My father suffers with colour vision deficiency, otherwise known as “colour-blindness”. Not severely enough to affect his everyday life but bad enough for him to make some questionable sweater and chino combinations and discard any dreams he may have had of being an airline pilot or an electrician. There is however an altogether different colour-blindness that I have seen over the years in many organisations, big and small, when it comes to influencing others.
In 2019 the PayByPhone UK leadership team embarked on a leadership development programme which has been an intrinsic part of our success. The first part of this involved training on Strengths Deployment Inventory (SDI). SDI is a psychometric tool that can be used to understand the motives that drive an individual’s behaviour. It explains ones preferences when things are going well and then how that behaviour changes (if at all) under pressure. One of my favourite things about SDI is its simplicity. We’ve all done Myers Briggs or DISC before but can seldom remember what we are (is it ENTJ or ESTJ and are those even the right letters?) but SDI uses colour to describe the seven different personality profiles it identifies.
So we embarked on this journey with SDI. Trained by the fantastic Sara Burkes of Adaptis, we each took our test and then began slowly opening pandora’s box. And it revealed all sorts of interesting things about us as a leadership team, many of which may never leave the confines of the PayByPhone boardroom but SDI also teaches some key lessons on influencing.
Start where they’re at.
Have you ever come up with a great idea, thought it through, worked out the detail and then pitched it to a stakeholder only to find it falls flat at the first hurdle? Why does that happen? Most likely because you didn’t start where they’re at. You started where you were at. There are any number of reasons why your colleague/friend/spouse/prospect hasn’t engaged in the way you wanted them to. Maybe they’re in the middle of something, maybe they don’t like discussing something without having read the detail, maybe you didn’t do enough small talk, maybe you did too much! By understanding someone’s colour, it gives you a fighting chance to start where they’re at. You’ll know their preferences, their likes and dislikes and how to frame something in a way that will not just land but land well. And it’s so simple that you don’t need to send someone a test to work out their colour. Just watch. And listen. It’s normally obvious enough when you know what you’re looking for.
Get the tools from the bottom of the shed.
To influence someone in your world better, you may need to call upon tools in your toolkit that you don’t use too frequently. In SDI you learn about your preferred approach to solving a problem. In the most challenging of influencing situations, your natural approach will almost never be the one required to effect the change you want to see. I’m reminded of my friend Mark who is a carpenter and who has over the years done various bits of work in our home from fitting a kitchen to hanging doors and even building an Ikea wardrobe (“shame on you” I hear you say!). Each time Mark comes to the house, he has his same box of tools. Occasionally, half way through a job he has to go back to the van to get a different tool. Very rarely however, he needs to go back home to get one of the most infrequently used tools from his tool shed. With SDI you learn which influencing tools you have in your toolbelt, which ones you have in the van (and therefore have to work a little harder to use) and which are in the shed at the bottom of the garden, buried so deeply that years go by without seeing the light of day. To influence effectively you need to use the full range of tools.
Get the buy in of those with a profile different to yours.
In SDI I come out as a “red”. Reds are happy when things are getting done. A meeting with a red will typically start on time, run quickly with a light sprinkling of small talk at the end of the meeting once the work has been done “so, how was your weekend?”. Greens on the other hand are quite different. Greens are happy when things are done properly. A meeting with a green will start with a well prepared agenda, circulated in advance, will run to time and all of the time will be taken to ensure a thorough investigation of the facts is conducted during the course of the meeting. As a red, I run a risk of being perceived as impetuous and risk taking by a green. Therefore, if I want to influence a green, or a group of greens, I need to start where they’re at. I also need to use tools that are used infrequently in my day to day (a forensic attention to detail, for example). However what can be most powerful is if I can form a coalition with another green who is prepared to work in partnership with me, gaining buy in of this mission to other likeminded greens. You see if I can get that green on board, other green dominos should fall one after the other. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we find new things much more palatable when they come from “one of our own”.
Following our initial training in SDI back in 2019, we subsequently rolled it out across the whole business. It’s become part of our everyday vernacular. I want everyone in the business to be able to influence their colleagues well. By giving people the tools they need to be able to effectively influence those around them, we will only become leaner, fitter and stronger as an organisation. Ultimately, the success of SDI is measured in the bottom line.