Types of people: starters and finishers

Tentatively part 1 of a series of short posts on "types of people and how to spot them"

My husband and I had a meeting with the lead builder on the renovations on our new house this morning. On the way back, I told my husband: “This is going to be fine. He’s a finisher - you can tell. The end of the project is in his sight now and he’s really motivated to get there.”

And then we had a conversation about how I could tell this from the way he interacted with us in the meeting, how this is not a skill everyone has, and about how maybe I should be writing that kind of thing down for the benefit of other people. So here we are.

Starters and finishers

Some people love to start things - if there’s a spark of an idea, some latent opportunity in some possibility space, they love to kindle that spark until it turns into some concrete project. They’re the ones who ask “what if?” They enjoy taking the unclear and making it clear, finding hidden value where nobody else can see it it. They take delight in the novelty and the sense of possibility.

Some people love to finish things - once they can envisage the outcome and the destination is in sight, there’s no end to their impetus for getting there. They’re not particularly interested in goals that are vague, unclear or uncertain - that would get in the way of getting things done. But if you have a well-defined outcome, you can trust a finisher to get it to completion quickly and properly. Finishers pride themselves on a job well done.

Often (though not always), finishers are not great starters, and starters are not great finishers. Some people are neither and a rare few are both. You probably already have a sense of where you fit on this axis.

(Personally, I’m a strong starter and not at all a finisher. I can be full of motivation to fold all my clothes away Marie Kondo style and find myself giving up when everything’s 90% put away.)

Noticing what energises people

I noted our builder as a finisher based on the conversation patterns he engaged when he spoke to us.

On the topics we discussed which had uncertainty, anything with choices still remaining, or with logical “if statements” gating their completion, he took the back seat in the conversation, waiting for us and deferring for more information. If there were decisions to make that were his, he took them quietly and thoughtfully. But on topics where he had sufficient detail that he understood what needed to be done, it’s like a motor turned on inside him. His conversational tempo sped up. He was acknowledging our statements with “yes, we can do that” before we finished making them, drawing sketches on every available surface to show what he was planning to do. His energy gave me confidence about the outcome of the project - here is someone whose head was switched on to *this thing in particular*.

I think this example illustrates a simple technique for noticing what is motivating for people, which is to notice when their energy level and conversational patterns change. When we speak to people about something neutral, we can get a sort of “base reading” of their default conversational tempo and enthusiasm - the tone they use, how fast they speak, how much they interrupt, and how long they wait before speaking. Then, we can notice when these characteristics of their energy changes in either direction - this gives us a cue to spot if something has them really fired up, or really switched off.

Of course, motivation is not the only reason someone might be fired up. They might be angry, or amygdala activated (in a Fight direction) - you’ll have to use other cues to identify the difference between fired-up-good and fired-up-bad. But the point is, we can use a combination of cues to notice if someone’s energised in particular circumstances, and make a hypothesis about what motivated them.

Keeping mental taxonomies

The particular axis I highlight today isn’t ground-breaking or novel, and by itself its usefulness is highly situational. As I say above, not everybody sits well within the starters-finishers axis, some people are neither or both. Even for people who are strongly one or the other, there may be other concepts even more motivating for them.

To be successful at reading a variety of people in all contexts, it’s useful to have a variety of axes and taxonomies of people’s skills, strengths, preferences and interests.

I would wager you already have *something* in your swiss-army-knife toolkit of ways of reading people. I invite you to consider how this axis fits alongside them. When might you apply this particular read, and in what situations would it be useful for you?

Using strengths and motivators

While knowing what makes people tick is useful for interacting with people 1:1, it really becomes a superpower when you need to collaborate with groups. When you have a good understanding of the different strengths and motivators of the team you are working with, you are able to split work according to what works best for everyone - and that will show through in the success of whatever project you are collaborating on, be it building renovations or commercial project.

This axis provides a great example, because starters and finishers are natural collaborators. If you can make a “production line” of having your starters hash out initial ideas to the point of visualising the outcome, and having your finishers take that clear outcome and deliver it, you’ll have much more success than having them each churn out complete projects by themselves.