Many years ago, I was MD of an £8m business here in Dorset. With no previous leadership experience, I managed to pull a team together to help turn the business around, back into profitability, and I enjoyed the experience tremendously. When the family that owned the company then sold it to a much larger enterprise, my life changed.
My new boss had no concept of appreciating me for who I was. His approach was quite simply to try to batter me into a mini version of him. It was only 2 years later when I came across the colour model that I started to understand the dynamic – essentially, his very Cool Blueness was rubbing up against my extreme Sunshine Yellowness in a very negative way. Where I tried to galvanize the team with positivity and a vision for how much greater we could become, he would ridicule my “vacuous words”. When I explained progress against target, he would identify a hole in my argument and seemingly delight in doing so publicly. And the more “Bad Day” Blue he became through his frustration with me, I probably reciprocated with stressed out Yellow, just worsening the relationship.
But we also know that as well as being our “most difficult person”, our Opposite Type can also be our “best ally”. Indeed, I am not the only one who is happily married to or partnered with their ‘opposite’. So, how can we move from the negative to the positive relationship?
Well, there’s no doubt that there are many different answers to that one, on many different levels. On a relatively simple level, I would like to say that the colour model at least goes some way to helping us understand our differences and open up conversations that might help us find better ways of working, or, as I often put it in my workshops, “ways to hack each other off less”.
On a more profound level, meanwhile, relationships with life partners go deeper than mere colours and behaviours. We share the same values, we know each other on a more complete level, the whole person, we build trust and love.
And this is perhaps partly why we are unable to build such relationships with our Opposites at work – we don’t KNOW them. We get stuck on dealing with and judging the external observable mask that is our behaviours, the bits we find difficult. Strip away the mask and we are much more likely to find common ground and thereby reasons to like or at least understand each other. With these foundations, the move to starting to VALUE the DIFFERENCES can more easily be made.
At Stony Brook University in upstate New York, psychology professor Dr. Arthur Aron and his colleagues wanted to know if they could create lab conditions that would make strangers bond and form close friendships after just a few minutes. They arranged volunteers in pairs and gave them a list of 36 questions to ask each other in turn. Within just 60 minutes, respondents typically said they felt unusually close to the other person. In a control group paired up to engage in small-talk, there were no such bonding results.
David Rowan, editor of Wired magazine, recently tried the same experiment with senior executives and entrepreneurs at a large conference in Athens. The results were the same.
Despite the fact we’ve spent the last 28 years together and know each other really well, I tried this with my wife (also my Opposite) and it was an incredibly enjoyable and love-strengthening exercise (although we took 2 hours to get to Question 22!).
So, how does it work? Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, the effect is based on gradually escalating reciprocal self-disclosure, breaking down the barriers, and taking your mask off. It may not of course be possible for you to set this up with your difficult person but the principle remains the same – trust can be built by having the strength to be vulnerable with each other.
Read up on trust, loving your team, the discovery colour energies and 8-types, authenticity, meaningfulness and vulnerability