People Styles at Work, by Robert Bolton & Dorothy Grover Bolton
If you’ve ever enjoyed the results of a personality test (like Myers-Briggs, COREmap, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera), you’ll likely really enjoy this book, People Styles at Work, that helps you look at your personality not by what you perceive yourself as, but by how others perceive you.
Written with work relationships in mind, this approach is great for helping you uncover how others perceive you, how to ask for what you need for your personality type and how to adapt your style for the other personality types you perceive in your relationships.
At its simplest, this approach asks you two basic questions:
1. Are you more or less assertive (e.g. directive or forceful) than the rest of the population?
2. Are you more or less responsive (e.g. showing emotions or awareness of other’s feelings) than the rest of the population?
If you’re not sure how to answer these questions, ask your friends and family and colleagues … they’ll know. 
Based on your answers you can categorize your perceived style as one of four types:
1. Analytical – Less Assertive and Less Responsive
2. Amiable – Less Assertive and More Responsive
3. Driver – More Assertive and Less Responsive
4. Expressive – More Assertive and More Responsive
You can kind of guess by the category titles what attributes might be associated with that personality style, but get the book to really understand the possible benefits and challenges for each. Especially helpful (in the back of the book) is a description of how to adapt to each of the other personality styles based on the style you are coming from.
As with any personality test, I was pleased that this book emphasized that these are just categorizations aimed to make useful suggestions for your relationships with others – they are not a hard and fast rule about how you will behave in any situation. You are a naturally creative, resourceful and whole human being, and you have some natural styles for how you like to express yourself.
If you’ve ever had a hard time communicating with a co-worker or family member or anyone in general, this is a great resource book for quickly identifying practical ways you can adjust your communication style to ease the relationship. As much as I love the Myers-Briggs approach (I am a Psychology major after all), I’d start with this personality test first and foremost for its practicality. It will be a reference book in my library for a long time to come!
