By Carolyn Crawford
This second blog in our Neethling Brain Instrument series explores our friends, and indeed they are our friends, with a first preference for Right Brain Limbic (R2) thinking.
I am red: I care. I care about family, friends, colleagues, staff and customers and I care about strangers and animals too.
I like working in groups, I’m keen to incorporate people’s opinions and ideas and I think it’s important to try to achieve some sort of consensus in a rigorous but respectful way. Depending on how ‘red’ I am and how long I’ve been in business, I may or may not have yet become comfortable with needing to sometimes simply make a call without consultation, and move on.
Manners count. Politeness counts. Getting to an outcome at the expense of people’s feelings or well-being is not acceptable.
I will work above and beyond the call of duty to please my boss or senior management, to support my team, to pull my weight among my colleagues and to satisfy the customer. I may not have learnt to confidently say ‘no’ when I’m overstretched so I may work myself to breaking point to please everybody.
I do not like conflict or confrontation so I may bury my feelings and acquiesce. This may be useful for achieving an outcome in the short term but leads to deep dissatisfaction and sometimes resentment and early burn-out in the medium- long term.
I need encouragement, praise, pats on the back and acknowledgement for myself and/or my team reasonably regularly. Equally, I’m an excellent coach and mentor of my own team. I’ll spend time with as many of them as possible 1-on-1, listening to their aspirations and challenges and helping them develop their skills and talents so they can achieve their goals. I’m a popular manager. People like working for me and I both enjoy, and am good at, nurturing them.
I read people well and respond to them in kind. I’m good in sales; I’m good in customer service; I’m good in management; and I’m a great liaison point for bringing teams with disparate points of view together.
But there’s a downside to this people-sensitivity and intuition. I am often affected by the news. Reading or hearing of people being hurt upsets me. I’m more altruistic than many of my friends and colleagues with different thinking preferences. I’m not driven by making money. I’m driven by helping people and making a difference and it bothers me when people are blindly, and to my way of thinking, selfishly, ambitious.
People sometimes consider that I need to be treated with kid gloves or that I’m “high maintenance”. Personally, I see it as being asked to be treated with an element of common decency and courtesy. As I bother to treat others, so I expect and hope to be treated. A little bit of kindness goes a very long way.