Going back to our driver manager position, let's say you can't find the perfect match, but you find somebody who has a tendency to rely on relationships rather than just results, they'll adapt. Especially if they've had experience in the industry, you can be almost certain they'll adapt because experience makes up for a lot of things. But there's only so far you can adapt because your natural style is such that, under great pressure, that's what you revert to. So you want to get as close to their natural style as you possibly can, but people can and do adapt and the key there is experience and training.

There's an analysis process called DISC. D represents dominance, I represents influence, S represents stability and C represents compliance. We all have different elements of those within us; some are higher and some are lower, and it's these different combinations that make our personalities what it is and make us best suited to certain types of jobs.Someone can sit down at a computer and, in about 35 minutes fill it out what we call a Growth Dynamics Index (GDI) profile. The analysis of that short test will tell you amazing things about that individual that they've maybe only shared with their mother. What it does is help you make sure you don't hire someone into a position where they are likely to fail just because they don't have the right personality attributes for that position. While we can all adapt; a person who's a good leader of people might be able to adapt to being a planner or a salesperson, but they won't adapt to being someone who sits in a closed room crunching numbers all day. But it's all just one part of the decision making process.

As an example, let's look at the ideal personality profile behind a driver manager. I'm not talking about a typical dispatcher; I'm talking about someone who may control the dispatch but who also supervises the activities of the drivers where it relates to productivity, compliance, preventive maintenance, all of the control issues that a supervisor would have a hand in, versus the driver that they're managing.A driver has typically what you would call a supporter profile. They are very stable, organized, listen well, avoid conflict, and quite simply want to have their lives laid out for them so they know what's expected of them so they can go about their business and live up the expectations that others have of them. On the other side of the personality circle you have the driver manager who wants to make things happen. They are a change agent. And they want to make it happen now. He is also a leader of people.Right off the bat you'll have a communication conflict if there's no planned communication; if there's no program for people like that to interact within, they would be at each other's throats. Just like the salesperson and the accountant analogy I used earlier; they'd also have nothing to talk about if you put them in a closed room together, so the selection is critical.

We're all different; we are who we are. There's no right or wrong and we're all made up of different characteristics that make up our personality. A person who you would hire to be an on the street salesman, who you expect to be highly assertive and make things happen, would be an entirely different person than the person you would hire to be an accountant who will go in the back room, close the door and crunch numbers. In between that there's a complete range of different personality combinations as to whether or not someone is well-suited to a leadership role, to be a manager of people, to be an organizer of people, or who uses information versus relying on inter-personal relationships, or who just wants to be a supporter, or a worker-bee.