Temperament, Culture, and the Core

Email Blog 2 for New Coaches

Know Thyself – Ancient Greek Aphorism

I believe that the greatest truths of the universe don't lie outside, in the study of the stars and the planets. They lie deep within us, in the magnificence of our heart, mind, and soul. Until we understand what is within, we can't understand what is without.

—Anita Moorjani, Dying To Be Me

To learn about leadership means first learning about yourself …

So, what makes you tick? What makes the people on your team tick? How does the way we tick fit into this idea of “culture?”

I recently heard Dana Anderson, Capital ESD 113 Superintendent, comment that he wasn’t sure that organizations could learn, but that it is the people who learn in the organization that results in change. In Blog 1 we talked about a personal theory of action and problem of practice. It is one approach to how people learn.

In Blog 1 explained that I was learning about the role of mentor coach. My new metaphor for this role is “The Sock Assist.”

A “sock assist” is a device that provides a little help to get your socks on when you can’t quite reach your feet. So, if you are feeling stuck as you work with your team, I hope you will reach out to me, or to another WSLA coach, for an assist in getting your socks back on and your team up and running again!

Temperament: Knowing how our minds work …

Learning about temperament has helped me learn about myself. In schools we use True Colors to help students understand temperament, themselves and others. The Meyer’s-Briggs and the Kiersey-Bates temperament sorters are tools that many of us have taken to learn about our temperaments in leadership programs. In case you are curious, my color is “Gold.” On the Meyer’s Briggs I’m an ISTJ. In other words, I tend to work first and play later.

What is your temperament? How does it influence your behavior as a coach of leaders?

How can you use the information from these temperament tools to help you build trust and understanding between the members of the teams being coached?
What signals might you get from your team that trust and temperament might be topics to introduce and discuss?

Want to refresh what you know about temperament or go deeper?

True Colors:

Kiersey Bates:

Culture: Extending the Geometry of Leadership

Connors and Smith, authors of Change the Culture, Change the Game, use a triangle called the Results Pyramidto distinguish between the present and the desired culture. To get differentresults we need to change the culture. To change a culture, you need to change the experiences, beliefs, and/or actions of the people in the culture.

When you look at a room full of people, picture them as a room full of individual triangles. Each triangle is made up of individual experiences, beliefs, actions and results.Each person represents a personal culture, distinct and different from every other triangle. Collectively, each individual culture makes up a larger triangle where the common and shared experiences, beliefs, actions and results represent the culture in the room or organization.

How can we help the teams we coach see and understand the culture in which they work?
What do you need to learn about and practice to help them see and understand their potential for better results? What experiences might be needed to change beliefs?
What connections do you make between knowing what makes you tick and what makes a culture tick?

Three Cultural Metaphors

Father Michael Oleska, an Alaskan Orthodox Priest, defines culture using three metaphors. He charts them using the geometric shape of a triangle! The three metaphors are:

The story into which you were born. (Embedded by cultural experience and temperament)
The way we see the world. (The rules by which we live)
The game of life as we understand and play it. (the political frame)

I want to focus on the first two of Father Oleska’s metaphors, though they are all intertwined, because they help me think about and make sense of the cultures that people, teams and organizations represent and why misunderstanding is so common. He suggests that we can learn to understand one another better by listening to the stories being told and paying attention to the pace, pitch, distance, order of deference, volume and rituals in the interactions of people in their current culture. Staff rooms, meetings, sports events, and social occasions are good places to observe culture in action.

Is thepace fast or slow? Is the pitch high or low? What does the tone mean? Do you interpret the meaning of pace and pitch differently than the people you are observing?
People in different cultures are born into environments where they learn the characteristics of culture above from birth forward. The differences in the culture we are born into can cause misunderstanding. Do you agree, disagree? Why?

The second bullet is about rules. Gretchen Rubin, the author of the Happiness Projectuses four quadrants, or frames to think about how people respond to rules. She also has a tool to help us think about the kind of rule follower we might be. A link to her video is provided below, along with a copy of her short rule assessment tool that is attached. How might you use these resources with your team? You can find the rule quadrant descriptions on the last slide of the attached PowerPoint.

Core Values and Culture

Our core values are embedded in our personal and system cultures. Sometimes we are aware of them and sometimes they operate below our radar because we can only keep about three things going in our brains at one time. Below are two links to core values exercises that you might fit into your work with your teams:

Center for Ethical Leadership exercise that I first encountered in a presentation by Dr. Bill Grace who defined the primary responsibility of leaders as “providing hope.”

www.ethicalleadership.org/uploads/2/6/2/6/26265761/1.4_core_values_exercise.pdf

The second exercise comes from Elena Aguilar’s book The Art of Coaching: Effective Strategies for School Transformation. It is available on her website:

A final note on temperament. We all operate with baseline levels of “happiness” temperament. It is one of the most inheritable traits. When we encounter positive events in our life, we swing up above the baseline. When we encounter negative events in our life we swing below the baseline. Duration is the length of time we stay at the high above the baseline or how long we stay below the baseline. This is my interpretation of information in the book, Feedback.

Our baseline, swing and duration influence how we respond to adversity and success. In other words, it affects how we respond to coaching and feedback. Do you agree? Why or why not? What connections to mindset might you make to my interpretation of “happiness?”

Popular research indicates that happier people experience less stress in the workplace.

I’m not sure if there is a strong correlation between temperament, happiness and information about rule following tendencies, but I do believe that knowing about them influences mindset. There is evidence that “mindset” does influence our own mindset and the mindsets of those who influence children directly.

And one more thing …

Dr. Alex Delaware, a character in the Jonathan Kellerman novel, Survival of the Fittest p 59, makes the statement, “Biology is strong, but there are always choices.”Is temperament determined by biology?

What is the way past biology to choice?

Cheers, and keep putting your coaching socks on everyday – with or without an assist!

Tom