Surrounded by Idiots
How to understand those who cannot be understood
The book Surrounded by Idiots, by Thomas Erikson, is an excellent aid to understanding – and making oneself understood – by the people we work with. It deals with professional work, but its ideas can easily be applied to other areas of life: family, charities, associations, etc.
We all accept that there are different types of temperaments, but we do not always draw the full consequences of this principle when it comes to doing teamwork. As the author says, we run the risk of thinking that we are surrounded by idiots, trying to measure others with the yardstick of our own way of being, forgetting that each personal profile has a different way of communicating and working.
Keys to know the temperament of others
Thomas Erikson is an expert in the study of behavior and has worked for over 20 years offering leadership courses to different companies. In this book he offers some keys to help us identify what type of person we are dealing with, to which values is he or she most sensitive to, how to interpret his or her attitudes and how we can communicate more effectively with that person. He insists that the best teams are those that manage to get people with different types of personalities to work together.
To illustrate, he introduces a model called DISA (Dominance, Inspiration, Submission, and Analytic). This model builds on earlier theories by William Marston and Walter Clarke, as well as Hippocrates’ classicaltheory of the four types of temperament (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic).
Erikson emphasizes the importance of avoiding overgeneralization. Specifically, individuals may display one dominant temperament while also exhibiting traits from others.
Improving one’s own way of being
One might miss in the book some advice on how to improve oneself in the weak points of one’s temperament. This is certainly not the aim of the book, but perhaps it would have been useful to include some ideas in this respect. (See in this website: temperament and virtues).
The book is enjoyable to read, thanks to the countless anecdotes that the author draws from his experience in training professionals in different areas. He also offers stories from everyday life (family, friends, etc.).
To get along better with others, and not to think that we are surrounded by idiots, Erikson gives us this advice: “The first step is to try to tune into the frequency of others and then adapt to them. In this way, you gain their trust and they are able to recognize themselves in you”.
Rodolfo Valdés
To learn more about how to grow in the way of being with the help of the virtues, see: Some ideas about temperaments.
Knowing one’s temperament is easier with this online temperament self-test.
