Order: The need to keep everything organized, tidy, and in its place efficiently.
We all know someone who is super organized. The person who is always 10 minutes early, finishes projects efficiently and always knows exactly where their car keys are. If you are disorderly, this person might drive you crazy and you might not understand why they do what they do. However, we’re here to help. By looking at someone with a high Order scale in this week’s behavioral scale deep dive, we hope to provide you with some awareness of their natural tendencies and give you advice to best manage and encourage their growth.
High Order
Meet Samantha. Samantha gets up everyday at 7:00 am, makes her bed, makes a nice omelet and does an energizing morning yoga sequence to start her day. Before she leaves her house, she double checks that she has everything in her bag that she needs for the day and queues up her favorite podcast for the drive over. She always arrives at work at least 10 minutes early so she can get everything organized for her day, creating a checklist of the things she needs to complete that day, consulting her weekly and monthly master lists. Once she has a plan and priorities, she gets to work right away crossing things off the list.
Samantha is a good example of someone with a high score in Order. She:
- Needs routine.
- Is a well-structured planner who needs to stay organized.
- Prefers to accomplish things one at a time and check things off her list as opposed to doing “100 things at once.”
- Enjoys clarity, methods, and the “tried and true”.
- Is sensitive to timelines, and often prefers logic and analysis to emotion.
- Can be judgmental, moralistic and readily give advice.
- Is determined and focused, with a clear need to pursue and reach her goals.
- Tends to be conservative, detailed, mechanical, conventional and painstaking in their approach to life.
- Generally resists change
Tips for Managing High Scorers:
If you have a low order scale (like our example from last week, Sally), Samantha may be making you feel totally stressed out and overwhelmed thinking about her mountain of checklists and details. How can someone who doesn’t even own a planner relate to this person? An appreciation and understanding of the differences of others will go a long way towards increasing your performance, and that of your teams as well. Here are some tips for managing someone with a high order score:
- Encourage them to realize that one can be highly effective without having to necessarily be highly ordered and structured. A person can still pay close attention to details in their work or profession without being a micromanager or control freak.
- Don’t give them 100 things to do at once or interrupt them to start a new task when they haven’t finished their current one. Let them methodically work through their list of to-dos.
- Give them clear deadlines and expectations and let them do their thing without micromanaging.
- Sometimes, people with a high order score can come across as rigid and controlling. Making them smile, laugh and encouraging them to devote considerable time interacting with colleagues will benefit the high scorer in order. This behavior is not “wasting time,” they’ll never allow that to happen. The idea is simply to help the high scorer “loosen up” a bit.
- A high scorer in Order is motivated by organization, planning and slow paced, low change environments. If any changes are necessary, try to give them as much advanced notice as possible. If change is coming, help them plan for it and understand that they may need more time to adjust.
- Encourage them to be a little messy or make a mistake once in a while to experiment with being less than perfect.
- Again, the idea of loosening up, is good for high scorers in order.
Does this sound like you? Contact us today to try our Behavioral Assessment and see exactly where you score in Order.
