I have a friend who is the most diligent professional I know. I’ve known him for 20-plus years and he never misses a deadline, never fails to hit targets, never fails to follow up… he’s the King of Reliability. If he’s asked to do it, he’ll do it — no matter what it takes.
Yet he’s the first person to tell you that he’s significantly overweight, totally out of shape, feels terrible most of the time… yet he can’t seem to stick with even the gentlest of diets or exercise plans.
That dichotomy has always puzzled me. How can someone who always delivers at work, who relentlessly stays the professional course, totally fail to do things he desperately wants — and needs — to do for himself?
But I’m not puzzled anymore.
Every once in a while you read a book that makes you see things in a totally different way. A perfect example is Gretchen Rubin’s The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Lives Better, Too).
Within minutes I realized that my friend is what Gretchen calls an Obliger: Someone who meets outer expectations, like meeting a work deadline, but resists inner expectations, like keeping a New Year’s resolution. (I, on the other hand, am a Questioner, meeting all expectations only if I feel they are justified. That means I can meet inner expectations all day long, but outer expectations? Only if I feel like they make sense, which in effect means I only respond to inner expectations.)
Since he’s an Obliger, my friend is great at meeting deadlines, etc, because he has a boss and a team that depends on him. But when he tries to set expectations for himself, he fails, whereas I can consistently do even the dumbest things if I decide I want to.)
Which category do you fall into? See where you would place yourself:
- Upholders respond readily to both outer expectations and inner expectations. (19 percent of people are Upholders.)
- Questioners question all expectations; they meet an expectation only if they believe it’s justified, so in effect they respond only to inner expectations. (24 percent.)
- Obligers respond readily to outer expectations but struggle to meet inner expectations. (41 percent.)
- Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike. (17 percent.)
Or better yet, take Gretchen’s short online quiz to find out.
Why do you care? Whenever you try to do something new, you have to set expectations for yourself. That means you need to understand how you respond to expectations, so you can plan — and implement — accordingly.
For example, if my Obliger friend wants to lose weight and get in better shape, the best thing he could do is get a diet/workout partner to hold him accountable: if his partner expects him to be at the gym at 5 p.m., he’ll be there. If his partner expects him to log his food and share the results every day, he’ll do it. That’s how my friend is wired. My guess is he won’t even question whether keeping a food log is useful; he’ll do it just because someone else expects him to do it.
The same premise holds true if you’re in charge of people. Knowing how your employees respond to expectations — both external and internal — will help you tailor your leadership approach.
Give Obligers a task and a deadline and they’ll meet it. Questioners need to understand why — not just why a task is important, but why completing that task is important to them.
As Gretchen says, we all tend to “tip” in the direction of a tendency that overlaps with our own, but nevertheless we still remain firmly located within a core tendency. And it’s also true that no matter what our fundamental tendency, a small part of each of us is Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, and Rebel.
Take the quiz and find out your tendency. Then have the people you work with take the quiz. (Better yet, have people in your family take the quiz.) You’ll be surprised by how quickly you’ll find ways to better work together and interact.
And by how quickly you’ll realize some simple ways you can change your approach so you achieve more of your personal goals.
And then read The Four Tendencies. It’s great.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.