PCM Types of Personality

According to the PCM, individual personality structure is composed of six types of personality.

Each of us has all six PCM types of personality defined by Kahler, in differing orders and strengths.

All these personality types are arranged like the floors of a condominium (in the USA a name for an apartment building), with our core or “Base” type at the bottom, moving up through each floor to the least-accessed trait at the top, or attic. The Base is the easiest and most accessible and thus most highly developed personality type in us, which has the strongest influence on our behavior. The weakest and least accessible personality type would be the sixth floor.

Each floor has unique attributes, including a perceptual frame of reference, character strengths, communication and environmental preferences, motivational needs and highly predictable distress behaviours.

The six personality types are: Thinker, Persister, Harmoniser, Imaginer, Rebel and Promoter. They were identified statistically, then correlated with individual:

  • Character strengths
  • Management styles
  • Personality parts
  • Channels of communications (the way people prefer to talk to one another)
  • Environmental preferences

  • Psychological motivators/stressors
  • Perceptions (the way people experience the world)
  • Degrees of distress (predictable ways someone sabotages his or her personal and professional life through sequences of miscommunication and mismanagement)

The Personality Inventory (The PCM Personality Profile)

People who wish to use the Process Communication Model® will first complete a questionnaire which, once processed, will enable them to discover their personality structure. The teaching metaphor of a condominium helps us to visualise the composition of each unique personality structure.

Each of the six personality types is located on a single floor with the size of the bar within the floor indicating the level of energy available when the person wants to use the corresponding personality type. The metaphor of an “elevator” illustrates the person’s ability to reach all of the floors and use all of their resources.

The Base

The ground floor, called the Base, indicates the dominant, most highly developed personality type. Being able to identify another’s Base helps us to use the most effective communication channel and perception to connect with that person.

The Phase

The concept of Phase provides keys to understanding what motivates people. Satisfying the psychological needs of the Phase affects our motivation on a day-to-day basis and guides us on how to motivate self and others. Even better, it helps us to recognize when we or our communication partner enter a distress sequence and gives us the tools to tackle this situation.

This is useful for whatever context in our lives: personal relationships, sales and negotiations, education, project management, HR or simple social interactions.

Once one starts to understand PCM, it will become a (quite exciting) habit to identify the most energized “floors” (meaning, personality types) in someone’s personality. Doing this helps strengthen one’s understanding of PCM and the six personality types, making it easier afterwards in our day to day life to know how to better approach our conversation partners (or our team members, direct reports, line managers, life partners, children, etc.), to “speak their language”, so that we avoid miscommunication and distress and we get more things done smoothly and efficiently, while building high quality and trust-based relationships.

Below are a few more details about each of the PCM Personality Types and you can use the video at the end to find even more information. Enjoy!

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