Colorful Leadership

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

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

Colorful Leadership

By Steve Wille
With Bill Kuehn and Larry Nelson

Stop fighting and start working together.  It's easy to say and hard to do. The customer is not always right. Management sometimes has it wrong. And coworkers have all sorts of opinions. You can complain about it or you can take a step back to look at the situation through other people's filters. After that, add the different images to build a more complete picture before making a judgment.

Consider a television camera. It builds a complete picture from three incomplete images shot through three filters. The red, green, and blue images come together on your TV screen to build a full color image. You cannot have the complete picture without all three images.

What I see is filtered by my skills, needs, and experiences. It is incomplete. The same can be said for every other person. To get the complete picture, it takes the discipline of looking through multiple filters. This is easy to say and hard to do. Actually, it is easier than you might think once you realize that you can build a pretty good picture from just three specific filters, sort of like the red, green, and blue filters in a television camera that give you the complete picture on your TV screen.

The book, Colorful Leadership, explores what you can do with three filters to gain significant understanding of a situation before making a decision. These filters are people, quality, and innovation.

• In a business transaction, how people feel is important. Feelings are not always logical, but they are real. People make decisions based on emotions and we must constantly consider how people feel.

• Equally important is the quality filter. Do the numbers add up? Did you check the facts? Does your product or service meet specifications? People make decisions based on logic, too.

• Often overlooked, but just as important as feelings and facts, is the need for innovation. People survive in the world by adapting to new situations. Yesterday's solutions for yesterday's problems are not necessarily going to work today and tomorrow. The world changes.

For our businesses to survive in a challenging economy, we must pay attention to other people's feelings while making logical, fact based decisions, plus we must adapt to new realities every day.  Colorful Leadership helps you make sense of the conflicting literature on leadership, management, and entrepreneurship. If you go to Amazon.com and do a quick search on leadership, you will find around 379,920 books. A search on management brings around 996,291 books. Entrepreneurship comes in at 56,375. Obviously, there are a lot of opinions on these subjects. To a large extent, leadership is about inspiring people through the people filter where feelings are critically important. Management uses the quality filter where numbers, facts, and logic rule. Entrepreneurship is about innovation and finding new opportunities. The three disciplines don't always line up neatly and give you the same answer. Colorful Leadership is about seeing through the three filters, independently, and then adding the three images together to build a complete picture. Armed with more complete information, you are going to make better decisions that take into account, feeling, thinking, and adapting.

The Colorful Leadership 3-Filters™ Discipline can help you survive any challenging situation, at work, at home, or anywhere else you happen to be. It is quick to learn, easy to apply, and incredibly powerful.

Steve Wille, author of Colorful Leadership, is a senior applications manager at Great-West Life and Annuity. He has over 25 years experience in corporate information technology management. His article on Constructive Conflict has been published internationally. Steve is a PMP (Project Management Professional) and has developed multiple large information technology systems from the ground up. Steve's MBA degree is from Regis University in Denver, and his BSBA degree is from the University of Denver.

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.