Head Tale

This was a lesson I learned from my first manager at RPL (who also happened to be the Manager of HR so had tons of great insights into managing people, dealing with conflict and so on.)

The context was that I was in a very unique role as Organizational Development Specialist, responsible for all staff training but also for a more nebulous “change management/organizational culture” work as RPL was heading towards some major changes – a staff reorganization and joining a province-wide library consortium.

I had proposed something that I thought would help staff with change management as we moved towards these huge organizational changes and though my immediate manager thought it was a good idea, it got shot down by a senior manager who didn’t think it would work.  (“Find Ways To Say Yes/Why Not Try It?” is going to be a future post!) 😉

I was venting to my manager that the rationale for shooting it down didn’t give much credit to the RPL staff – I said that most RPL staff were friendly, outgoing, customer-service oriented people but the senior manager saw them as very rule-based and suspicious of change.

He thought about it for a second then said “What if you’re both right?”

I didn’t really know what he meant at the time but it became clear when we did one of our quarterly “Librarian Forums” and put the assembled librarians from across the organization (about 30 of us at the time) through the True Colours personality test.

Like Myers-Briggs, these tests aren’t heavily scientific but can provide a useful shorthand for interacting with others who see the world differently.

And when we got our results, it was exactly what my boss had said.

Only a couple librarians had Green as their dominant trait – analytical and data-driven.  Only a couple librarians were Red/Orange as their main trait – creative and imaginative.  Of the remaining librarians, there was an exactly equal split between the Blues – people pleasing and Yellow/Gold – rule-based and deferential to authority.

It was a good reminder that it’s not always about “you’re wrong and I’m right” but more that people have different approaches and different personalities and if you want to reach someone, sometimes it helps to understand where they’re coming from.

(I also remember one of the only two Reds in the room saying that if she wanted to get buy-in from her boss who happened to be one of only a couple Greens, she would send a spreadsheet instead of a written document since she knew he was analytical and data-driven.)