Colorful Leadership

A Manager's Guide to Achieving
Long Term Commitment, Consistent Quality, and Innovation

A Must-Read Book for Leaders, Managers, and Entrepreneurs

Hi, I’m Steve Wille, author of Colorful Leadership. People have asked me if we really needed another book on leadership. If you go to Amazon.com and search for books this topic you will find over 330,000 listings. They address leadership and management from different angles, often in conflict with other perspectives.  For example, some of the  literature emphasizes people skills.  If you get the right people and treat well. there is no limit on what they can accomplish.  The emphasis is on teamwork and collaboration. A great people leader knows how to speak from the heart.

Other management experts emphasize process, taking the spotlight off people.  Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the great quality leader, said that 85% of the time when there is a quality problem, the process is to blame, not the people.  Six Sigma, a popular quality program, emphasizes the need to produce a consistent product by building processes for everything.

A third perspective on leadership is innovation; get there first and lead the way. As a technology manager, I know that innovation is the only hope of surviving certain obsolescence.  The half life of computer software seems like it is about 20 seconds.  There is always someone out there building something significantly better than anything we have ever seen before.

In the book I offer a model for accommodating these three important but conflicting views.   They are all correct, all the time, and you need to consider every decision from each perspective.

3 Filters

This book is built around Larry Nelson's 3-Filters theory, a model of human needs.  Like the red, green, and blue lights in a television coming together to build a high definition image rich in color, these three basic needs come together to build a complex picture, rich in possibilities. 

Where red, blue, and green come together in the illustration on the left, you see white light.  This is known as the additive color process.  A colorful leader uses the additive process, thinking and acting in three dimensions

Please take a look at the color photograph with a white background and notice the text.  Now look at the same picture taken through a green filter and notice that the word green became invisible because white and green are identical.  Red and blue became mysterious shadows of unknown colors.  The yellow picture is better, but still not complete because blue is still missing.

When you look at a situation through your normal filters, you are not even aware of what is invisible.  If you spin the filters, you can build the entire image in your mind. Colorful leaders look at the world through multiple filters and build the composite image, viewing the complete image as seen by others from multiple perspectives. This creates options when it comes time to make decisions.

People-Feelings Filter

The people filter expresses our many relationship and emotional needs. It defines what it means to be human.  When we speak from the heart, we are expressing our people filters. To be successful at sales, politics, corporate leadership, and any other activity involving people, you need to know how to see through the people filter.

Security-Quality Filter

Survival of the organization is dependent on quality products and services.  Quality is driven by processes and procedures that ensure consistency in every product.  The goal is predictability and control, so every product meets specifications and every customer receives the required level of service.  An effective manager strives for an organization that functions like a well oiled machine, regardless of the people operating it.

Future-Innovation Filter

This dimension focuses on another vast category of human needs that are essential for survival. It is our ability to adapt to unstable situations. It is our ability to invent and build on what others have already done.  To adapt to a changing world you need flexibility and an eye for what is over the horizon.

Colorful People

We lead people, manage processes, and pursue goals. These are three fundamentally different skills that come together in what we call leadership, management, and entrepreneurship. This book focuses on the center spot in our picture where the three disciplines converge. Notice on the cover that the only area with natural color is in the center. Everything else is a bit off-color.

Color Balance

Back in the 1900s when we used film, we had put the right kind of film in the camera. If you used indoor film outside the picture would be too blue because indoor film is balanced for tungsten light which is much more yellow than daylight. People have a color balance, too. We call it a 3-Filters Bias. We have a preference for our own filters, and we look a little off color to others who have their own preferences. The solution is to spin the filters to see what others see, and then use that information to make the best decisions.

If you play cards you know that high cards beat low cards, unless there is a trump suit, then a low card in trump beats a high card not in trump. Corporate culture is like trump. I can have a high card in the people filter suit but it can be trumped by a low card in the security filter suit. If my 3-Filters preference is out of trump, I have to play my cards strategically.

Based on the Life Styles Inventory and LSI Conflict profiles. Copyright (c) 1987-2008 by Human Synergistics International. Adapted by permission.

You might not always resolve conflict, but you can keep it constructive The key is your self-talk. Here are the constructive approaches to conflict:

• Pragmatic - Let's look at the facts and figure this thing out.
• Self-Empowered -Here is what I am doing about it.
• Relationship Builder - First, let's get to know each other.
• Conciliator - I know we can work this out.

It is important to see the value in all three conflict approaches (constructive, defensive/aggressive, and defensive/passive).  Sometimes you need to be defensive because others really are out to get you.  Conflict is part of life and you must address it strategically, looking at all the options.