How to Connect With Drivers

By Michael Lovas

See the woman on the right? Is there any doubt that she owns her space and controls her domain? Whether she actually owns the corporation or is an executive is just a detail. In her mind, she’s the caretaker of the firm’s welfare.

With that in mind, would you walk into her office and start chatting about the traffic or the weather? Not if you wanted to retain your self-respect. She'd call security to escort you out of the building. She is a Driver. The various other names for her include: Guardian, Dominant, Organizer, Leader, and Economic. As you can tell from the names, these people have no time for idle chit chat.

First, how can you spot them? It’s simple (like all my work); just look for a lack of lines on her forehead. The Driver is a walking, talking evaluation machine. Picture the actors Keaneau Reeves and Uma Thurman; they fit this profile. There's plenty going on in their heads, but their faces don't show much (if any) emotion. They have the look of always being calm, cool and collected.

A Driver is a person who loves comparing values and then making a decision based on it. If you can draw a straight line from initial fact to ultimate decision, you can understand how the Driver focuses his energy. If you can then see a few boxes off to the side, that's where the Driver files anything that's not directly related to the decision making activity.

He is very traditional and conservative, never taking any more than the tiniest of calculated risks. If you say, "New concept in financial products" or "developing markets," you'll upset his sensibilities. That's also a quick way to break any trust you might have developed.

There are people who have goals — and then there are the Drivers. They live and breathe goals in all their various forms: deadlines, benchmarks, ROI, supply-chain efficiency and the bottom line. If you can't deliver or operate effectively under that kind of scrutiny, don't try to work with or sell to these people.

As you look at the photos of Drivers, think of these people doing all of their expressing inside their heads. They are like machines that have been designed, built and programmed to take in essential information and make quick, calculated decisions based on that information. They're great "in the box" thinkers, so they follow the established ways, adhere to the company model and won't usually "wing it," or improvise.

These people display the following values:

Duty
Structure

Note: This article is taken from our book Face Values. It is also part of our new Teleconference “How to Master the Art of Reading People.”

The Teleconference is a fabulously fascinating and fun class in how to reading people like a book in less than three minutes. We’ll teach you how to read facial lines to gain insight into a person's values and decision-making style. You’ll learn what NOT to do. And, what you must always do for the different types of people. Like all our work - it's simple and easy.

We invite you to attend the next class:

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