Kemal's Braindump

#leadership #communication #growth

Recently, I read a post from Edward O'Brien where he was writing about his personality profile, and how it has influenced his career. I commented on his post, but want to expand here a little bit more on my own experiences.

The “Colors” theory is not a gang sort of thing, but a great way to get a concrete description of your personality, understand how your behavior effects others and improve your communication and cooperation skills. Of course there are also other assessments, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses, but this is the one that, at least for me, was easy to understand and also to explain to others. I got a recommendation to do it about 12 years ago, after a not-so-positive leadership review I received. That feedback, and this assessment, sent me down a long reflection road that at the end led to biggest breakthroughs in my personal development.

Where is your team?

As a young professional, I joined Mercedes-Benz AG in 2009, and was tasked with building up test management and preparing a test strategy for a car system that would have to comply with ISO 26262 when it becomes a certification precondition. I tackled the task very intensively, as I had already two years of test engineer experience and was eager to reach the next step in my career. After about two years of hard work, I had an internally assessed test strategy that was aligned with ISO 26262, and a working test management on the system level. This success brought me a good performance review from my management, and as it usually goes, I got tasked with something even harder, although I didn't recognize this at the time. The next task was to extend the test strategy to also include component-level analysis and then align it with all the component responsible and their suppliers. In order to give me the attention I needed, I actually got a slot in the management meeting every second Friday, where I could present my progress. So everything was setup, to deliver great results and get, the ever so needed, visibility for my work.

I did then what I always did. I dug into the topic, worked out a very good technical solution, and invited component-responsible people for regular connects to present them the solution and then push them until completion. I presented, pushed, explained, escalated in those management syncs when there was no progress... and after a year or so of fighting, we reached our first successful SOP. Now I was really looking forward to my next performance review. And the review started very well, as I was commended for reaching the goals and given a good raise. But then I asked about my leadership performance ... and got a feedback that was very short and to the point: “You have reached the goals, but at the finishing line, you were the only one there. Where is your team?”

At first, I didn't understand the feedback because results had been delivered; therefore, I had proven my worth, right? The team performed and delivered, so what's the problem then? The issue was that the project team would not do me. They had delivered but reported to their line management that they felt uninvolved, pressured, and burned. This hit me hard, as I actually thought that everything I did took them with me. But it seems, it came out the wrong way, and I was stunned by what went wrong.

Paper Mind Model, an addition to the Colors

It was clear that I needed to take people with me, and as I wrote, I was convinced that I was sending out that message all the time in our meetings. But why did the receivers get something completely different? And on which level did I not engage with the people who had different levels of technical expertise?

Finding out through the assessment that I am mostly Red and Blue offered an explanation for why I lost colleagues with Yellow and Green shades. The fact that my German was colored with a strong Eastern European accent seemed to be enough to push others away, as I was perceived as someone very strict and military-like.

But still there was the problem of engaging people on the right technical and abstraction level, in order to help them understand the goals and thus enable their active contribution without feeling overruled or uninvolved. I figured out that my pace was too fast. For some time I thought I lost people because they were not technically skilled enough. But that wasn't the reason. We all need different levels of abstraction to grasp ideas, and have different processing speeds to understand them. Having a higher processing speed doesn't mean you will deliver better results; it only means you can deliver first results faster, which says little about the quality of those same results. In my experience, processing speed can get higher as we gather technical and life experience, but this change is not so drastic. So I stopped making an assumption that if I am in a room with people who have a lot of technical experience, then very high levels of abstraction are sufficient. And vice versa, that juniors need detailed instruction lists to deliver results. Instead, I developed a mind model for myself that I like to call 'Paper Mind Model'.

In this mind model, I imagine a sheet of empty paper and ask myself how many lines of text on that sheet will the person in front of me need to understand what I am talking about and get involved in the idea, task, project etc.

Following are three levels that I have seen in real life:

• A headline is enough.

  • This is a type of person where writing just one headline or title on paper is sufficient to get them started. As an example, for me, the headline “We need a Test Strategy that is aligned with ISO 26262” was enough to get me going.
  • The benefit of this type of people is that they can generate concepts, solutions, and ideas almost out of thin air. However, there is a risk that they might miss the target because you can misinterpret a lot from just one headline or title.
  • As a leader, it's important to invest time in refining their ideas with them. They will need boundaries, but these can be provided later; let them generate freely first.

• Explain me your idea.

  • This is the most common type of people. It takes about half a page of text for them to get started and dig into the details.
  • The benefit here is that they help define the task better by either asking questions or being hesitant with the idea, which forces you to think harder and explain your purpose more clearly.
  • These individuals are valuable assets in the team as they often do not generate new ideas independently but can make your team work more efficiently by providing steady flow of improvements.

• I need clear instructions.

  • For this type of people, it's essential to invest time breaking down the idea or task into sub-items and explain what needs to get done in a level of detail that might sometimes be tiring for fast-paced people among us. It could require a full page of text or more, but if done properly, it is good investment.
  • Some people argue that these types need to be more independent and build more experience, because we need more of the other two types mentioned earlier. However, I disagree. Some of them, mostly fresh graduates, will move upwards in abstraction level over time, but some remain at this level for a long period. This is good as they can deliver a foundation for bigger projects and work with you through daily grind when high potentials are already moving on.

Noteworthy is also a category of people who need no text or headlines to produce results. These individuals listen carefully what's happening around them, what was discussed in meetings, and then start generating improvements and ideas without being explicitly triggered. I do this sort of brain-dumping often and like to call it 'fishing'. Sometimes I catch a fish, and sometimes the idea is just not worth it.

Conclusion

So that's it; the combination of Color Theory and Paper Mind Model helped me a lot in reaching people and leading them to success. As with the colors, you need a good mixture of these types in a successful team. And as a leader, you have to figure out who is who in your team in order to lead them efficiently. But when strong colors get mixed with demanding paper types, this is where leadership gets very interesting.