Let's Communicate like Adults: Styles and Types

I have been fascinated by personality styles for a while now, owing in large part to my own introspection and the abundance of online "tests" for this or that.  While I am working on how personality types can help us to understand our own reading preferences, including what narrative strategies of engagement we prefer, on my Booknotes blog, I am also interested in other ways in which personality types and communication styles might speak across the teaching-training divide.

I would argue that the most prominent classification system for personality types is the Meyers-Briggs classification system, which relies on the categories of Introversion/Extroversion, Intuitive/Sensing  Feeling/Thinking, Perceiving/Judging.  From these categories, we get 16 "types":

• INFP
• INTP
• INFJ
• INTJ
• ISFP
• ISTP
• ISFJ
• ISTJ
• ENFP
• ENTP
• ENFJ
• ENTJ
• ESFP
• ESTP
• ESFJ
• ESTJ

And each of these types are handily linked to explanations of the interactions between the traits measured by the four categories.  Here is a good description for the Wikipedia-adverse, or if you prefer Wikipedia, their descriptions are also acceptable.  (If you would like to take the test to find out where you stand, here is an online version of the test.)

In my training department, rather than talking about personality types, which are more the realm of psychology, we talk about communication styles.  And communication intersects neatly with teaching, training, and rhetoric.  Not only does our department (but not me personally) teach these communication styles so that people who take the class can learn how to communicate more effectively with others in their offices, communication is intrinsic to training and to teaching--and, well, rhetoric (an erstwhile specialty of mine) is communication, and knowing how to communicate to/with an audience.  Adding a self-reflective layer and a way to understand one's intended audience can only be helpful, particularly for Freshman comp and for students who do not already have a knack for targeting a specific audience effectively.  The communication styles that we discuss in our training department are called  "the four bird mode" or, quite ridiculously, "DOPE," which stands for

• Dove
• Owl
• Peacock
• Eagle

The bird designation is both useful and very annoying, because the classification system attempts both to use and to distance itself from the traditional associations with the birds.  Dove does, in fact, mean peacemaker; Owl does not precicely mean wise, though it does have to do with collecting information; Peacock isn't really supposed to mean a strutting performer--except that it sort of does, and Eagle isn't actually a bird of prey, just an ultra-direct leader type.  Sadly, the one I find the most offensive, with the least explanatory power at face value, is my own: Peacock.  More on that in a minute...

There are some good explanations of this system online.  It has the benefit of being simpler than Meyers-Briggs, and of dealing specifically with one aspect of personality--communication.  Here is a paper-based (PDF) test, which includes descriptions of the birds; this site has a self-assessment questionaire.  Here are two more sites with good explanations of the types:

• "Are you. . . an Eagle, Peacock, Dove or Owl when you communicate?"
• "Team Communcation:  Birds of a Feather"

The latter, in particular, has a comparative chart that tells you how to recognize each of the types and what their strengths, weaknesses, and bottom line are.  I  tested firmly as a Peacock, but I have more than a few Owl traits.  On the whole, I am less happy with this schema than the Meyers-Briggs, which in some ways supports and in some ways contradicts the DOPE classification--the INFP "Idealist" could be an emotional Peacock who gets excited about ideas, and might be a "performer" in some ways, but is not necessarily a pushy attention-seeker...

What is interesting about the birds is the diagram on page 5 of this PDF (also above), which shows how controlling or supportive, direct or indirect each type is.  I like to think I am direct, but also supportive--Peacock.  This model substitutes "Assertiveness" for "Controlling."  And this discussion translates the whole thing into practical terms--what you need to know in order to be able to communicate effectively with each of the types.  Something to remember when doing a self-evaluation is that this schema is geared specifically to the workplace.  So while this chart probably represents how I come across in meetings (as a Peacock):

• The Dove is sympathetic, moderate, people-focused.
• The Owl is technical, analytical, process-focused.
• The Peacock is expressive, persuasive, recognition-focused.
• The Eagle is bold, confident, results-focused.

I have more than a few Dove and Owl characteristics (INFP).

So how is all this useful?  Well, in Training and Organizational Development, teaching people how to communicate effectively in an office environment is simply one of the services we offer.  People don't know how to communicate.  They butt heads.  They misunderstand one another.  They work inefficiently in groups. Aha--wait!  There is the common ground I was looking for.

I think that in teaching, personality types and communication styles could be productively discussed with undergraduate students and employed in the classroom.  Throughout the 1990s and forward, the mode of teaching has been shifting to prefer so-called "active learning," when it is in fact active learning and not simply a search-and-find activity by which the student receives the same information that would be handed out in a lecture.  Active learning can be tricky, and involves more questioning than is typically permitted--at least at the secondary level.  But what active learning means more often than not is more group work--projects and whatnot--which I hated when I was in school.  Loathed.  Because often there was someone else competing with or sabotaging my vision--which meant that I was inclined to take charge and cut the other person out.  The PBS Kids show Arthur actually has a great episode on exactly this topic.  Group work is difficult to manage as an inexperienced student negotiating one's own ego in relation to others.  And it is equally difficult to negotiate as a teacher--at least, as a teacher who is trying to facilitate student success.  And yet, as much as I hate to admit it, it really is a useful skill to be able to work with others on projects.  But all of the group work in the world won't make students better prepared for group projects in the workplace--unless they are taught a little bit about how people work together, group dynamics, and how to negotiate the roles they are required to fill.

