At work, one personality trait trumps all.
An excerpt from my upcoming book “Superhuman Intelligence.” Chapter 3: Personalities. Understanding and applying these concepts can be life-changing for you and your colleagues, so share with your friends and team!
Agreeableness is probably the most interesting personality trait in business because of what it helps us understand: how will a person channel all of their skills, knowledge, and personality into workplace intelligence?
To understand agreeableness, the first picture to have in your mind is of competitiveness. Disagreeable people are competitive people and often will establish “sides” or teams and then attempt to win. Agreeable people are cooperative people and will often work to erase lines and remove the concept of sides or teams altogether.
Over the course of human history, we can see a pretty clear trend toward overall society learning new tricks from the agreeable. Rather than setting our neighbors’ villages on fire, we are now often engaged in trade and cooperation and integration. I’m not saying we are there yet, but if you lived in any other century, you’d notice that a lot of what is normal today would be missing, and you’d probably be tied up in the middle of the town square by a disagreeable person for wandering into an unfamiliar place and asking for it.
Let’s unpack this and go deep by analyzing the sub-traits of Agreeableness: Politeness and Compassion.
Politeness has to do with your social skills, respect for people, attitude toward hierarchy and authority, and awareness of how your actions make other people feel. Polite people avoid confrontation and create harmony, while impolite people may be confrontational and only respect people who continually deserve and demand it.
Compassion has to do with both your interest and response to the well-being of others. I heard it put well that sympathy is the ability to comprehend what another person feels, empathy is the ability to feel what another person feels, and compassion is the impulse to act on how another person feels. Compassionate people “make time and do kind things for others, even if doing so might interfere with fulfilling their own needs and interests,” to use language you’ll find in your Understand Myself test results. I couldn’t have possibly put it better, so I’ll quote it rather than plagiarizing it.
These two sub-traits usually trend in the same direction, so disagreeable people are often both impolite and also discompassionate, meaning they are confrontational and don’t particularly worry about the well-being of others. It gets a little easier to lay a wide receiver out cold when the well-being of the person you just tackled isn’t a priority for you. That emotional distance from another's’ well-being can make people successful in sports, negotiating, law and making tough decisions. At an extreme, disagreeable people can see other people not as people at all, but as things, or even more specifically, they may categorize other human beings as either “useful” or “barriers.” These kinds of tendencies are when we enter the territory of serious personality disorders like psychopathy, sociopathy, narcissistic personality disorder, etc.
Highly agreeable people, on the other hand, are often both polite and compassionate. They care very much about how other people feel. At an extreme, they care more about another person’s wellbeing than they do their own, and we all know someone who will almost exhaust themselves with making sure everyone else is okay. My wife is one of those people: she will spend all of her energy on others and do very little for herself. She has literally nothing in common with a disagreeable, competitive person. She is physically incapable of negotiating and screwing someone intentionally, while we all know people who think screwing other people is called “Tuesday.”
It’s about to get bumpy, the subtraits are splitting
OK, so buckle up for this next part, because it might change everything about how you think about human beings at work. When these two subtraits of Agreeableness deviate, that’s when things get really interesting.
First, the Crusader:
A person of high compassion and low politeness is a fascinating individual. These are our revolutionaries, our visionaries (when also high in openness), our stubborn drivers of radical change. Because of their compassion, these people are tuned into others’ well-being. They see oppression everywhere they look. They see starvation and disease in Africa. They see factories polluting the water. They see lack of intellectual and physical diversity harming decision quality. They see people miserable in their jobs due to poor tooling and bad leadership. They see inefficient processes. And they see all of this because they notice, care about, and connect with the people who are affected.
But then their low politeness kicks in, and this is where the romantic comedy turns into an action movie. A person of high politeness would create comfort for the oppressed by spending time with them, being a good friend, and helping them through these circumstances. But the person of low politeness will frequently seek to eliminate the source of the pain, start a revolution, decisively and sometimes viciously overthrowing the oppressor.
At work, this looks like the person who is normally kind and caring and charismatic, but isn’t afraid to point a finger at a process, a tool, or a person and say, “That is bullshit right there and I’m here to put an end to it.” And as the politically-fueled antibodies put up barriers and friction to prevent change, rather than backing down, the Crusader burns even hotter. The Crusader will seem completely unhinged, unafraid of being criticized or even fired and that’s because it’s true: if someone has to go down, they’d gladly sacrifice their own comfort and well-being to expose and conquer the oppressor.
The Dark Operator:
Now let’s talk about the dark side when that see-saw tilts the other direction. I’m not trying to scare you here, just make you aware of something that is very real.
When a person has high politeness and extremely low compassion, look the hell out. This is the charismatic, polished person who is on the board of the Children’s Hospital, but has never been to the Children’s Hospital. They throw great parties, but it’s just to boost their reputation and oblige the guests to repay them with favors and access to their networks. Using their gift of politeness, they look the part and they act the part, but they are just that deep-sea fish with the pretty light on their head. That pretty light is there to get other unsuspecting fish within range of the giant, razor-sharp teeth.
They see people as objects and keep them around as long as they are useful. Their main pursuit is the accumulation of power, and these people are often very competent and hard working, but use that competence exclusively for the purposes of gliding on social and career updrafts toward the power they seek. They know who to know and how to get what they want.
