‘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.
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?
