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Managing Up #2: Speed reading others, how to build rapport quickly with your new supervisor and team.
Ever have a conversation with someone who just did not get you? You may have been speaking clearly and loud enough, but your idea just did not land? Today’s skill in Managing Up is all about Speed Reading others to identify the communication style that will best get through to them.
You may not realize it, but we all have preferences on how we like to communicate to others and how we like to be communicated with. If you have been in the workplace for a while you may have taken a personality assessment that shows you your preferences. These preferences make up part of the lens through which we see the world. Each lens is unique to the individual based on their life experience and no one personality style is better than the other.
There are many tools available to help you assess your personality preferences, one that is easy to understand (and free) is the Lumina Splash App. Check out the free App to learn more about your preferred style. Lumina looks at 4 Colours, 8 Aspects and 24 Qualities across 3 Personas (Underlying, Everyday and Overextended) to help you understand your preferred style.
When we understand how we like to approach the world we can start to recognize how important it is to understand the preferences of others when communicating with them. We can learn to speak their language, to build rapport faster, get our ideas across, collaborate and influence others.
Example: If you use Lumina’s 4 Colour model and like to lead with blue, Lumina would describe this as someone who is detailed oriented, evidence based, observing and measured, but if you were speaking to your boss who is yellow (a Big Picture Thinker who is conceptual, imaginative and sociable) you need to shift your communication style in order to “speak their language”. If you speak as you personally like to be communicated with, your ideas will fall on deaf ears as you are not speaking your boss’ “language”. To be successful here the blue person needs to stretch, perhaps out of their comfort zone, to speak to what the yellow person needs. Hint, they do not want spreadsheets and detailed graphs upfront, they most likely want to know more about strategy, direction, the big picture and where the idea could take the project. They may also want to be involved in brain storming or idea generation before you come to them with a fully developed plan.
Without taking a personality assessment though, how can you tell the best way to approach your new boss? This is where Speed Reading comes in. By looking for a few characteristics (body language, tone of voice, content of conversation, and what their workspace looks like) you can quickly assess the best way to approach them.
Tune in to the next Managing Up post on what to look for when Speed Reading others.