One decides, the other absorbs, and neither knows it is happening.
A Dominance and Steadiness pairing is the most common source of quiet, delayed conflict on a team. Dominance decides quickly and reads the absence of objection as agreement. Steadiness has an objection and has weighed the cost of raising it against the cost of the working relationship, and chosen the relationship.
- Dominance × Steadiness
- Both sides get moves
- Measured, not concatenated
Neither person is behaving unreasonably. The gap is that one of them believes disagreement announces itself, and the other believes disagreement should be invited.
Where it works, where it slips.
Where it works
Complementary in a real way. Dominance provides direction and the willingness to be the one who decides; Steadiness provides continuity, notices what the decision costs people, and does the repair work afterwards.
Where it slips
Dominance moves at a pace Steadiness experiences as constant low-level disruption, and never hears about it, because each individual instance is too small to be worth a difficult conversation.
The tell
A Steadiness colleague who has gradually gone quieter in meetings over a period of months.
What each one concludes about the other.
Dominance reads Steadiness as
agreeable and low-maintenance — right up to the resignation, or the long-standing problem surfaced fully formed after the point where it could have been fixed easily.
Steadiness reads Dominance as
not interested in their view, because they were never asked for it — and a Dominance colleague who does not ask is, in their model, a colleague who does not want to know.
Four moves, not four adjectives.
Both sides get something to do. Guidance that only asks one person to change is a verdict rather than advice.
- 01Dominance: ask directly, then stop talking. Three seconds of silence is where the answer is. Do this before the decision closes, not after.
- 02Steadiness: say the objection once, plainly, in the room. A Dominance colleague will take it well and will not think less of you for it.
- 03Give warning of a change rather than announcing it. The advance notice is worth more to this pair than the explanation is.
- 04Dominance: after a disagreement, reconnect within a day about something unrelated. The distance afterwards does more damage than the disagreement did.
When did I last ask this person what they thought, and wait for the answer?.
This is the general case. Your two colleagues aren't.
Throughline measures the pair rather than concatenating two type descriptions — so the guidance names the specific people, and changes when you change the names.
All ten pairingsTell us what you’re working on.