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Companies are tightening the belt. Management is making tough decisions. Often, decisions they have never had to make over the last 10 years. Budgets are getting slashed, people are being laid off. Tunnel vision is the norm. Sounds kind of stressful to me.
At some point, managers and companies will see the cracks in their plans. It may be putting too much responsibility for change on a single manager, or cutting back too deeply in non selling areas of the company. The challenge will be to figuring out what can be rebound or rejuvenated before it is too late.
It is these situations when the phone rings. The leadership team is dealing with conflict poorly or the boss realizes his people are checking out. The pain is increasing for the manager, with measurable ramifications on the business results. These issues are internal, not generated by the outside economic climate. They are controllable and preventable.
HBDI Facilitates Neutral Ground
It is important to have a neutral language to talk about issues, concerns and challenges. The HBDI (Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument) is my assessment of choice. HBDI revolves around thinking styles, not personality types.
The research work that Roger Sperry did in the 1950’s and 1960’s and subsequently earned him the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1981, states that there are two major hemispheres, the right and left part of the brain. About 30 years ago, Ned Herrmann, working in General Electric, furthered that research and divided the brain into four distinct quadrants. These quadrants help individuals and teams to gain insight to how they think, learn and communicate with others.
After taking an HBDI assessment, individuals and teams can receive a profile showing them their preferences for each quadrant.
HBDI Stress Profiles
An additional insight into the HBDI thinking preferences is the stress profile. Your base profile will provide you information on what I refer to as your “steady state”. The stress profile may be very similar or different from your steady state. Think about people who you know well and can predict relatively easily how they might react to something. Then, all of a sudden their behavior is quite different or may even shock you. Chances are, they may be showing their stress behavior to you.
Having a different stress profile is not always negative. Often, it allows us to tap into other quadrants more readily. Understanding it is how we might react and sharing that information with others can be beneficial to avoiding the button pushing that often happens in relationships.
The HBDI’s application extends to individuals, small groups, organizations and your customer relationships.
Article by Lynn Dessert
Lynn Dessert is an executive coach and training expert on cognitive development and personal effectiveness - facilitating behavior change for individuals and teams. Clients consult her to design and deliver HBDI leadership development programs and career minded individuals engage her for personal development. Lynn is the author of Elephants at Work and owner of Leadership Breakthrough, Inc. specializing in Executive, Leadership and Career Development. Start your discovery process by contacting her at 585.249.5149 today.
Lynn has written 271 awesome articles for us at Elephants at Work
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