April 29, 2015

Insights Overview

Insights Overview

Let me just say first off, that for me Insights is probably one of the most important things to learn in order to become a great leader or manager. Once you are able to master this, you will be able to manage different people and situations with greater success.

Insights Colour Energies

Insights is a profiling system that is based on the work of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his protégé Jolande Jacobi. You may have heard of other profiling systems such as MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) or DiSC and are wondering how Insights differs from them.
Essentially, the benefit is in its simplicity! On a high level, it is based on four colours which each map to a different personality. In doing this, it not only makes it easier to remember, but also easier to identify other peoples colour as well. The image below is a representation of the four colours with their high-level personality traits:

Insights Colour Wheel

As a side note, it is interesting to note that the opposite colours tend to have the most difficulty in interacting with each other. For example, fiery reds tend to want stuff done immediately & quickly, whereas the earth greens are more relaxed and chilled about getting it done. This can lead to difficulty or conflict between the two groups as they are essentially each others opposite.

Your Leading Colour

Each and every single person has all four of the colours within them. Now you may be thinking how is this even possible? I'm definitely a blue/green or a red person? Well, all you need to do is look at your situation. At work you may consider yourself to be blue, but at home you tend towards the green, so it is dependant on various environments and people you interact with. That said, each person typically has one or two colours that they tend to gravitate towards as it gives them a sense of comfort, and possibly even energizes them.

When you hear people talking about "leveraging your strengths", what they mean is to do the tasks that tend to map to you colour profile. Learning to adapt to your various team members colours, is part of what makes a leader or manager great. In doing so, you can communicate on "their colour level" which leads to happier people and team.

Scenario time

For example, lets take me, a cool blue/earth green person and I'm in the position where I'm looking to buy a new DSLR camera. My typical work flow would be to do as much research as possible by reading up on the specs, pros and cons, reviews etc. When I eventually settle on a model that satisfies all my needs, I go to the store to purchase it and find that I have more knowledge of the products than the sales person.
Knowing before hand of all the details of the purchase, makes me feel happy and confident in my decision. What would make me really uncomfortable is impulsively purchasing a product on special without knowing its ins and outs. Sunshine yellow people on the other hand have no issue with those types of impulse purchases at all.

The Colour of a Leader

One thing to remember is that there is no one colour that makes a person to a better leader. Each and every colour has the potential to become a great leader. What is more important is that a leader be able to adapt to colours of other people. For example, lets look at following famous people and their associated colours:

  • Nelson Mandela - Earth green (Caring & calm)
  • Oprah Winfrey - Sunshine Yellow (Social & outgoing)
  • Donald Trump - Fiery Red - (Assertive & direct)
  • Elon Musk - Cool Blue - (Precise & introvert)

This shows that you any colour can be a leader so there is no excuse in saying "I'm an introvert or to caring, I'll never be a great leader." It just isn't true!

So that wraps up this post. In the upcoming posts, I will go deeper into each individual colour and try to provide you more details on them.

Until next time...keep learning!