‘Team building Reflection’

Last week we carried out a workshop on knowing your True Colour. I felt it was really cool, because we all got to find out our True Colours. We had to fill out a personality test which kind of psycho-analysed all our personalities and placed us into Colour groups. I have done stuffs like this online in the past but none were as close as this test.

The first Colour group were Gold mine which represents the ‘Schedulers.’ This are the group of people who need to feel a sense of responsibility, fulfill duties and obligations. Gold mines place emphasis on morals, like making lists, always punctual, stable, faithful, loyal and dependable. They are great in an organisational setup because they are accountable, goalgetters so meet up with deadlines and also are good in the home front.

The Orange skies. This in simple terms are the fun people. The kind of people who are creative, lively, obvious, whimsical and immodest usually light up a party and are attention seekers. They are not time conscious and this is one of the downsides of this group. The Orange are able to infuse a sense of creativity in a project or an organization. They work better when they are under tension so they leave things up till the last minute. Which can be frustrating when working with people. But they are indeed fun people to hang out with and can be easily identified.

Captain Planet…  He is a super- hero…

We have the Green planet which I am proud to say I am, Go greens! We are the more focused guys, who often over analyse things, find the shortest cuts. We kind of focus on the smartest ways to carry out tasks in order to avoid long processes. We do more of the thinking than implementing. We are supposed to love nature although am not a big fan of that, sadly not so emotional but not that we don’t have emotions. It’s just that we usually keep them bottled up deep down because we like to be in control and not vulnerable. We end up being executives because we are good at delegating duties to the right departments. We believe in quality of friends and not quantity. We are also not good listeners, I find that it happens a lot when am talking with my mum and she is trying to tell me a story, I discover that I usually do not let her wrap up before I jump in and give her an analysis of the whole situation. My mum is usually pissed off whenever I do that.

Lastly, the Blues Ocean. These are the group of people who are calm, overtly emotional they care about people, interacting and listening to people and making them feel good. They tend to put their friends before themselves and they are also pet lovers. In the organizational set up they fit into Human resources. In PR they can serve as the voice of the consumers because they can easily tell how a set of people will react to a particular product or service because they are sensitive.

I personally felt this study was great because having this knowledge will enable you handle people with different personalities and be able to work effectively with them. I also found out that no man is an Island as the saying goes, you need a little element of the different groups to be a holistic being and to perform as a team either in school or in the work place.

At the end of the exercise, we actually had scores for each Colours although in our main Colour’s we had the highest score, but we had scores in all other Colours groups as well. So we were informed that we are rainbows because we have a tiny bit of every other Colour embedded in us. We can harness the good qualities of the other groups and add it to our Colours to be great in our teams, lives and careers. I have definitely learnt to incorporate the wonderful qualities exhibited by other Colour groups like the relaxing and friendly nature of the blues. I will also love to borrow some of orange’s creative juices.

Another important aspect I learnt from this exercise is the fact that when you have different individuals in a group you should appreciate their unique qualities and find a way to channel their resources in the right direction for example a Gold would be good in writing out the work breakdown structure of a project, while an Orange could suggest ideas because the same kind of people cannot always work together because it’s not realistic even if a situation arises and they are allowed to work together it would be Catastrophic. For example imagine a group of all oranges, they would definitely come up with ideas but it might not be implementable and that’s due to the fact that they lack the ability to prioritize and set clear goals.

This workshop definitely gave me a clearer understanding of the group dynamics although it wasn’t a 100 percent accurate, because there were some of my course mates I was so sure would be in a particular group but they ended up elsewhere and on the other hand some participants may not have filled the forms accurately.

I now understand why a lot of things happened in the group meetings that we had earlier on. Where some group members where struggling to be project managers which brought about strife because some other people felt they were neglected, while some others were laid back. During group assignments I usually try and figure out what everyone is doing and regularly discuss before I make an input. I am a team player. If True Colours were a movie I’ll give it excellent ratings. Now readers what’s your true Colour?