Discovering how people see me

A couple of week's ago we had a team day in work that included a session using the "Insights Discovery" colour toolkit. It's another one of those profiling tools that reaches various conclusions about personality based off a questionnaire. As part of the day we were given several cards each, which we could either keep, give to a colleague, or hand back to the people running the course. 

The cards all had a characteristic on them and we were supposed to keep the ones we felt applied to us, and redistribute the others. We all started with 12 cards. I gave six away and was given another eight. This is the selection I ended up with.

The six I kept were:

• Encourages structure and order (well, I try)
• Gives and receives trust
• Quickly gets to the root of the problem
• Rapid reasoning
• Imaginative problem-solver, and
• Identifies the possibilities in every situation

Some of them I strongly identified with, but I'll admit some of them I kept more because I would like to be like that.

The eight I was given reflect how my colleagues see me - or at least what they have seen so far. We have only been working together for a couple of months.

The cards my colleagues gave me were:

• Can facilitate resolution of interpersonal conflict between others
• Good situational analysis
• Will find ways to work more effectively (I call this tactical laziness; other people call it ergonomics - that's an idea for a future blog-post!)
• Realistic and systematic
• Sees adversity as just another opportunity 
• Knows the importance of detail within the process
• Gets the job done and done right (too right!)
• Brings boundless energy to any situation (this was surely a joke)

These are all fairly nice things to be told. I'm aware this sort of thing is not far off from those horoscopes that use vague compliments to make you feel positively about what they are telling you. We are almost always more likely to accept a compliment as a true statement about ourselves. 

Later I got given a detailed profile of my personality based on the answers I had given to the quiz. Strangely, there wasn't much overlap between the cards and the profile. In fact, some of it was in direct contrast - apparently I am likely to delay making a decision until I am in full possession of all the facts rather than deploy rapid reasoning. But from the perspective of living in my head, once I have those facts I reach a conclusion quickly. 

The only sour note of the whole exercise was that someone in my team handed the card saying 'Good sense of humour' back in to the facilitator. I felt mildly offended that they didn't give it to me. But maybe that's telling me something that I really ought to know...