So, okay, so agreeable people are compassionate and polite. What are disagreeable people like they’re, tough-minded they’re, blunt they’re, competitive, and they won’t do a damn thing. They don’t want to do so. It isn’t exactly that they’re aggressive, although they will push you the hell out of their way, if you’re in the way, they’re not there, not like volatile, like you are, if you’re high in in neuroticism, it isn’t defensive aggression, it’s more like predatory aggression, it’s dominance, behavior And so for someone who’s high who’s high highly disagreeable, they look at the world as a place in which they can compete and win and i’ll tell you a story. I have a friend. I gave him my personality test.
The big five aspect scale that colin de young developed in my lab and uh. I knew he was a disagreeable guy and by interacting with him i mean he’s even rude to people sort of spontaneously on the street. I actually like him quite a bit he’s very, very funny, he’s also very conscientious, so you can trust it, but it’s disagreeable as hell and uh. So i gave him this test because i thought it would be funny and he came out as the most disagreeable person in ten thousand reasonably reasonable in compassion about 30th percentile, but like .001 in politeness.
So he’s extraordinarily blunt he’ll just say absolutely anything, no matter how horrible it is, and he was often brought into corporations to sort of clean them up. So if a corporation was tilting and not doing well, they’d bring him in to find out who the useless people were and fire them, and i talked to him about that, because i’ve had the miss opportunity to have to not have graduate students in my lab. For example, that weren’t performing well – and i find it very, very difficult to you – know – dress someone down and certainly difficult to fire them. I just hate it because i’m actually quite an agreeable person. Much to my chagrin – and i asked him about that – and i said well, what do you do?
You have to fire people all the time? How do you handle that he says handle it? I enjoy it and i thought wow, that’s so interesting that someone would have that response. I said Well what do you mean you enjoy it? He said: look i go into these companies and i analyze the performance of groups of people right and there’s in those groups there are people who are really striving, really trying hard and working themselves really hard and being productive and then there’s these people that are just Doing nothing they’re completely in the way they don’t carry their weight at all. They take advantage every chance they get and they’re always whining about why they can’t work. It’S like i find out who they are.
I call them into my office and i tell them exactly what they’ve been doing. It’S like hit. The road buddy you’ve had your you’ve had your run of it, and i thought oh yeah, okay, fair enough, you know. Well, i can tell you, you know: i’ve had situations in my lab where i had underperforming graduate students and one of the things that was really awful about. That was that it was really hard on the high performing graduate students. You know because they felt that even being in the same category as the people who weren’t working hard and pulling their weight devalued what they were doing. You know and that’s exactly right, and so this is also why there’s a conscientiousness, trait and an agreeableness trait, because conscientious people judge you on your accomplishments right.
They don’t give a damn about your feelings, not a bit. It’s like. Are you doing the work or not, whereas agreeable people think? Well, you know your mother’s sick, and you know you’ve. You’ve got a bunch of family problems and, and we all have to take care of each other, and it’s no wonder that you’re having a rough time and like you can’t say that one of those attitudes is correct and the other isn’t correct.
You can’t say that there wouldn’t be those two dimensions if there wasn’t something correct about both of them, but you can certainly point out that often they conflict, you know, and so the demand for inclusiveness and unity and care and the demand for high level performance In a hierarchical structure, they’re very different orientations in the world, and so it’s complicated for people who are agreeable and conscientious, and actually, i think, often, that large corporations and large institutions of any sort run on the unheralded labor of people who are high in agreeableness.
And high unconscientiousness and they’re disproportionately women, my experience in large institutions has been that if you want to hire someone to exploit appropriately, no not appropriately, if you want to hire someone to exploit productively, you hire middle-aged women who are hyper, conscientious and who are agreeable because Thy’ll do everything they won’t take credit for it and they won’t complain and that’s nasty, and i think that happens all the time.
And so, one of the things you have to be careful of if you’re agreeable, is not to be exploited because you’ll line up to be exploited, and i think the reason for that is because you’re wired to be exploited by infants and so that just doesn’t work. So well, in that actual world, and one of the things one of the things that happens very often in psychotherapy, you know people come to psychotherapy for multiple reasons, but one of them is they often come because they’re too agreeable, and so what they get is so-called Assertiveness training, although it’s not exactly assertiveness, that’s being trained.
What it is the ability to learn how to negotiate on your own behalf and one of the things i tell agreeable people, especially if they’re conscientious is say what you think, tell the truth about what you think. There’s going to be things. You think that you think are nasty and harsh and they probably are nasty and harsh, but they’re also, probably true, and you need to bring those up to the forefront and deliver the message. And it’s not straightforward at all, because agreeable people do not like conflict, not at all they smooth the water. You know, and you can see you can see why that is in accordance with the hypothesis that I’ve been putting forward. You don’t want conflict around infants.
It’s too damn dangerous. You don’t want fights to break out. You don’t want anything to disturb the relative peace you know and if you’re also more prone to being hurt physically and perhaps emotionally, you also may be loath to engage in the kind of high intensity conflict that will solve problems in the short term, because a Lot of conflict, it takes a lot of conflict to solve problems in the short term, and you know if that can spiral up to where it’s dangerous, which it can if it gets uncontrolled. It might be safer in the short term to keep the water smooth and to not delve into those situations where conflict emerges.
The problem with that is, it’s not a very good medium to long-term strategy right because lots of times. There are things you have to talk about because they’re not going to go away, and so partly what you do with agreeable people is you get them to figure out and they have a hard time with this too. If you ask a disagreeable person, what he wants to say or she wants they’ll tell you right away, they know it’s like.
This is what i want, and this is how I’m going to get it, but agreeable people, especially if they’re really agreeable, are so agreeable that they often don’t even know what they want, because they’re so accustomed to living for other people and to finding out what other People want and to trying to make them comfortable and so forth that it’s harder for them to find a sense of their own desires as they move through life and that’s not look, there’s situations where that’s advantageous, but it’s certainly not advantageous. If you’re going to try to forge yourself, a career that just doesn’t work at all,
http://www.MyLeadCoach.com/969746
Discover more from Making Money Is Easy
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
