All Colors Styles are “essential” on a team, but this article will focus on our Blue friends.
When executives tell me they have “people problems,” the solution can sometimes be easier than you think. Individuals on the executive team might consider digging up their “inner Blue” or else delegating “people solutions” to managers who have clear Blue characteristics as a part of their own personality.
Blue folks are naturally good at working with people. The good news is that they are mentors and advocates, teachers, healers, and champions of personal development and organizational improvement. The bad news is that very few Blue people rise to executive ranks because they either do not enjoy those positions or they are overlooked for being “too touchy-feely.”
Recently, I was invited to help a team whose front line people did not like the executive in charge because he simply issued demands and refused to interact much with the rest of the team. Both performance and morale were dangerously low.
I interviewed the much maligned executive first, and he turned out to be Green – very proud of his own knowledge, competence, competitive edge, and work ethic. He insisted he reached the level he achieved because of his own hard-work, independence, and clock-like reliability. He was a self-starter, he said, and had little patience for other people who weren’t.
Later I interviewed his employees. They also claimed to be hard workers, self-starters, and so forth. What they didn’t like was the apparent lack of empathy and basic social skills of their boss. The employees felt they worked in a hard, cold – even toxic – atmosphere and that their efforts, ideas, and energy were unappreciated.
It turned out that most of the employees were clearly Blue. For Blues, the bottom line to most all activity is the quality of human relationships – yes, even in a business setting, i.e., people relating and getting along. Really great, harmonic relationships are almost never less important than performance, production, profits, or any other scale of business success you can mention.
So from a boss (of any Color), Blues would like to have plenty of verbal give and take, face-to-face meetings, the sharing and respecting of ideas, and the ability to change in new directions. They actually have a fundamental need for personal interaction. Blues love democracy and consensus.
Green folks like their boss love independence and control over their own environment. They often shun small talk and social gatherings (even business meetings). They relish figuring things about by themselves and usually wish that everybody else would do the same thing. Oranges and Golds, by the way, can be just as task-oriented as Greens.
So you can see why the Green boss may have thought his employees were time-wasting, touchy-feely crybabies in the workplace where folks should be concentrating on excelling in their work, and less on “talking.”
The Blues, on the other hand, felt unappreciated, not listened to, disrespected, left alone, and unsupported.
When the workshop was over, the Green boss finally realized that if he wanted to improve performance and morale on the team that he’d have to step out of his independent world and sit at a round table with the Blue folks. Clearly the Blues would have a great deal to contribute. Surely the Green exec was as smart as the dickens, but the wisdom and talent of the whole team was much smarter when all team members got to put in their two cents on a regular basis.
Blue people are a productive organization’s glue. You’ll find Blues most frequently in customer support, human resources, training, wellness programs – anywhere that people need or want to operate face-to-face.
Although Blue folks really don’t like conflict, they are the ones to call when conflict happens. It is their greatest desire to help people create harmony.
And although Blues seem to be “too social” for a business setting, a workplace that encourages warm social interaction will find performance and morale very high. Yes, among the endless warm words, hugs, relentless sharing of ideas, office celebrations, after-hours gatherings, and lots of atta-boys, you will walk each day into a welcoming, productive, and proud place to work.
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