Process Communication Model (PCM): Introductions

Self-Development

Do you know the feeling when you discover something and you don’t believe that you didn’t know it before?

That’s the feeling that I had during my first Process Communication Model (PCM) workshop that I’ve participated in at the beginning of this year. I was familiar with few different psychometrics before (Gallup StrengthsFinder, Insight Discovery, DiSC, HBTI, FRIS, MBTI), but I’ve never experienced the tool that would be so to the point when it comes to describing the reality of different personality types. And what’s important as well: it adds the elements of stress (calling it distress) what is one of the most crucial things for the crazy world that we experience now.

I would like to give you few insights about what PCM is, how we can use it as individuals, managers, partners while being in the relationship, CEOs while being a head of a company or parents. It’s one of those solutions that can work on many different layers, in different contexts, life-roles or business areas. So adaptive, descriptive and insightful that it looks too good to be true.

What is Process Communication Model?

PCM is a structure of 6 Personality Types that are the base of how we think, act and communicate with others. It is a framework that can support people in their personal and professional lives in being more conscious about themselves (treating self-awareness as a start of every growth activity that we do). And when we are more aware of how we are constructed and what it means for us, we can learn more about how we communicate (in regular situations and under pressure). This knowledge will lead us to be better with others: our significant other, kids, friends, parents, as well as with our colleagues, employees, supervisors or clients.

One of the most beautiful things about PCM that I’ve discovered when I started to absorb its wisdom was that this a very structured, yet understandable way of describing how we operate, what we need when it comes to psychological needs, ways of communication (how we communicate when talking to others and what we need from others when they talk to us). And that it’s not the same thing. It seems quite obvious that there is no one-size-fits-all way of communicating with other people, but yet: we struggle with this process all the time. We learn and learn about this, we gather knowledge, tools, we practice during training sessions and workshops, but we make mistakes all the time. There are conflicts, misunderstandings that make our life miserable, not efficient or effective the way we want it to be.

That’s where PCM comes, all in white.

The 6 Personality Types

PCM includes 6 Personality Types within its structure. If you know different psychometrics and questionnaires, you might be interested in 2 things that I found in this one that makes this tool special:

There is no introvert / extravert differentiator within the method; it means that it’s less biased, for me for sure more immune to put people in certain boxes with a big risk of being outside of OK-OK quadrant in the OK-OK Matrix;

Taibi Kahler, who is an author of PCM stated that on which “floor” of the house a certain type of personality lands, is not going to change after approx. the age of 6 years old; so once it’s set, the order is fixed (an easiness of access to the higher floors can be different, but the order itself is not going to change).

Here’s the visual of how the structure of PCM can looks like with the names and key words connected with each type. Let’s dig deeper into the description of them, so you have the idea what they are.

PERSISTER is a person that is observing the world through the lens of values and opinions. They operate with a structure of their belief and values system, they have a strong opinion on every subject. When they start doing something, they are fully committed to finish it. It’s impossible for them to even think about not deliver if they promise to do it. The trust is what they value, until somebody proves them otherwise.

THINKER is a person that uses data, facts, logic, information to connect with the world that is around them. They use thinking as a base of their decisions, problem solving activities, even building relationships with other people. What can’t be prove, doesn’t have a right to exist. They connect the dots, looking for the logical sequences, connections between things and answer the questions that will make more sense to them.

PROMOTER is a doer. Their perception is full of activities, actions, making things happen. They need stimuli to keep their momentum going. Experiencing things is their way of learning, being able to thrive and being effective and efficient. They don’t like to wait and talk too much: “instead of talking, let’s do some action” or “less talking, more doing”, they say.

REBEL is a person that needs to be in contact with others. Their perception is to enjoy things, have fun in life. They need reactions (theirs and others) to feel that they are alive and in a good place to fulfill their destiny. Being creative, spontaneous, full of energy: that’s what describes the Rebel the best.

HARMONIZER uses emotions to experience the world that is around them. How they feel about certain situations, decisions or people is their compass to make further steps. They value other people, relationships and family: those are their main points of focus and a touch base while making any decisions.

