You split it. Your Push and Pull axes both sit in the middle, which means that in most disagreements you name part of the problem, hold part of your position, take part of the other side, and settle on something nobody is unhappy enough about to reopen. It is fast. It is fair in the way that "meet in the middle" is fair. And it produces decisions that neither side fully owns.
The Dealmaker's strength is real: you end conflicts and people leave feeling handled rather than beaten. In a leadership team full of Enforcers you are the one who keeps things moving. The cost is that the compromise often sits between two positions when one of them was right. Splitting a decision about which market to enter, or whether someone stays, does not give you half a market or half a person. It gives you a slower version of the wrong answer.
The second cost is that Dealmakers rarely find out what the other person actually needed, because the deal arrived before the conversation did. Check your Curiosity bar. If it is your lowest, you are trading before you have understood what is being traded.
A CEO in one of my rooms had two senior leaders who disagreed on where the company should grow next. One wanted to go deeper with the customers they already had. The other wanted a new segment. Both cases were good. He split it and put half the team behind each.
A year later neither bet had enough people behind it to work, and both leaders felt he had not backed them. Either position, chosen fully, would have taught him something within a quarter. The middle taught him nothing and cost him a year. The compromise was not fair to both sides. It was a decision he had not made yet.
One change for this week. In your next disagreement, before you propose the middle, ask one question: "If we could only do one of these, which one, and why?" Make the other person answer it and answer it yourself. Then decide whether the middle was a decision or an escape.
Your Directness score will sit in the middle band, which is accurate. The work for a Dealmaker is not more directness across the board. It is deciding, case by case, when to push all the way and when to pull all the way, instead of always doing half of each.
Next step: this pattern shows up as slow decisions. Check it with the Decision Velocity diagnostic.
Next step
The other results
- Straight TalkerYou name it, you hold it, you keep the person.
- EnforcerYou name it and win it. The relationship pays.
- SmootherYou keep the person and lose the point.
- PostponerYou wait. The problem does not.
About this result
This is one of 5 results from the Conflict Style Assessment, a free tool that shows the score without an email. Aggregate figures are at the statistics page once 30 completions have been reached. More free tools are at the tools shelf.