I spent my day at the Optus training centre in Melbourne today, quite a nice modern building with a lot of training rooms. It had a couple of TV’s running Foxtel which I can’t say I’ve seen before in other buildings I’ve visited, without going into boring interior design all in all it was sleek and semi-eye catching. Ok so Foxtel wasn’t the highlight but the building had all your other usual facilities and setup you’d expect to see at a training centre.
The company I work for gave us the opportunity to participate in Optus run training covering leading people through change. Our presenter, Kerrie Cottrill has a solid background in coaching and working with teams, I was in awe of her background and the brief significant events she went through to get where she is now. Fantastic at delivering the session also, Kerrie kept us engaged throughout the day and one of the most interesting techniques in her delivery was playing up beat and positive music when we were doing group sessions. No death by PowerPoint here!
One concept introduced to us was the decision making functions which are based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The two functions here are thinking and feeling. Based on Myers-Briggs, the function we exhibit shapes the way we make our decisions.
Thinkers are those that analyse the situation, they calculate, assess, look for flaws, tell it how it is, state the facts, use logic and use their head. They can come across as detached and can slap you from side to side – “That was a fantastic job Bob. Now let’s improve more”. They can be a facts and figures type person and stereotypically you can find quite a few of these individuals in senior management roles.
Feelers on the other hand use their heart. They consider others, are people focused, praise and encourage, use understanding, they are high on values, empathetic and subjective. They generally don’t want to upset people and seek harmony and balance. Feelers will approach people with more emotion than their thinking counterparts, if they see an under performer they will consider outside influences that might be affecting this individual and are they under stress? Is it a motivation issue we can address or a problem with team dynamics?
We were split into groups and asked what issues and concerns we foresee with thinkers and feelers working together, our group was made up of feelers. Some of the points we came up with where a higher risk of conflict due to misinterpretation or misunderstanding. Both thinkers and feelers approach a situation with a different mindset so because there is a difference in perception there’s a chance of communication issues. And how would we help the situation? We would ensure we had clear goals so there’s a common understanding, we would build team communication and awareness of how to interact, hold regular discussions and encourage team participation and open feedback. All our answers were written down on a large bit of paper and on reflection, we laughed realising the issues we foreseen and our approach was that of a feelers personality so the way we process a situation due to being feelers certainly came out on paper and Kerrie’s session on this topic helped us recognise this.
Having an awareness of these two functions allows us to manage people through change and make our approach more effective. It’s also possible that if you’re a feeler, that you can still use aspects of a thinker to deal with a situation however that does not indicate you have a thinkers approach – it makes you more effective as you are utilising more of the behaviours you find on each of the two functions and by being aware of them. This applies vice versa if you’re a thinker. You may have someone under performing and as a feeler you may want to analyse and collect data to confirm this is the case (thinker), you then follow up with a one on one discussion with this individual and find out why this is occurring. Are there outside influences? Is there a training issue we need to address? Maybe it’s heavy workload or an issue of conflict within the team? Kerrie gave us a story of a woman who found herself working in a senior management team and was the first woman to be promoted into this group in the lifetime of this organisation. Most of these individuals of course were thinkers – facts, figures, straight to the point, no fluff. The woman on the other hand was a feeler. She quickly discovered that in order to succeed in this group she had to learn about the behaviours of the thinkers and when required use them to communicate and work with her group. This made her more effective and able to gain more from the interactions and tasks. So again, it’s not about becoming the other type but having an awareness of it and using certain behaviours from the function when required in order to be more effective in your approach and more successful.
We covered many other topics during the day however this was a highlight as it helped to build awareness and understanding of how people think and in turn, how they react to a given situation. This is important to know so we can effectively manage people when change occurs and take an individual approach to helping them through the change.
Kudos to Kerrie for the delivery of an excellent training session!