IMAGINER uses the world of reflection. They imagine different scenarios, options, possibilities and they dig deep into those inside of themselves. They need time and space to be in their world and they have a rich internal life that is in their bodies and minds.

One of the most important thing in PCM is to understand that each person on the planet has all of the types inside of them. It’s impossible to have none of a particular type. They are just in a different order and we have different access to the higher floors of our personality structure. It all depends on how we were raised (since the order is fixed since the age of 6 years old), what kind of environment we experienced in the past and we are have in our life now. It depends on all of the experiences we gathered so far, and what we have learned about ourselves and the world.

Where can I use PCM in my life?

Once you fill out the questionnaire and have a report, you will have a chance to have conversation with a certified PCM Practitioner who is going to explain you more about the essence of the framework and how it’s applicable to your particular case. You are going to talk about the order and intensity of each type in your individual structure, as well as the insights about what happens to you under stress and in relations with others.

Where exactly can you use PCM?

First of all, it’s a tool that will allow you to understand yourself better: your construct, thoughts, behaviors, decision making processes, ways of communicating with others (how you communicate and how you want to receive communication from others);
It’s a stress management tool: it describes how each type reacts in 3 phases of distress and what happens if you’re not stopping it in the right time;
If you are a manager, leader, director, CEO: it’s a tool that allows you to understand and lead people better, because you are going to be more aware of WHY people behave the way they behave;
If you are in a relationship: having 2 reports (yours and your significant other) you can understand the flaws in your communication and why the other person drives you crazy sometimes (and the other way around);
If you are a parent: you can understand behaviors or your children better and adjust your parenting style, so you come back to OK-OK zone more frequently;
If you are a trainer, coach, mentor: you can use this tool to support your clients better, since communication is a #1 thing that is a root cause of many different issues that people have, stuck with or are in an impasse and don’t really know what to do next.

The list is not fixed. PCM is a great, universal and adaptive tool that can help you in many different ways and areas of your life. If you want to be a better person: for yourself and for others, it’s an amazing step that you can go with to improve your contact with the world. Communication is present in every single situation in our life, regardless of the moment where you are on your journey, your age, years of professional experience or social status. We are always in the communication with others: in person or virtual, written or spoken. More or less polite and friendly. We don’t enjoy it all the time, frankly: sometimes we don’t enjoy it at all. PCM is the way that we can enjoy and make it efficient way more than we did in the past.

How to get to know more about PCM?

You can contact myself to get more information about the tool if you get intrigued after reading it. You can also look for more information in other sources available globally HERE or HERE. As I mentioned at the very beginning of the article: I never saw that well-designed, connected to the people’s mind and soul tool that supports us in the process of growth.

I hope it’s going to inspire you to get more knowledge about it, get your feeling and make one step forward into the future of higher awareness and better communication with others. It’s worth it.