Enter communication styles.

With the resources online, it would be simple for a teacher to devote some time at the beginning of a class, or of the first group project, to a discussion of communication styles.  While an Eagle might one day, under the constraints of a job title, be forced to subsume his or her personality in order to placate a boss, it might help a group of students to complete a project on time to have them assign a leadership role to the person who is the clear leader.  Having a group of 4 Doves or 4 Owls (4 Eagles seems unlikely...) working on a project might be ill-advised--or it might be treated as a problem to acknowledge and strategize to overcome. Have the Owl of the group do the research (Owls love information-gathering); let the Peacock exert some creative control.  Working together according to the students' natural inclinations is bound to produce a stronger product, teach them about themselves, and prepare them for the eventuality of higher-stakes group work.  Add a self-reflective writing exercise at the end, and voila!  You have some good pedagogy.  And something to build on:

• From what you have learned about your personality type, discuss your approach to interaction in your classes or your approach to education in general. 
• From what you have learned about your particular communication style, analyze the tone of your first argumentative paper. 

You have now opened new avenues for critical thinking, analysis, and revision, and made the "personal narrative" obsolete as a bonus!

Unpacking a Workshop Activity: "Last Man Standing," Communication Styles, and Resistance

On Friday, I participated in a Professional Development workshop conducted by the "soft skills" side of our department.  I belong to the technology side.  My side teaches tech skills; the "soft skills" people teach people and personal skills.  The workshop title was "Interpersonal Communication."

I decided to take this workshop for a couple of basic reasons.  Once a week (or less often, if we're lucky), we have "Huddles"--meetings with the whole group, which includes both groups of trainers, people who design online training, administrative support, and directors.  Unfortunately, because our main director is on the "soft skills" side of things, the emphasis tends to be on things that really don't concern the tech trainers, which is irritating, and frequently, there are unexplained references to things taught by the soft skills people.  So, for example, different members of the department were being referred to as "dove" or "peacock" in order to explain certain traits that the exhibited.  Eventually, I learned that the birds were representative of communication styles as taught in the "Interpersonal Communication" class, so I signed up for the 3-hour class (which our director has since made mandatory).

On the other hand, communication is sort of what I do.  For years, I taught composition and rhetoric, until I had a pretty good command of key rhetorical concepts like "appeal" and "resistance."  Audience has been an interest of mine since long before graduate school--specifically, the ways in which fiction authors place their readers in certain roles using narrative clues like direct address.  One of the things I want to return to is audience engagement by way of open-ended questions or lack of resolution in fictional narratives.  I am pretty adept at written communication.  So on the one hand, a class on "Interpersonal Communication" simply provides a new vocabulary to discuss something that already interests me.

Finally, I am painfully introspective and enjoy considering categories.  So personality types and communication types are a lot of fun--as long as they don't result in typing and stereotyping.  I can "own" the INFP label that Meyers-Briggs assigns, but if people are given advice on how to circumvent my most "peacock" tendencies, or if I stand to be brushed aside in meetings because I'm a "peacock" (thing "persuader"--not my term--rather than flashy and arrogant, though that implication is impossible to avoid), then I have a problem with the categories.  But figuring that I could learn something useful, I signed up.

I see immediate applications for personality types and communication styles in undergraduate education, as I do believe that raising--and shaping--self-awareness in students is a valuable part of humanities education, but more on that later.  Right now, I want to focus on one particular activity, which we learned as a group when an outside trainer came last July to teach us how to be better facilitators (not really something that was useful for tech trainers, who simply show-and-tell).  It is called "Last Man Standing"--though shouldn't it be "Last Person Standing," or "Last Group Standing"?

In the context of the particular class, we were asked about barriers to communication.  Each table (a group of 3 or 4) was asked to brainstorm as many possible barriers to communication as they could, writing each one on a post-it note.  When the time (about 4-6 minutes) was up, we were asked to arrange our post-its into groups.  Then, each group picked a representative to go to the front of the class and take turns placing a post-it on the board.  Duplicates were not permitted, so if one team had "technology," another team could not get credit for having "technology" as well--or a term that was judged as too close to "technology," eg. "technophobia" or "technological innovation."  As the game progressed, team after team will run out of unique contributions, and the game is over when one team is left standing with additional unique ideas.

