Are You Mostly A Blue, Green, or Red?

Being a part of management for an extended period of time allowed me to participate in numerous conferences, seminars, and training opportunities. Many of these programs featured sessions that dealt with identifying individual traits required to become high profile managers. Some of these involved taking tests and then using grids, charts, and graphs to depict a particular person’s potential for becoming a superstar manager.

I remember the first of these types of sessions I participated in. It was in a weeklong conference in Chicago. The senior personnel consultant who conducted this session told us he had used this testing approach to provide insights into high potential candidates for many of the leading companies in America. It was a double blind format where it was hard to not reveal your real traits because the questions were asked in different ways in different sections. I was a very young manager at the time; therefore, the results were not that significant to me. In fact, my profile has been pretty much consistent over the years. More on that later.

What was really interesting was to see the reactions of those who thought themselves to be high potentials when their scores indicated something entirely different. Talk about grumbling. The test must be wrong. The way they saw it they were hard driving, take no prisoner types of people. Guess what? No, they were not. In fact, what the battery of testing showed was some of them were most likely better suited for administrative work than managerial. Talk about some angry, red faces. While these results may not have meant they could not be a good manager, they did provide a window into how their make-up may have been a better fit in another type of role or responsibility.

Many years later I attended an international technology conference in San Diego. This was a very memorable week since it was during this conference that San Diego experienced a major 6.6 earthquake and that event created more than a little excitement. I am certain there will be a blog account of my personal earthquake story but it will have to wait for another day. During this conference we had another of the evaluation sessions to determine personality and aptitude for particular corporate roles. That session’s speaker was a delightful fellow, a professor from USC, who looked like a department store Santa dressed in a business suit.

He had studied management profiles for many years and his testing results had been verified in many projects and applications within real corporate situations. He essentially said you couldn’t, over time, be something other than who you really are, and that’s just the way it is. If you are in a managerial position but don’t have the inclination for it, you will either be ineffective or frustrated. One other thing he said has stuck with me over the years. There are no right and wrong answers regarding the strengths we have as individuals. Your perceptions may not fit reality but knowing the truth about who you really are is still the truth.

My results at this conference pretty much mirrored the same types of outcomes from similar exercises I had participated in over the years. The final result from this session was boiled down to a color coded wheel where blue indicated a nurturing personality, green was judicious, studious, and administrative, and red meant high charging and domineering. Those scoring high in the blue were people who enjoyed working in an environment where they could help, nurture, and serve. The Professor said his wife scored so high in this category he was sure she would most likely lay down in the snow under a car to help it gain traction. (This is the same score my wife had when she later completed this assessment.) Those high in the green would be those who enjoy bookwork, accounting, support roles, and tasks that have a purpose. People who scored off the chart in the red would be those willing to step on anybody at any time to achieve the results they seek, typically for their own self-interests.

Remember there are no wrong scores. There might be wrong uses of the identified traits but not wrong strengths. Mine turned out to be what they called a blended hue which interpreted means I can move in and out of the three as required to accomplish the purposes I have been given to achieve. If I need to be in the blue as one who nurtures and if that’s what is needed to get the job done, I can do it. If I need to do the grunt work associated with green, I can do it. If some red is called for in terms of standing up to be counted, I can do this as well. I guess the real issue is in coming to terms with your own particular patterns of strength. Those who wanted desperately to be a high red but did not score that way were disappointed. The objective was to take what was found out about these internal strengths and apply it, not to be angry because you found out you are not naturally a ruthless person!

I was able to get a handful of these tests and brought them home with me. A couple of years later we hosted couples from our Church in our home and I thought the tests would be a really fun thing to do. Was I ever wrong! My approach to the tests was to let the spouses guess how the other spouse would score and what color would be the prominent feature. The exercise was intended to be a diversion not a prelude to divorce court. Well, it wasn’t quite that bad but there was much disagreement between couples regarding how they thought their particular mate would come out.

Some predicted they were probably a green with much blue and ended up being green and red. Their wife had said red and then the argument was on. It reminded me of the time we did a Sweetheart Banquet at the Church and I designed a Newlyweds Game for fun. I put the husband and wife in chairs back to back and asked them questions and they had to write down the answers. Often the answers did not come close to being the same. This turned out to be somewhat of a problem since a number of them began arguing about their mate’s answers on things like when they first met, or where they went on their first date, and other trivial questions. It sounded like a good idea at the time.

Truth is, getting reality to match perception is not that easy. But let this be a lesson for us all. I didn’t have an expectation of being a high red; therefore, a blended hue was okay with me. If you are honest on the testing, supposedly it is to show who you really are, not who you want to be. Trouble comes whenever someone is in a job or situation requiring much in one color but they are mostly void of that characteristic. This is why the Bible tells us to develop our children around their recognized bent or personality. This requires parents to be tuned in to each child. Remember also that it's what we do with what God gives to us that counts. Everyone would recognize Moses as a great leader but I wonder how many know that God said his greatest attribute was his meekness! Think about that! Every individual is a different color as it relates to his or her personal strengths, and we need to help each one find that proper place where they can do their best work. More later………….