We have spent many hours consulting with different couples and business partners around their strengths. We help them understand who they are individually and how their styles interact with each other.
In our time together with this couple, we walked through the various scores for both, interplays and how they compare and contrast.
Here are some summary points:
Cognitive
This is how they deal with ideas. Both are low cognitive, thus, are concrete and deal in practicality. They are thinking about the here and now and things that they can see and touch.
The husband (“Green”) is a Planner and uses discussion to get clarity around ideas. The wife (“Blue”) is a Refiner and uses repetitive doing to gain clarity for herself. She takes existing things that work and moves them from 90% to 99%. She is about refinement.
Green translates strategies into systems, planning and policies. Thus, his strength is around scaling a business and locking in the planning for committed strategies that a team has already decided on.
Blue sees the imperfections in systems, ideas, systems and procedures. It helps her to refine what exists, but it can also be difficult to participate in a brainstorming or vision setting conversation where ideas are ambiguous and open-ended.
In their relationship, they work in practicalities. They may be missing some of the big picture dialogue and thinking that an outsider can introduce.
Relational
Their relational scores are different. This measures how they deal with emotion. For Green, he is a feeler and empathizer at 70. He feels other people before he feels himself and carries the emotion of others and a situation. It’s internal to him.
Blue is 27 on the relational scale. Emotion is outside of her, and she feels herself before she feels other people. She is a verbalizer. She welcomes people getting out their emotions and articulating what they are feeling. She sees it as cathartic.
Green gives empathy as a way of comforting others. This allows him to connect by helping the other person understand where they are coming from.
Blue has open networks of relationships and has a strong pull towards reciprocity. If someone does something nice for her, she reciprocates.
This is a score where they are both different and can help each other. Green is about winning other people and he does this with warmth and empathy. Blue is able to see situations without emotions. Green gets to his thinking through his feeling. Blue does as well, but she is able to isolate emotion, especially in tense situations.
They both see the world differently when it comes to emotion.
Goal
Green is a 51 Goal. This means the goal is external to him. He manages towards balance and the win for him is having his multiple goals in balance and in progress. This is where he feels at peace as a Regulator.
Blue is a 27 Goal score and is Responsive. She takes direct action and has a strong action-orientation. Combined with your concrete score, she is a doer. She moves to action quickly.
Blue likes being a part of a team and defers to the team’s authoritative setup. She responds to urgency and understands what needs to happen immediately.
Green maximizes the team’s resources and productivity. He takes the goals set by higher goal people and creates progress and balance around those priorities. He understands tradeoffs and keeps forward progress as a focal point in his achievement.
As a couple, Green will tend to want to make the call and Blue will want to support you with the effort. Their blind spots are that they do not necessarily know what is the most important thing at a given time as a very high goal person would. Thus, in their relationship, they tend to be steady and tactical.
Detail
They are both different in how much routine and freedom they each crave. They are both Managers around details. They will manage those they hand off to and have a balance between routine and personal freedom.
Blue is a mid detail score at 61. Her first instinct is to do the work herself. If she does hand off, she will check back and keep the person accountable and moving towards a goal.
Blue prefers routine work and with her concrete score, doing the tried and true is more amenable.
Green has a 43 Detail score and is also managerial. He wants to hand off. But he wants to do one more thing. He cares about the quality. He will organize for many others and maintain order personally for himself.
Their differences here are around order and freedom. Blue will tend to want to keep more order and Green will want to have more freedom. They can help each other by understanding each other’s preferences in this area and what gives them both happiness.
Both of them may not seek resources or be attuned to detail. These are more extreme scores and these people would help bring more to the table in terms of execution and finding resources.
They are both different in all areas and experience reality differently. They can use the differences to grow and sharpen each other. As a team, it allows them to be more powerful by covering each other’s blind spots. But it takes awareness and dialogue.
Overall, Green is a manager. Blue is a tactician.
Living In Your Strengths
Everybody is something.
And it’s hard to be someone you are not.
The best you can do, especially under stress, is to be aware of other people’s preferences and then, if you want to have influence, help meet their preferences rather than your own.