And once they get that power, everyone who helped them get there is suddenly all too familiar with Julius Caesar’s question: “Et tu, Brutus?”
These tendencies are all classified as disorders, but this particular mental illness makes people appear to thrive in society, rather than be outcast. Like the deep-sea fish, the Dark Operator doesn’t harm out of a decision to be evil.
To the Dark Operator, it seems very strange that everyone wouldn’t also be playing the game they are playing, and like the fish, anyone who chooses to not play the game is clearly allowing themselves to be or was born to be a victim and is meant to be food. These are the attitudes of Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes, and many others who genuinely are incapable of seeing themselves as they are.
Before you cast this all aside, realize that 21% of CEOs in the US are clinically considered psychopaths due to their complete lack of compassion. Most people you meet who exhibit some of these traits might not be all-out psychopaths, but may indeed be on the Dark Operator spectrum, and it’s important for you to make sure you work with colleagues and for leaders who are have the psychological capability of caring about you and your well-being.
If you do work for one or you just feel miserable at work, please start looking for a new job. It will change your life, and it is totally okay and right for you to run away from people who do not care about you. You deserve better and they will not change.
What you can do
Tips for high Agreeableness
Your compassion is a source of almost impossibly-high value to every organization. You are the one who understands what the buyers want, what the customers want, what pain they encounter, and you are insanely gifted at creating relationships both inside and outside of your organization. We just have to make sure you realize the value of your knowledge is every bit as high as a more dominant person in the room, and get you to quit apologizing so damn much!
Did you just apologize for apologizing?
You probably already know this too, but people are going to take advantage of you, and it’s going to hurt. Agreeable people have this terrible dilemma to deal with: do I toughen up and protect myself, or do I stay like I am and risk suffering in the future like I have in the past? It’s a terrible position to be in, but there are solutions.
The best possible solution is to have an agent. Now you might not be a movie star or a professional athlete who has an agent on staff, but you need a friend, a family member, or someone who you can talk to about any situation where you are agreeing to a set of terms with another person. At work, I’m talking about big things like job offers, negotiating a raise or promotion, partnering with someone in business, etc. Your agent needs to care about you and your worth. They will help you prevent yourself from getting screwed. Your goal with them isn’t to do the opposite and screw other people; it’s to find fair and balanced agreements, get help with the words to say to stick up for yourself, and make you feel validated that sticking up for yourself is the right thing to do in the first place.
This isn’t going to solve every little frustration you’ll have to deal with as an agreeable person, but it’s going to change the game in the big areas of work that have a huge impact on your future and your ability to use your incredible compassion to fuel intelligence. And your agent can also help you buy a house, a car, or find the right companion, too.
Tips for low Agreeableness
You need to work where you can win. You need naturally competitive environments like sports, sales, and being a solo act where individual performance matters.
The attitude you’re going to need is one where you respect that compassion is a data source. You will need to realize that people are going to make the majority of decisions based on how that decision makes them feel, and if you’re ignoring how your words, actions, and positioning make a person feel, your win rates are going to be a fraction of what they would be if you were paying attention. In a way, you might be scoring points, but this attitude means you won’t be undermining yourself along the way.
Conversationally, you need to stop creating sides and trying to win. You cannot win a conversation, you can only win an argument. What that does is make you turn conversations into arguments, essentially dividing you and your colleagues rather than realizing you are on the same team.
Tips for the Crusader
Your compassion gives you a portal to a dimension others are blind to, but you need to avoid the Steve Jobs effect of letting people mislabel you as the brilliant asshole. You can see that the Dark Operator is the real asshole, but because they are polite and you are not, a shocking majority of people are going to get it completely backwards. Your comfort with confrontation and ability to directly attack the incompetence of some leaders (who are indeed incompetent) creates an air of uncertainty around you and makes everyone uncomfortable about what you might say or do about them, too.
You need an attitude of diplomacy, but this doesn’t mean politics or sacrificing your morals. It means you need to learn how to talk about your position more clearly through the use of metaphor, aphorism, and analogy. Use patience rather than firepower to allow incompetence and self-centeredness to reveal itself, and target your harsh criticism toward people’s behavior, rather than attacking their very nature. Don’t foul out in the first quarter; keep yourself in the game.
If you are also extremely high in Openness (creativity, explained in the book), you will need to realize that your brilliant ideas are radical and usually unrecognizable to other people. While there may be brilliance in your design, other people might struggle to see the connection between the world they understand today and the world you’re describing.
You will need to spend more time on the communication of your ideas than you do on the creation of those ideas. Much like a playwright, poet, or artist might spend thousands of hours to write a beautiful narrative to encapsulate a powerful central point, you will need to wrap your idea in aesthetic and intellectual beauty to make it connect with people. Don’t begrudge the world that this is necessary. Learn to enjoy and hone your craft, and there is quite literally no limit to how interesting and impactful you and the teams around you can become.
Tips for the Dark Operator
You don’t ever show your cards, so we aren’t showing ours. I’d tell you to go get therapy, but you’d probably just laugh.
These explanations are all at the extremes, and most people you meet will be milder versions of what you see here. In the workplace, it’s agreeableness that explains a lot of people’s true intent. Stay sharp and treat this as a tool. If the suggestion relevant to you resonated, hit the applause button and also share this with your network. These tools can really help teams self-evaluate and arm themselves with new and better ways of collaborating.