Udostępnij

Komentarze

0 0 votes

Article Rating

0 komentarzy

Oldest

Newest Most Voted

Inline Feedbacks

View all comments

Czytaj także

Leadership

Experiencing Burnout in IT? Here’s Why

Are you feeling sick to your stomach on Sunday afternoon when you think about starting work on Monday? Or maybe you are under constant stress and pressure of not delivering everything you have on your task list? Not being up to date with everything that’s changing in the Tech world? Do you have moments of energy so low that you don’t even want to get out of bed to start working? If you said “YES” to at least one of the above, it might mean that you’re in the middle of burnout. A lack of power, energy, intrinsic motivation, and engagement to do things at work. Why is burnout a new pandemic, especially in the tech world? I see so many leaders, startup Founders and team members who are experiencing that state than I can count. That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the subject and give you 2 things: The root cause analyses and some solutions that you can take and implement. So, if you are this person or you know somebody who is in the burnout zone, keep reading. Burnout Root Cause No. 1: Stretching Too Much The first root cause of burnout is staying in the stretch zone too much. In the article about OKRs, I gave you 4 zones of efficiency and growth: Bored, Comfort, Stretch, and Burnout Zone. When we are in the Comfort Zone too much, there’s no growth, and we can go into the Bored Zone. When we are in the Stretch Zone too much, we can go into the Burnout Zone. If you put yourself under too much pressure, you want to learn too much in a super short period of time, if you take on responsibilities that you’re not ready for or prepared to… You can go into burnout very easily. So, the question is: Do you push yourself too hard? Do you demand of yourself the things that you’re not so demanding about when it comes to others? And don’t get me wrong here. I’m a demanding person. I push myself every single day, but it costs a lot. And I’ve learned it the hard way because I pushed myself and then pushed myself and then I got sick. So, it was the wakeup call for me: To take care of my health and get my priorities straight. Do I still have moments of exhaustion? Sure, I have. But I also know that the best way is to move from Comfort to Stretch Zone in balance to prevent burnout. Diluted focus gives you diluted results. Always. The burnout among IT professionals, leaders, C-level people, Founders, and Co-founders in the startup setup is well-documented and a growing issue. So, it’s not like it wasn’t visible in the past, and it appeared like today. It’s growing, and it’s a lot of research, a lot of studies about this issue. Burnout Root Cause No. 2: Excessive Workload Another root cause is excessive workload and working long hours. Of course. Especially when you are a Founder or Co-founder, when you are building your business from scratch. But it should be a phase, not a day-to-day reality until the rest of your life. So, we have heavy workloads and frequent overtime. When you work as a highly responsible person (the higher position in the org chart, the more responsibilities you have), there’s a pattern of an expectation, mostly unspoken, to be constantly available. It’s also attached to the SME level; it seems like everybody experiences it. And we have numbers to show us how much it cost. The research of the ISACA Tech Workplace and Culture survey from March 2025 shows that 54 % of IT professionals have heavy workloads, and 43 % point to long hours as the primary drivers of burnout. We have more. The same research is talking about tight deadlines, 41% respondents say that they lack resources, 41 % underlines unsupportive management, also 41% the lack of appreciation. Burnout Root Cause No. 3: Constant High Pressure Another bucket of the burnout root causes in tech is high pressure work environment. When you work in a startup environment, it is super high-pressure because we are going for the next round of investment, or maybe we have a VC on board, and they require results because they invested and they want to get the money back. There’s always going to be pressure when it comes to money, startup setup or the corporate world. But we also have a high pressure of an expectation for innovation and rapid delivery. Because the world is shifting, and technology is changing so fast that it’s like being on a mission all the time. Tight deadlines, high expectations. Constant misery of the business because they’re not happy with the deadlines, with the functionalities that we deliver. Burnout Root Cause No. 4: Continuous Learning Demand In connection with that, the next part is the rapid technological change in continuous learning demand. So, it adds up to the pressure as well, because we need to continually update skills, especially Subject Matter Experts, engineers, and leaders. We like it or not, we cannot know everything. And I know that a lot of Thinkers are not on board with me on that one, but it is impossible to be up to date with everything. But a lot of professionals are overwhelmed by the pressure to learn new tools and practices while managing the existing responsibilities, tasks, projects, and initiatives, because it is like having two jobs. So, one, my day job is to keep the machine running, and the next job, the second part of it, is to keep up. And it can be a cause of burnout because it’s impossible. After all, it’s a never-ending story. It’s impossible to know everything. Burnout Root Cause No. 5: Work-Life Imbalance The next one is work-life imbalance and blurred boundaries. So, it is a shift, and I think it started

Czytaj dalej

20 December 2025 No Comments

Leadership

What Does a Communication Debt Really Cost Us?

