Each of us has probably been exposed to some brand of "behavioral types" rhetoric at some point.  Whether, you have taken an online "personality test," read a psychology book, or gone through corporate teambuilding or sales training, you have learned about the "four types of people."  In Tony Alessandra's "Relationship Strategies," a great overview of behavior type models over the years (from the astrological "Water, Fire, Air and Earth" to Hippocrates' "Melancholy, Sanguine, Phlegmatic and Choleric" to Carl Jung's "Feeler, Intuitor, Thinker and Sensor" to the hundreds of modern-day formats) is given.   The idea is that "people are different," but they are "predictably different." 

My mom always says "show me the commonality between all of the differing philosophies out there, and you'll be closer to the truth."  Well, the commonality between the various behavior type models is in their methodology.  In almost all of them, people are plotted within one of four quadrants based on their propensity to "ask" or "tell" (x-axis) and their propensity to "control" or "display" emotions (y-axis).  The scoring is generally done by aggregating data points from various human sources...this is obviously subjective stuff, but since the plot is supposed to represent the way someone is perceived by others (and not how he/she sees himself/herself), simple surveys usually work quite well.

So, the resulting four "quadrants," or types of "social styles" (using terms from the TRACOM Group, a company that offers consulting around these points) are "Driving (or 'the Dominant Director')," "Expressive (or 'the Interactive Socializer')," "Amiable (or 'the Steady Relater')," and "Analytic (or 'the Cautious Thinker')."  As you study the subject more and you apply it to your team, you'll find that almost everybody fits into one of these categories to a varying degree.   TRACOM Group also scores a person's "Versatility."  The concept is that the four quadrants are like four rooms in a house...everybody spends time in every room in their house, but they have one room in which they feel the most comfortable.

Why am I bringing this up?  The economy is heating up and a lot of companies are building their organizations.  From a company chemistry standpoint, try to ensure that you are hiring people of varying social styles on each of your teams.  The downfall of many companies is inter-team communication.  The sales and marketing teams are full of Expressives, the HR group has a high proportion of Amiables, the engineers are mostly Analytics and the executives are generally Drivers.  That type of make-up causes a lot of disconnects between teams and the eventual creation of fiefdoms.  Depending on the size of your company, this can be a crippling dynamic.

So, in your hiring, mix up the social styles.  In building our sales team, I specifically made sure to find a couple of Drivers and Analytics to compliment our Expressives.  There are plenty of intelligent engineers on the job market who are not Analytics...try to see if you can diversify your team with them.  Ever wonder why sales teams and engineering teams often don't communicate well?  Make sure to have some "bridge-builders" in between the two teams who have varying behavioral types.  Some of the sharpest people I have encountered in my career have been engineers who went on to earn MBA's or CEO's who grew up on the sales side of the organization.  Personal versatility and team diversity should be essential and deliberate elements of your plans for growth in 2006.