These explain how people go about processing information, how they handle stress, the environments in which they are the most productive, and how they go about becoming convinced.
These are the internal processing habits rather than what will trigger a person’s motivation.
Remember, as with the Motivation Triggers™, these may change based on the context or situation that the person is in. For example, some people prefer to know all the details when they are purchasing a new hi-tech camera, but then just want an overview of features and benefits for the purchase of a dishwasher. Similarly, someone may be very Thing-oriented when they are writing a document at work but want to speak to a person when thinking about investing.
How much information does a person need at work?
Do they prefer just the general overview, would they rather have all the detailed information or somewhere in between?
Specific: Details and sequences. Difficulty seeing the overview.
General: Overview, big picture. Can handle details for short periods.
Does a person notice the non-verbal behavior of others?
Do they display non-verbal behavior, such as varied facial expressions and tone or do they miss the non-verbal component of communication by focusing on the content alone?
Self: Attends to own experience. Doesn’t notice others’ behavior or voice tone.
Other: Has automatic reflex responses to non-verbal behaviour.
This category describes how people respond to stressful situations in a context.
It doesn’t measure a person’s response to a catastrophe, rather how they react to the “normal” levels of stressful events in the workplace for example.
Feelings: emotional responses to normal levels of stress. Stays in feelings. Not suited for high-stress work.
Choice: can move in and out of feelings voluntarily. Good at empathy.
Thinking: do not go into feelings at normal levels of stress. Keeps cool but can be poor at establishing rapport or showing empathy.
What kind of human working environment allows a person to be most productive and effective?
Alone, working in conjunction with others in clearly defined roles or all together working with others?
Independent: alone with sole responsibility
Proximity: in control of own territory with others around
Co-operative: together with others in a team, sharing responsibility
This category whether a person pays attention to people, relationships, thoughts and feelings, or rather to tasks, ideas, systems or tools – things.
This is an important LAB Profile® category to pay attention to, both when hiring employees to work with customers and when helping your customers. When people have a Thing pattern at work, they may not be as adept at establishing rapport since they focus on the tools or activities of the work rather than the person. Conversely, when someone has a mainly Person pattern at work, they will prefer that the work be about people and relationships.
Person: centered on feelings and thoughts. They become the “task”.
Thing: centered on tasks, systems, ideas, tools. Getting the job done is the most important thing.
Does a person have rules for themselves and others?
This category looks at whether people at work are likely to clearly state their expectations of others, if they know what they need to do themselves (or not), if they are likely to do what they want without much thought about others or if they are able to understand that there is more than one side to a story.
My/My: My rules for me. My rules for you. Able to tell others what they expect.
My/.: My rules for me. I don’t care about you.
No/My: Don’t know rules for me. My rules for you. Middle management pattern.
My/Your: My rules for me. Your rules for you. Sees more than one perspective but hesitant to tell others what to do.
The type of information people need to start getting convinced about something.
When people are going through the process of becoming convinced about someone or something at work, they generally go through two phases. First, they need to gather some information to inform their decision. The convincer channel describes the type of information people need in a situation to start the process of getting convinced about something.
The patterns for this category are: See, Hear, Read, Do. Many people will need more than one of the patterns.
See: see evidence
Hear: oral presentation or hear something
Read: read a report
Do: do something
What has to happen to the information previously gathered to make a person become “convinced” of something.
The second phase in becoming convinced has to do with what has to happen to the information or evidence previously gathered to make a person become “convinced” of something. Each person has their own way of knowing how much information is enough. The patterns are: Number of Examples, Automatic, Consistent and Period of Time. A person may have more than one of the patterns.
Number of examples: need to have the data a certain number of times to be convinced.
Automatic: take a small amount of information and get convinced immediately based on what they extrapolate. Hardly ever change their minds.
Consistent: never completely convinced. Every day is a new day and they need to get re-convinced.
Period of time: need to gather information for a certain duration to be convinced.