We talk a lot about communication. In fact, I am the person who teach and preach the whole idea of Communication Intelligence. And yet, we don’t talk strategically enough about one thing that is a phenomenon in many organizations: Communication Debt. I see and hear during workshops and one-on-one mentoring leadership sessions that I run a lot of thoughts, problems connected with that, and I wonder why we talk about it so much, and not doing a lot? So, I’ve decided to spend time today and unpack a little bit this subject. Let’s see what the communication debt is, when it appears in organizations and what we can do to address it, before it’s too late. What is Communication Debt? When we’re thinking about debt in overall, the first thing that comes to our mind is money. Then a lot of organizations, especially tech-oriented, are talking about technology debt (we didn’t invest in the past in the infrastructure or software, integrations, architecture: So, we have a technology debt). And the same thing is with the communication debt for me. The root cause is a lack of investment in communication processes. Lack of investment and/or lack of priority on all the communication processes that are in the organization on individual, team and organizational level. The communication debt is a gap between the level of understanding, data and information and contracts people should have and we actually have in a certain moment of time in the organization. And it can appear in many different setups: Between employees, peer-to-peer; between employee and manager, a manager and their manager; between the executive team and board or board of directors outside of them; including investors, stakeholders, shareholders, you name it. Again: This is a gap that is between what we should have in the organization and what we actually have. And not many people have awareness that they have a communication debt because… there is a lot of assumptions around. And many companies that I work with right now, and I worked with in the past, have on board people who are assuming that others know what they need, what they should or what they want. So, if we base our communication strategy on assumptions… It is not a huge surprise that people are not happy, their engagement is dropping dramatically. Gallup Institute “State of the Global Workplace 2025” Report shows that employees’ and managers’ engagement level is lower and lower. And the interesting thing is that it is even lower in the management basket than the employee basket. Of course, the differences are not very big, but they’re visible. I’m not surprised when I see that kind of results: People are less and less engaged. They are less motivated intrinsically. They look for a new work more often than 10 years ago, or even 3 years ago. And yes, you can say that this is connected to the generational change. But what the important thing is that the younger the generation is, the better they are in setting boundaries and a need for information. Transparency is one of the biggest values Gen Z has. So, this is something that for me, personally and professionally, as a leader is important to understand. Because I’m asked to support organizations, teams, a specific leader when there’s already a fire, when there’s already a drop in engagement, in efficiency, that the team doesn’t deliver tasks on time or value or projects on time. When people are quitting the team, especially tech talents that are hard and expensive to replace. And most of the time it’s too late. When the Communication Debt Appears? From everything I’ve observed for the last 10 years, working in different organizations and different teams, especially IT and tech, I can tell that the communication debt appears when there is no prior or very little priority on communication in overall. We’re not learning how to tailor our communication, we’re not investing in communication intelligence (CQ), because there is a lot of different items (more important in our brain) on the list to cover on a daily basis. And this is totally okay that tech teams need to focus on tech, because this is your genius; as well as HR people should focus on HR, and finance people should focus on finance. Every single person has a genius zone. But there is also a thing named “transferable skills”. And transferable skills relate to every single position, every single job that you are going to have in your future because you can copy and paste them and basically start using them right away. When you join a new team, organization or a new setup, business-wise and private-wise. And another thing is those skills are the umbrella (The Umbrella Skills, I call them that way). You can have your specific Subject Matter Expert skills and competencies, pieces of knowledge, but you also have the umbrella skills that like a real umbrella, are on the top of everything that you do, regardless of the situation, or the context. And this is something that I treat like the ultimate set of skills, like the power skills. Because if you don’t have them, you can have the most beautiful tech skills in the planet, but they will be useless. And now it’s hurtful. You need to have strong algorithmical communication skills, because it is a part of your intelligence. Communication intelligence is a real thing. And I can’t emphasize that enough. So, when there’s a very low or no priority on communication, when we assume that people know more than we ask, or we provide information, even if they appear for us as boring, repetitive, you name it. When you don’t invest your time and effort and energy and money in learning how to communicate better, there will always be a debt, no doubt about it. The culture of the organization determines what kind of communication, what channels of communication, what frequency of communication people

