We’ve all experienced it. You meet someone at work who approaches things completely differently from you, and somehow, everything feels harder.
They ask questions when you want to get on with it. They want to move quickly when you want to think things through. They want to talk about the people involved when you’re focused on the task.
It’s tempting to think they’re making things more difficult.
But what if the opposite is true?
What if the people who work differently from us are actually seeing the things we can’t?
We naturally connect with people like us
Most of us find it easier to work with people who think and communicate in ways that feel familiar. There’s less explaining to do. We seem to ‘get’ each other.
The problem is that teams made up of similar preferences can also share similar blind spots.
This is where we find Insights Discovery particularly useful. The four colour energies give teams a practical way to recognise the strengths different people bring — and to understand why the approaches we find hardest may also be the ones we need most.
On the Insights wheel, each energy sits opposite another: Cool Blue and Sunshine Yellow; Fiery Red and Earth Green. Those opposites can find each other difficult to understand. They also have a lot to offer each other.
The gift of the opposite
Someone with a Cool Blue preference may naturally bring precision, rigour and careful thinking. Sunshine Yellow can bring warmth, energy, ideas and a focus on possibility.
Fiery Red can create pace, make decisions and drive results. Earth Green can bring patience, listening, support and a focus on relationships.
Neither side is better.
In fact, the real value comes when the team can use both.
The Red leader may need the Green colleague to slow things down enough to bring people with them. The Green colleague may need the Red colleague to create the momentum that turns good intentions into action.
The same is true of Blue and Yellow. Detail and enthusiasm can feel like opposites, but together they can produce a much stronger result.
When strengths become difficult for others
One of the things we explore with teams is how the same behaviour can be interpreted very differently.
Fiery Red’s directness might feel refreshingly clear to one person and blunt or rushed to another. Earth Green’s care might feel supportive to one person and slow or indecisive to another.
Cool Blue’s precision can look like rigour — or unnecessary criticism. Sunshine Yellow’s energy can look like creativity — or a lack of focus.
The behaviour hasn’t necessarily changed. The interpretation has.
Recognising that can take a lot of heat out of team relationships.
From tolerating difference to valuing it
It’s easy to say that we value difference. It’s much harder to deliberately use it.
Our October Keeping Insights Alive session was about exactly that: moving from tolerating difference to valuing it. We encouraged teams to ask, rather than assume; to name the value someone else brings; and to deliberately pair people with different energies when a task would benefit from a different perspective.
Instead of always choosing the person who works like you, what might happen if you deliberately paired opposite energies? What would Blue spot that Yellow might miss? What would Green notice that Red might overlook?
A question worth asking your team
Who in your team do you find hardest to work with?
Now ask yourself a second question:
What might they see that I don’t?
That doesn’t mean every difference is useful, or that difficult behaviour should simply be accepted. It means pausing before we label someone as difficult and becoming curious about the value behind the difference.
Strong teams don’t just accept difference. They use it deliberately.
At Performance Catalyst, that is one of the reasons we love keeping Insights alive. The colour energies give teams a shared language for having conversations that might otherwise be much harder to start.
Sometimes the person who frustrates you most is also the person who can help you see something you’ve missed.
That’s worth valuing.
Find out more about Insights Discovery at Performance Catalyst →
Interested in getting your own Insights colour profile? You can access it directly here →