Are you an upholder?

- You know when you're in a big meeting and they tell you not to use your cell phone during the meeting. And then one person picks up their cell phone and starts texting away under the desk. Sometimes there's one person who's just glaring away, who clearly is so uneasy by this person using their cell phone. Or maybe you're the one who's very uneasy when you see that person using their cell phone. Well, if that's you or it describes somebody you know, that person is an upholder. I'm an upholder. I can't stand it when people use their cell phones that way because upholders readily meet outer expectations and inner expectations alike. So they keep a new year's resolution without much fuss and they also meet a work deadline without much fuss. They like to know the rules, like if it says no cell phones, they're not going to use their cell phones and they're going to be very uncomfortable if someone is breaking that rule. And in the workplace, upholders can be terrific because they're the ones who are very focused on expectations and meeting those expectations. And they don't need a lot of supervision. They don't need oversight. They don't need a lot of deadlines. You can just say, give them an assignment, let them go off and do it and they will do it without a lot of support. Now there are downsides to the upholder tendency too because of holder sometimes become, it can be hard for them to think outside the box. It can be hard for them to work in environments where the rules are ambiguous or it's not clear what the rules are, which is true in many cases. And they can also sometimes become almost paranoid worrying about whether they're breaking the rules. But of course, in some workplaces, that's exactly what you want. You want somebody who's absolutely 100% focused on meeting regulations or making sure that something is done particularly well. And upholders also can, because it's pretty easy for them to meet both outer and inner expectations, they can kind of carry other people along because since it comes fairly effortlessly to them, if there are team members who have trouble executing, trouble following through, a lot of times upholders can lead the way and provide that necessary momentum because for them it's like, well, what are we doing about this? And are we moving forward on that? And don't we need to schedule a meeting? Because for them it's pretty easy to meet those kinds of expectations. One thing to be wary of, if you are the upholder is that upholders can be judgemental. I'm an upholder. And it comes pretty easily to us to meet expectations, outer and inner alike. And we can get very impatient and annoyed with people when we see them struggling to meet expectations that to us seem fairly obvious and simple to follow through. And so it's very important to remember that the other tendencies don't see the world the way that upholders do. And it's important to build in the systems that are going to allow the other tendencies to be able to execute through with whatever the workplace demands are. So from a workplace perspective, it's pretty easy to work with upholders because they'll meet the outer expectations of the workplace without much fuss but then also their own inner expectations they meet without much fuss too. And so they don't need a lot of supervision and oversight.