It wasn't particularly well-executed in this workshop for a number of reasons.  First, our instructor (and my co-worker), who tends to be a bit too self-conscious in spite of the fact that he is basically as competent as anyone else, called in another trainer, who designed the course, to be the "judge" and determine whether the particular post-it term was permissible or whether it had already been used.  As she is a very "inside the box," more-restrictive-than-literal-interpretation kind of person, she wound up overturning more possibilities than she should have, closing down rather than opening up the discussion in a number of ways.  For example, the facilitator could not see how "politics" could be a barrier to communication, and interpreted "having an accent" as being indistinguishable from "culture."  Although he didn't think about it--and possibly others didn't either--he rather compromised his own credibility as an instructor by bringing her in as an "expert" rather than facilitating the exercise himself.  By facilitating the exercise himself, he would have made certain that the kind of classroom dynamic he was working to create was preserved.

In a work environment, people are already more deflated and defeated, and more easily accept when their ideas are shot down.  Not so in an undergraduate classroom--or really, in any environment in which inquiry and free-exchange of thought is supposed to be valued.  Closing off possibility breeds resistance because people feel their ideas are not understood or valued.  I can tell you that that is where I was during parts of the activity, and though I have been accused by students (education majors, who had their own reasons for resistance to my children's literature course) of "needing to learn that mine was not the only valid opinion," I am very careful to let literature and composition students give their interpretations, and to respond to them in some way.

The other major flaw in how the activity was facilitated is that although participants were instructed to put terms into groups according to which were similar, the grouping was not exploited at all.  It's a related problem, really.  Instead of shutting people down, the broader categories could be used to shape the game board.  So instead of saying that "having an accent" was the same barrier to communication as "culture," "culture" should have been the broad category (placed at the top of the board) under which "having an accent" or "language" or "respect for elders," etc. would fall.  So "texting" might be a subset of "communication" rather than being thrown out altogether.  The discussion becomes not only more satisfying for all participants, but more comprehensive.

Aside from the problems with its execution, this exercise has great potential as an entry point for discussions of rhetoric, particularly appeal and resistance.  The initial question might be the same: what are barriers to communication?

The game might start with the following instructions:  "Think of a time when you were reading an article/surfing the internet/browsing Facebook/listening to a speech or a commentary, and something made you want to stop listening.  You might have started thinking about counter-arguments rather than focusing on what was being said.  Think about how you felt and why.  This is resistance.  Now, with your group, brainstorm all of the reasons why you or someone else might feel resistant to a particular message, how it was being delivered, or a speaker."

This approach narrows the "barriers to communication" somewhat, rooting it in a particular experience.  This might be good because it creates immediacy.  But it might be bad because it asks students to remember being irritated, and this might not be the best way to get started.  It would depend on the class dynamic and how comfortable the teacher felt with the students.

An alternate scenario might be, "Think of a time when you were having a conversation with someone.  After a while, you realized that you were no longer listening to what they were saying.  What makes someone stop listening or paying attention in conversation?"

I think I might simply leave it at "barriers to communication" to see what would happen.

The rest of the exercise would remain the same:  write each one on a post-it note; group like terms; designate a group leader, and take terms placing the post-it notes on the board.  I would recommend to the groups that they look for broad categories first and place them at the top of the board.  As more specific barriers to communication were mentioned, they could be categorized.  Then, discuss.

As a follow-up, rather than simply reiterating the barriers, we would address how writers anticipate and overcome barriers to communication by considering the rhetorical situation and appeals.  When a writer anticipates a barrier, ignoring the barrier is an option, but not the best strategy, especially for a writer without authority (and all writers start out lacking authority).  So strategies for overcoming a perceived barrier to communication (which we're going to call resistance) include neutralizing the resistance in some way--by citing authorities that the resistant audience will accept, perhaps--or addressing the barriers directly, using the perceived communication barrier ("I may sound like your mom, but..."), explaining it ("Our views are different because they are shaped by our experience. Let me tell you where I'm coming from so that you can relate to my perspective, and realize why you are different."), or proposing common ground ("We have differences, but the similarities are what matter.")  I would likely want to assign a reading that did address difference directly--something like "Serving the Purpose of Education" by Leona Okakok (Harvard Educational Review 1989).

Another possibility would be to prepare a series of mini-prompts with scenarios:  "You are explaining X to someone who thinks Y."  "You are explaining your reasons for wanting to break curfew to a parent."  "You are explaining why a friend who hates fantasy should read Harry Potter."  Etc. Then, have the students either 1) brainstorm ways to convince that particular resistant audience, or 2) write a short paragraph that attempts to overcome resistance.  The prompts might be more or less political or socially relevant, but "Explaining to an white Evangelical Protestant male from Texas why he should support Gay Marriage" just opens up potential for stereotypes, so the situations would have to be extremely well-fleshed out in order to avoid bigotry. I would stick to scenarios that were more or less neutral, like the Harry Potter example, or universals, like parent-child dynamics.  Another good one might be "Convince a die-hard Windows user of the superiority of Mac OS," but that could also get heated...

Anyway, the point of the exercise is twofold--to demystify, and to get the conversation started.  Also, there may not be enough "fun" competition in the undergraduate classroom.  Group activities often feel stale and forced, or devolve into opportunities to socialize.  I think the "Last Group Standing" activity has the added potential to increase students' comfort level with each other, and with the active role that they play in the course.