What’s your style? Are you cutting edge, innovative, and out-of-the-box? Do you tend to prefer neat and structured tasks? Just as you have a set of preferences for what work you do and how you work, so does everyone that you work with. These “styles” are associated with how you prefer to think and learn – how you take in and use information.

Each person has a preference for different thinking, learning, relating, and communicating styles. This does not mean you cannot work in other ways; it means that your tendency is to approach tasks first in a way that fits your preference. Your style is simply a preference, not a competence. By understanding the way you think and learn (and thus how you approach your work) and using simple techniques to better “get” the way you think, learn, and work, people become more effective together.

Developing the skills of working with styles, making best use of your style and the styles of others, equips your team to combine talents rather than compete. When you better understand styles, you are equipped to understand where someone else is coming from and what you need in order to be heard. Communications become clearer so there are fewer “misses.”  

Expectations, too, become more understandable. People need different levels of input or review based on their style. For example: Jim wants frequent, detailed updates; Steve wants only the bottom line. Anne wants to play with ideas, while Rory wants a precise schedule for implementation. Moving past these different expectations puts you on the road to success more quickly.

Perhaps even more important than improving individual effectiveness, understanding styles empowers you to assemble more effective teams. The concept of groupthink – when all members of a team or group converge on a single idea and are unable to see other ideas or effectively consider the consequences of the favored option – is relevant here. By specifically selecting team members for their diversity – using thinking styles diversity – you take the first step towards revving up both results and relationships because each of the elements important for success exist in the team’s collective style. Each project will include fresh thinking, targeted research and analysis, timely and systematic implementation, and greater team and organizational engagement.

The journey towards accelerated teamwork begins with the individual. Each person needs to have insight into their own style preferences to unlock their potential. Next, the individuals on the team or in the group join in learning how they can best work with style variations. Using experiential learning and application-based cases, your team develops the capacity to approach their tasks with a sense balance and greater resourcefulness.

Application of thinking and learning styles (a concept developed by Ned Herrmann and widely known as Whole-Brain technology) is one of the cornerstones of The Odyssey Group’s approach.  We facilitate meetings and develop learning designs that are balanced across the continuum of thinking and learning styles. This approach helps ensure effectiveness in projects as different as change management, team development, competency identification, or training. Applying an understanding of styles allows you to choose those that are most effective at reaching the objectives. In addition to just meeting the bottom line, however, using Whole Brain techniques builds employee engagement – people feel like we are speaking their language.

Want to know more about working with “style”? Let us hear from you. contactus/contact-us-form.cfm