive thinkers tend to embrace mastering new challenges, not stability and security. Indeed, one problem they often have is that even the most significant achievements fail to motivate them for long; their psyche is forever nagging, "What's next?" Accordingly, they tend to be quite comfortable with change and often progress through a lot of different jobs and roles during their careers. Thus, they're good networking resources for career changers, provided the networker comes to them with some sense of direction.
Sensing Judgers: The Managing Majority
Sensing judgers run things. That's their bag. They take the Intuitive thinkers' glorious visions and implement them, manage them and drive them toward the bottom line. Sensing judgers embody the American ethos: they're rooted in here-'n'-now reality and are driven to produce tangible, measurable results. They're decisive, judgmental, orderly, control-oriented and, above all, results-oriented. They deal with the facts at hand rather than hypothesizing about abstract theories or slogging around in human emotion.
For sensing judgers, individual achievement isn't as rewarding as the accomplishment of the group or the organization. They define themselves largely in terms of their teams or companies, and they tend to be strong traditionalists who value stability, status, conformity and time-honored values and techniques. Because sensing judgers are results-oriented first, middle, and last, they spend a lot of time trying to identify and minimize anything that might impede getting results. By nature they tend to be risk-reducers, more cautious and conservative than other temperamental types.
A dyed-in-the-wool sensing judger may see risk in many places: in "people who have bounced around in too many jobs," in "loose cannons who are always trying to change things," in "someone with a perfectly respectable job who wants to throw it all away to go tooting around and do his own thing." Sensing judgers are natural skeptics and cynics. They get consistent results because they keep their eye on the ball, their shoulder to the wheel, their nose to the grindstone, their ear to the ground, and can somehow work productively in that position.
Sensing Perceivers:
You won't find many sensing perceivers among people who see the big picture, can make things happen, know their way around organizations or are in positions of great wisdom or authority. Why? Because they're out experiencing life, not trying to plan, control, or anticipate it. Sensing perceivers are the inspiration for the Nike motto: "Just do it." The true sensing perceiver believes that life is a huge bucket into which you dump as much sensory experience as you can until you die. They don't look for patterns or theories or plans. They look for opportunities to try things, to feel things, and to juice their senses. More than 70 percent of all firefighters, for example, are sensing perceivers.
Although they tend to run in packs, sensing perceivers tend to be highly autonomous, inasmuch as sensory experience is a highly subjective and individual activity. To others, they often appear impulsive, easily bored, or unreflective. They don't much like to be asked for advice; if you want to learn from them, you follow their example: "Here's how to do it. Just do what I do." They prefer not to try to explain things in the abstract; they'll just ask you if you want to come along and try whatever activity they're doing. They won't respond well if you ask them what to do with your life. They don't want the responsibility: "Hey, do what you want. Whatever's cool. Okay?"
Sensing perceivers will warm to you if you show interest in their interests or in the technology they frequently use to enhance their self-stimulation. Intuitive thinkers and sensing perceivers often run together, because both types are always looking for new things to do. Sensing judgers and sensing perceivers don't get on well. The love of change in the sensing perceiver's menu is inherently unsettling to many sensing judgers, and not a little frivolous.
Sensing judgers often accuse sensing perceivers of being poor team players (probably a fair assessment) and of being insubordinate. Since they so often operate out of the mainstream, sensing perceivers tend to care less than do other types about what others think of them. They may even be openly contemptuous of people who don't want to live life in the fast lane.
To network with a sensing perceiver, you've got to catch him and schedule time, neither of which is easy. Sensing perceivers tend to be on the go, in constant movement, and in flux even when they're standing still. They miss or forget appointments more than other types do; time management rarely is their strong suit. Sensing perceivers don't want continuing responsibility and they usually don't care if they're part of someone else's network. But sensing perceivers can be incredibly stimulating to be around. They radiate energy and are passionate about their endeavors. In terms of networking, if they'll let you plug into them, you can really get your batteries charged.
