Flex your color

I am orange, but sometimes I need to be gold

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Both at Google and Facebook I had the honor of being involved with programs that sought to help engineers make their first steps on the path of leadership. Over the course of two or three days, the programs sought to give these engineers tools that would help them be better tech leads and/or better managers. Apart from this being a lot of fun, one of my primary reasons for being involved was that these programs undoubtedly helped me be a better leader by really having to work with the material and having to find ways to make it easy to understand and applicable to the many, many, situations and stories that the attendees came up with.

For many attendees this was the first foray into thinking strategically about what it means to be a leader. Obviously, a program that consists only of talking heads explaining the theory doesn’t work very well, so the programs were designed to be experiential. There was a little bit of theory, but mostly we played games and then spent time debriefing the way the game went and everyone’s contribution towards the outcome.

We were massively helped by the fact that most engineers are avid game players. Some of these games came with elaborate rules and restrictions, but all attendees were always all-in all of the time. At one point a journalist from a local newspaper came round because she had heard that a bunch of engineers from a big tech firm were holed up in the local hotel doing some weird stuff around social competencies. She happened to visit us right in the middle of the setup of a crazy complicated game called “Powerball.” This game consists of an organization split into four different teams across seven different sites, needing to design and build some crazy complicated device over four “quarters” of about twenty minutes each. The game came with job roles (each with their own responsibility and capabilities), restrictions on travel between the sites, requirements for the thing that needed to be built, pricing charts, reporting requirements, budgets, and whatnot. While we were laying out the rules, the journalist was amazed about the 120% focus of all attendees on the rules of the game while simultaneously plotting how to beat the odds.

The purpose of these games was to bring out people’s default working style while also making everyone aware that they were working with other people who also had a default working style. One of the core goals of the programs was to make engineers aware that not everyone was exactly like them 🙂.

To drive this point home, one of the programs used some pop psychology in the form of a personality typing scheme called True Colors, invented by renowned personality theorist Don Lowry. This scheme distills people’s most basic temperaments into four different colors: Orange, Green, Gold, and Blue.

In this world, the impulsive idea-driven people are the oranges. These are the people who have five ideas before breakfast, start working on two by lunch, and eventually almost complete at most one. The greens on the other hand are the deep thinkers. These are the people who write intense design documents to describe the best idea in elaborate detail and who will debate you to death about the absolute merits of one approach over the other. The golds are the people who value organization and structure above all else. These are the spreadsheet and to-do list makers. Finally, the blues are first and foremost concerned with social harmony, making sure that people’s voices are heard, and ensuring that everyone is on board.

There are extensive questionnaires that will help you figure out what your predominant color is, but as a bonus for being a faithful subscriber I hereby give you not one but two different easy, fast, and somewhat tongue-in-cheek methods to figure out your (or anyone else’s) preferred color.

Method #1: With which of the following mental disorders do you most readily associate:

• Attention deficit disorder ⇒ Orange

• Aspergers ⇒ Green

• Obsessive Compulsive Disorder ⇒ Gold

• Codependency ⇒ Blue

When I use this method it is a tight race between orange, green, and gold.

Method #2: How do you buy a new television?

• You go to Best Buy, look at a few, and then point at one and take it home (or buy it on Amazon right there using your cell phone) ⇒ Orange

• You build a kick-ass PC from components and install Media Portal ⇒ Green

• You read five back-years of Consumer Reports and make a spreadsheet with important features and weights to help guide your decision ⇒ Gold

• You ask your friends what TV they have, you take your entire family with you on this journey, and ultimately you buy the TV that your roommate, POSSLQ, romantic partner, or child wants ⇒ Blue  

Of course a method of four colors does not do justice to the multi-layered and multi-dimensional personalities of actual human beings. But it is a nice tool to think about behaviors of people, both your own behaviors and those of people you interact with. 

The danger of a scheme like True Colors is that people start to use color as destiny or as immutable aspects of a person. Instead, we tried to tell people that these colors are a lens through which to look at a situation or to analyze behavior. Sometimes people come to me for advice on how to deal with a colleague who is difficult to work with (for them). If I knew that my mentee had attended the leadership program where we discussed True Colors, I could propose using the color as a lens through which to look at the situation: “What color are you displaying? And as what color do you think this other colleague is behaving? What do we know about this?” On more than one occasion I have had a mentee say: “Oh, they are acting as a gold, and I am acting as an orange, and so ….”

The “color as lens” approach is also a powerful tool to investigate and choose your own behavior. If you are not paying attention (or are stressed), you readily fall into your default behavior, acting out your strongest color. But always ask yourself the following: “Is this what the situation needs?” Personally I define leadership as the action of doing what the situation needs to help it move forward. So if you are in a meeting room and there are three people generating ideas already, what does that situation need? Does it need a fourth person generating ideas? Or does it need someone to take the initiative to organize the ideas that are already on the table, perhaps collecting them in a document? In the words of the True Colors, does that room need another orange? Or does it need a gold? Even if your natural inclination is to be more orange, you might want to dig deep and flex into another color in order to move the situation forwards.

There is a lot to say about personality typing schemes. Even the more refined ones, like the Myers-Briggs type indicator assessment (that recognizes no less than 16 different personality types) are a crude way to categorize human beings. That said, you and everyone around you does have certain characteristics that are dominant and a scheme like Myers-Briggs or True Colors can help you to quickly assess and categorize patterns of behavior that you can then respond to.

But remember, color is not destiny. The fact that you are an annoying orange does not mean that you are destined to behave in that way always and all the time. You can (and should) dig and flex into another mode of behavior if, all things considered, the situation needs it.