Chamber speaker encourages members to follow the 'platinum rule'

Most people have heard of the golden rule, but Johnny Carcioppolo with Team Insight Plus encourages people to follow the "platinum rule."

“Treat others the way they prefer to be treated. You will be much more successful, your businesses will thrive, you will have greater employee satisfaction, and I will tell you, when we start putting these processes in place, it happens so fast,” said Carcioppolo, who was the speaker at the South Shelby Chamber of Commerce’s Oct. 5 luncheon.

Carcioppolo’s company, Team Insight Plus, works to help companies improve by employing processes that help with communication, productivity and hiring processes. During the luncheon, Carcioppolo walked chamber members through one of the assessments he uses — the DISC assessment.

DISC is one of the many ways to analyze behaviors, seeking out which behavioral traits are the most dominant. It breaks up into four main categories — director, influencer, steady/relater and compliant/analyzer.

“Everyone is made up of all four,” Carcioppolo said, but there is normally one that dominates, and that ends up influencing the ways they like to be communicated with, how they communicate with others and what their work habits are.

Directors like to win and end up being dominant personalities. Influencers are the “life of the party,” Carcioppolo said, and love to interact with others. Steady/relaters are the ones who hate change and normally open their doors to listen to other’s problems. Compliant/analyzers are very rule driven and what some would call “OCD,” Carcioppolo said.

By finding out how people operate, it can improve communication and productivity, Carcioppolo said, because it makes everything more effective. He told a story about someone who was predominantly a “director” that got upset when he was recognized for 10 years with his company in front of a crowd. On the other hand, there was another employee — an influencer — who got upset for being recognized at her desk, when no one was around.

“If we had done those right, we would have been far ahead of the game,” he said. “The fact that we did it wrong, we had a lot of ground to make up with those employees.”

By adapting to those behavior types — they stopped bringing up the "director" individual’s name in meeting, even if he had achievements, and started vocalizing achievements by the "influencer" individual in meetings — they saw things start to improve, Carcioppolo said.

Working with different behaviors and putting the right behaviors in the right roles can help companies improve drastically, Carcioppolo said, because it makes sure employees are happy where they are. If someone is having to adapt too much from their natural style to fit a role, that increases stress and job dissatisfaction, which can lead to turnover.

Furthermore, Carcioppolo said, by analyzing actions based on behavior, it takes the “personal” factor out of the situation.

“If you take this in the vein where it’s put out there and use it to your advantage, everything changes,” he said. “Productivity goes sky high. Family relationships become much easier to manage because you take the personal out. Everything is not about people trying to do something ‘to us.’ It’s just the way they are sometimes.”