I’m glad the holidays are fast approaching - I need a rest. The last two weeks have been big learning weeks for me - last week was Team Coaching and this week was learning about thinking preferences and behaviours presented by the Emergentics profile!
What I walked away with was a re-grounding around the fact that everyone has gifts. And all of us has biases. When those biases have us thinking critically or judgmentally about another person’s gifts, we miss a lot! What’s more is that we may be less successful than if we could include and harness the gifts of those people!
What struck me about what we learned was that we - leaders, managers, recruiters, HR - can learn how to communicate with, understand and incorporate people into our teams, who have different thinking preferences and behave differently than we do. What’s more is that doing so will strengthen a team’s ability to generate new solutions, solve tough problems, keep a breast of change, etc.
Communicating well with people who think differently than we do, taking a whole brain approach, can increase one’s ability to lead. Leaders can help themselves by building strategies to understand and communicate better with team members in areas where they don’t have a thinking preference.
In fact C-suite leaders themselves (65%) say their “right-brain” skills are weakest and recognize the need to strengthen their right-brain skills — including empathy and intuition — for a well-rounded “whole-brain” approach.
What I also learned was that even though a number of us might have the same thinking preferences, our behaviours have a significant chance of being different from each other. We might behave with less force or more force, naturally. And, for some of us, how we behave, depends on the situation.
Finally, by working with all members of a team to develop the same capabilities as the leader, to understand and communicate better with each other, the team creates an opportunity for themselves to go from “good to great”. And, that has a ton of benefits for everyone and the organization!
If this peaks your curiosity, reach out to learn more!