Difficult boss or miss-match of needs?
Let’s talk about Roger for a minute, the man Sam was working for as a personal assistant. Roger usually juggles five or six totally different business projects at once. He jumps from one to another like lightning on a hot summer night!
Roger is an idea person. Creative, perceptive, with a gift for seeing connections and hidden potential. He wants to deal with the big picture and has little time or patience for the detail work needed bring ideas into concrete form.
What Roger needs in an assistant is someone who can organize the different business concepts he creates into a cohesive, structured process for investigating the best opportunities and moving them forward.
The person who takes on this role will need to be comfortable with ambiguity and figuring things out ‘on-the-fly.’ Capable of developing and managing processes to bring intangible concepts into form.
In will require both seeing the really big picture – I’m thinking from 30,000 feet – and digging into detail, doing the research to screen out unsuitable ideas.
And since worthy projects will be handed off to others, job satisfaction will come from simply knowing that you’ve contributed. Because it’s a changing game and there will be little in the way of concrete evidence of work completed.
Decoding unconscious communications
Voice inflections, changes in breathing, facial colour and other subtle non-verbal cues guided my conversations with Sam and Roger, telling me when I was getting close to something really important and when to probe a little deeper. The structure of their language and choice of words provided a blueprint for how they process information and function when they are in ‘work mode’ or on-the-job.
Words have a subtext
Now we’re getting to the unconscious part of language. Decoding the structure and process of the words people use – unconsciously – in casual conversation is is an accurate predictor of how people will respond in specific situations – their default settings for acting, or not acting. Usually more accurate than paper or computer based profiling, because it is based on unconscious responses.
Here’s a decoding opportunity for you
When you have a few minutes to play, go back and read Unconscious Communications And Job Fit – part 1, noticing language, the specific words used to describe Sam. (I used his own words for the description.)
Now, compare the language used above to describe Roger. What differences can you identify? Exclude the paragraph beginning ‘what Roger needs,’ for now. And stay tuned for the next post where the language will be explained, unpacked or decoded, your choice, so you can see the implications for default behaviour. I’ll also finish the story of Sam and Roger ….
Communications, Motivation And NLP Resources 