Czytaj dalej

27 June 2025 No Comments

Self-Development

4 Things I’ve Learned About Looking For a Community

You know what they say: It’s always lonely on the top. Whatever the “top” means. Being in the board or executive team in the organization, a founder or co-founder of a startup, entrepreneur in overall. Being a top athlete, art creator, innovator of any kind. Visionary that no one really understand because their brain works in the modalities that are not available to most of the people. There are even books, articles, podcast episodes that are saying that there’s a cost of being “on the top”: Loneliness and alone, hard journey. But you know what? The last years of being an entrepreneur showed me that it’s bullshit. You don’t need to be alone, and I’ll go even further: You can’t be. Because it’s extremely hard to juggle all those hats and tasks we have on our lists to do it all on our own. Community can be the answer. That’s why I’ve decided to start looking for people who can be with me on this journey. Here’s what I’ve discovered so far (because it’s still an unfinished project) that I believe can be helpful for you in hunting for a great community for yourself. #1 Your family and friends usually aren’t the best option If you have around you people who are your cheerleaders, they support you in your work-related decisions that’s great. Not a common thing, though: I am familiar with many experiences (my own and different people I worked with or be friends with in the past) that have quite the opposite ones. Here are few examples (quite nice one, since I know also more aggressive options): “You should be happy about what you have, why you need to change something?” “If you risk, you can lose what you’ve already have.” “Maybe it’s not the best idea, stay where you are and enjoy it.” “You’ve never done something like this before.” If we think about it deeper, most of the time people don’t’ have bad intentions while saying that kind of things. They mean to protect us, reduce the risk of the failure, disappointment, loss. The truth is that most of those behaviours have a root cause in their own insecurities, fear and bad experiences from the past. Or sometimes unconscious jealousy: Because they’ve always wanted to do something like that, but they’ve never had enough courage or skills to do so. That’s why quite often people that are the closest to us are not the best when it comes to our community. The only exception I see is that they are also experts in our field and they are extremely flexible when it comes to changing the hat that they’re wearing at the certain moment. Then they can be our spouse in one moment, and the other entrepreneur in the next one. But let’s be honest here: That’s a rare situation. And it’s not about that they are bad people. They really aren’t. But we don’t need the second thoughts in our brains (more that we already have on our own). We don’t need second guessing our decisions, giving our brain more holes of fear to go into. I’ve heard years ago this, and I stick to it ever since: “I don’t take business advice from people who never ran a business. I don’t take parental advice from people who don’t have kids. I don’t take relationship advice from people who can’t build a healthy relationship.” Finding a community outside of your closest circle can be so much better for you, and for your friends & family as well. #2 Looking for community is not a weakness. It’s a strength. For a very long time in my life, I had a strong belief that I need to do everything on my own. That I need to be strong, look for answers on my own, even if it takes a lot of time and effort. It was a pattern that I’ve got in my childhood, and it helped me in many situations, but in my middle 30s is not as useful as before anymore. We all have patterns in our brains. Most of them are unconscious, printed in our wiring since we were kids. They were mechanisms that supposed to be the best solution to be worthy of love and attention of our caregivers. They answered the question: “Who do I need to be / How should I behave to “be worthy” of those who I crave the most?” And I remember that situation from my childhood where I asked a question about something and I’ve got and answer: “Go and find it in the book on your own”. It doesn’t look angry or hurtful, but it put a seed in the small person’s brain that’s saying: You can’t reach out for help, you need to do everything on your own. Sounds familiar? That’s why so many people are struggling with looking for a person, group of people or a bigger community that consists of like-minded people because they still have those beliefs that are not serving them anymore. There was a copying mechanism for a child we are not as adults. I know for me it was a journey and a healing process to go through, so my brain rewires into a new belief. There’s nothing wrong with reaching for support. I’ll go even further again: It’s a sign of strength, wisdom and an ability to use one’s resources the best possible way. Because from the rational and logical perspective we do know that if I ask somebody for something, there’s a bigger chance that I’ll resolve my problem faster. 80% of the problems I had in my past somebody else already experienced or they know somebody who did! So why wasting time and energy that we can reinvest in something else that creates more value? #3 Put yourself in the rooms where there are people who have what you want to have A couple of years

Czytaj dalej

7 June 2025 No Comments