What are your tendencies?

Do you know enough about yourself to lead with confidence?

Great managers are curious. Curiosity leads to new awareness, which leads to opportunity, which ultimately leads to success. People with more self-awareness perform better at their jobs, get more promotions, and lead more effectively¹.

Today I’ll offer the first of many tools for improving your self-awareness: The Four Tendencies.

How our happiness in life is tangled up in how we perceive ourselves and react to different situations is deserving of a separate and much longer post, but I believe that the more we know about who we are in our “natural state,” the more effective we’ll be at setting ourselves up for success.

Gretchen Rubin is a New York Times bestselling author and speaker who has spent a decade researching and writing about happiness. Rubin believes that happiness can only be built “on the foundation of our own nature, our own values, and our own interests.”

Rubin created The Four Tendencies to help surface why we act and why we don’t act. By understanding which of the Tendencies is dominant for you, you can adapt your circumstances to suit your nature.

Each Tendency is a discrete combination of how you meet external expectations versus internal expectations. As with all of these “personality profile” tools, it’s very important to remember that how you show up is neither good nor bad.

Rather, understanding the way you are naturally, without any extra effort, allows you to structure your world in a way that guarantees success for your natural self. It also helps you to stay aware of times when more effort is required to overcome your “default settings,” if necessary.

I’m an Obliger. Obligers “meet outer expectations, but struggle to meet expectations they impose on themselves—‘You can count on me; and I’m counting on you to count on me’.”

While the Four Tendencies assessment is rather course and can’t begin to capture the wealth of nuance and subtlety in any whole person, it’s true that I’m more likely to wriggle out of the expectations I set for myself.

I’m allergic to letting people down, and I’ll always go the extra mile for everyone (even if they objectively don’t deserve it). My weakness is in showing that same degree of loyalty to myself.

Knowing this helps me to create my own tailored environment for success.

I work better with accountability, so I got an “accountabilibuddy” to meet with me once a week to compare notes on the things we’re each working toward, and to ask me the tough questions about what I left incomplete or unsaid.

Creating accountability for myself is facing my natural way of being head-on, and structuring the way I work to accommodate it. I don’t expect that I’ll magically become more disciplined about keeping my promises to myself, but this awareness creates opportunity for me to build an environment for success.

As a leader, your core responsibility is to create an environment for success to emerge and thrive within your teams. That environment is a confluence of norms, cultural ideals, incentives, and the specific humans who inhabit it.

By doing the important inner work necessary to build self-awareness, you can create that environment for yourself. From there, you will have the requisite understanding and experience to create a thriving team environment as well.

Take the Four Tendencies Quiz here

Questions for you

1. What is possible when you fully understand the essence of who you are and the value you create without any extra effort?

2. What one insight into your teams’ way of being would be the biggest unlock for the environment you’re creating around them?

3. Where can you see friction between how people are without effort and the environment they operate in?

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