Openness at Work: Visionaries and Custodians
One of my favorite ways to think about Openness is as orientation in time. High-Openness people are fundamentally future-oriented, they are most energized by what could be, what's next, what hasn't been tried yet. Low-Openness people are fundamentally present-and-past-oriented, they are most effective at maintaining, refining, and executing what already exists.
This distinction is everything in hiring and role design.
Meet Tamar
Tamar was brought in as CEO of a struggling retail chain to lead a turnaround. She was visionary, creative, and full of ideas that the board found genuinely exciting. Eighteen months later, the company was worse off. Her creation of new ideas was too soon for the struggling company. They needed to first be stabilized before introducing innovation. The company would have been far better off with a CEO who was less creative, less innovative. They needed support fixing holes in their relentless execution of existing systems. They needed someone who could close loops, hold people to process, and grind through the unglamorous work of fixing what was broken. Tamar’s skillsets may serve them well, but not at this point in time. They hired the wrong end of the Openness spectrum for the moment they were in.
To be such a visionary that you cannot tackle the practical is a real liability. And to be so focused on the practical that you cannot adapt when the world changes around you, that is equally dangerous. Balance, as always, is the goal. But knowing which direction you naturally lean in is the starting point for managing.
Environmental Fit
High-Openness people thrive in: creative, informal environments; cultures where debate is encouraged and questions are welcomed; roles with open-ended time frames and room for reinvention. They wilt in administrative tasks, quality control, and situations requiring rigid conformity to process.
Low-Openness people thrive in: organized, formal environments; roles with clear expectations and defined time frames; cultures that value consistency and institutional knowledge. They find environments of constant change and ambiguity genuinely distressing — not a character flaw, simply a mismatch.
Influencing Someone High in Openness
If you're trying to persuade, negotiate with, or communicate effectively with a high-Openness person, here is what works:
Lead with the big picture. Mission, vision, passion, the image of what this could become. Give them the painting before the brushstrokes.
Emphasize what is unique or unusual about your idea. Novelty is intrinsically motivating to them.
Flow with them. Be willing to explore tangents, brainstorm, and dream together. Don't rush to close.
Appeal to their curiosity. Reference the thinking behind your proposal, not just its practical outcomes.
Be prepared for them to change their mind. Plan for it. Don't be derailed when it happens.
Once interest is established, scarcity works: help them see what they'd miss by not proceeding.
Meet Daniela and Erez. Their divorce has been bitter, and they're now sitting across from each other in a mediator's office trying to agree on a custody arrangement. Erez's lawyer has come prepared with a standard week-on-week-off proposal, clean, simple, what most couples in their situation end up with.
But Daniela's lawyer has done her homework. She knows that Erez is high in Openness. He's a designer, creative, someone who's always talked about wanting to be a present and involved father in a way that's anything but conventional. So instead of presenting a schedule, she presents a vision.
She talks about what it could look like for their daughter to have a father who's deeply woven into her school week, not just every other week, but there for the Tuesday night art class he always took her to, the Friday morning drop-offs that have been their ritual since she was three. She talks about a structure that's built around their daughter's actual life, not a generic template. She uses the word intentional. She uses the word rare.
Erez leans forward slightly. He's listening in a way he hasn't been all morning.
The week-on-week-off proposal never gets discussed again.
Influencing Someone Low in Openness
Emphasize what is tried, tested, and proven. 'This has worked before' is a genuine argument to them.
Walk them through it step by step. Don't skip ahead. Don't assume the big picture will carry the details.
Be specific. Concrete examples are not illustrations for them — they are the argument.
Reference precedents: other companies, cases, or respected figures who have done something similar.
Social proof carries real weight — if respected people in their world are doing this, that is meaningful information.
Authority matters: an expert's endorsement can move the needle where enthusiasm alone will not.
Learn from my mistake. I learned this the hard way in a business partnership, and it cost us months of frustration before either of us understood what was actually happening.
I'm high in Openness. I think in frameworks, models, the shape of things. Early in our partnership, I sat down with my co-founder and laid out my vision for how we'd divide our work. I spoke about domains and responsibilities, about the architecture of our roles. I referenced organizational models I'd read about. I walked away from that conversation feeling like we'd built something together.
She walked away feeling like I'd said nothing.
It took weeks of friction before I understood why. To me, I had communicated completely. I'd given her the structure, the logic, the vision. But she needed an example. "So you mean you'd handle billing, and I'd handle things new client calls?" Yes. Exactly that. That one sentence landed in five seconds what my entire framework had failed to deliver.
It ran the other way too. She would come to me with references, telling me about other companies doing something similar, slightly differently. And I'd feel a creeping impatience. Why are you telling me this? We're not them. We're building something new. But she wasn't making a comparison. She was doing what low-Openness people do instinctively: checking that the ground was solid before stepping onto it. The precedent wasn't a distraction to her. It was the argument. The evidence that something was safe to try.
For me, someone else doing it made it feel less worth doing.
Neither of us was wrong. We were just reasoning from entirely different starting points, and neither of us knew it. Had I stopped to think about the differences in our personalities on this dimension, I might have been able to save us both months of frustration.
The Phantom Behind the Curtain
One of the most important and underappreciated dynamics in any negotiation is this: the person across the table from you may not be the person who makes the final decision.
Your job is not only to persuade the person in front of you. You have to think about who they need to convince and make sure they are prepared with a compelling argument that they can take back home with them for to their decision making team. Your preparation involves not only the person across from you, but also giving them what they need to persuade the person behind the scenes, and that person may sit at a completely different point on the Openness spectrum.
Meet Noa and her father-in-law. Noa was negotiating the sale of a small business. The buyer's representative, a warm, intellectually engaged woman named Dana, loved Noa's pitch. They brainstormed together, explored creative deal structures, and left the meeting with genuine excitement on both sides. Two days later, Dana came back with a much more conservative counteroffer. What had happened? Dana's father-in-law, the actual decision-maker, was a man in his late sixties who had built three businesses the old-fashioned way and was deeply skeptical of anything that sounded too clever. Dana had gone home and tried to sell him on the vision. He wanted to see the numbers, the precedent, and the step-by-step plan. Noa had won the room. She hadn't armed Dana to win hers.
A Warning for High-Openness People
If you score high in Openness, hear this clearly: your openness is a gift and a vulnerability in equal measure. The same quality that makes you creative, flexible, and intellectually alive also makes you very susceptible to influence. You are drawn to new ideas, new perspectives, and new ways of seeing, and that curiosity can be exploited.
Your reasoning and logic are your best defense. When you feel yourself being pulled toward something exciting and new, slow down. Ask yourself why. Your curiosity is an asset, but it needs reason as its gatekeeper.
YOUR PRACTICAL TAKEAWAYS
Before your next important conversation, ask: is this a visionary or a custodian? Then adjust how you open the conversation accordingly. (Of course most people aren’t at the extremes of these scales, but use the scales to guide you).
If you're pitching to someone low in Openness, lead with a real example of someone who has done something similar, before you pitch your idea.
If you're pitching to someone high in Openness, lead with the vision and save the step-by-step for later. And come prepared for the conversation to go somewhere you didn't expect.
When negotiating through an intermediary, give them two versions of your pitch: one for them, and one built for whoever they're reporting to.
COMING UP NEXT
Let’s talk about the trait that best predicts long-term health and success, and the one most likely to determine whether your high-Openness visionary actually gets anything done. We'll also introduce the 2x2 matrix that shows what happens when these two traits collide.
