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Use HBDI to Build a High-Performing Team
My team is not performing well, so what can I do? Well, you can use HBDI to Build a High Performing Team. Our second video in this HBDI series is all about building high-performing teams. Join Darren and George as they explore ways you can super-boost your team for success.
You Can Read the Full HBDI Transcript Below:
Darren A. Smith:
Hi, my name’s Darren Smith and I’m here with George Araman. George, how are you?
George:
Hi Darren, how are you?
Darren A. Smith:
Very good, very good. We’re at the home of the world’s stickiest learning MBM, and we’re talking about HBDI now the 2nd in our podcast on HBDI. And I’m going to read out the title because it’s taken George and I a while to get an absolutely cracking title. My team is not performing well. What can I do? And this is based on feedback we’ve had from other people, OK, what can you do? And the second part is use HBDI to build a high performing team. So this podcast is all about HBDI and teamwork. And high performing teams, George, why did we come up with this as our second in our range of HBDI podcasts?
George:
Today, there’s a lot of problems around the world with Teamwork and team working together or not working together. So we found out like around 15 to 16 topics around that and we want to delve into them and discover how can we tackle each one of them using HBDI and how HBDI can take team performance to the next level. Love it. Yeah.
Darren A. Smith:
Brilliant. Love it. So for a couple of minutes, let’s do a recap on HBDI is, we’ll share a profile just so the viewers can see what we’re talking about in case they’re new to HBDI. And then let’s get straight into Team conflict, team dynamics and all that good stuff. All right, all right. So let’s check in with you HBDI Hermann brain dominance instrument. That’s all well and good, but what does it mean? What’s your take on? What is HBDI?
George:
As in the title.
Darren A. Smith:
What does it mean to you?
George:
Well, it’s a profile. An assessment profile type that helps you navigate into your like understanding or discovering your thinking style. If you’re more left-brained right-brain conversion, divergent feeler or thinker, all those types of sorts of things and to help you to help guide you to use your best assets and your best tools as well as improve the areas that you need in certain circumstances to develop better work. And work better in teams as well. Yeah, indeed.
Darren A. Smith:
Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant. I put George on the spot of there a little bit because we did a podcast last time, and I’m just bringing back his memory of what he retained. I’ve been working with HBDI for about 20 years. George, you’re relatively new to it. And we did your profile, didn’t we? So you did. You did 80 questions and then this thing pops out. Is that right? Yeah. OK.
George:
Yeah, yeah.
Darren A. Smith:
And what George was referring to is the left half of the brain, the right half of the brain, which most people know. This is largely logical. This is largely creative, but what Ned Herman said was there’s a top half and a bottom half of the brain as well, given US 4 quadrants. So the four quadrants, if I do it as four FS fax. So this is a thinking preference for retaining lots of facts. If you’ve got a mate who’s good at pub quizzes, brilliant.
Darren A. Smith:
This is future, so this is me. It’s not my profile, but I do have a tendency to think more in the yellow quadrant, which is big picture creativity type, then we’ve got.
Darren A. Smith:
It is.
George:
That’s what we that’s why we get along very well. I love yellow and red.
Darren A. Smith:
Yes. And we’re gonna come back to that. That’s why we make a good team. And the red is F, which is feelings. So these people make good nurses, good teachers, particularly vocational and the greens are our form. They like structure. They’re like project plans. They’re like next. They’re like timelines. And each we can all do all four of these. But we have a preference for pretty, for pretty much one or another. So I have a preference up here in yellow. You have a preference for some yellow and some red.
Darren A. Smith:
Less blue.
George:
Yeah.
Darren A. Smith:
And less green. OK, so that’s a whistle-stop tour of HBDI. The Herm and brain dominance instruments. What have I missed that we need to tell people about HBDI profiling?
George:
Well, actually, I’m very curious on how, since we’re talking about teams, I would like to know the difference between an individual assessment profile and a team assessment profile. Like how do they defer and like, why would it be important for a team to do an HBDI assessment test? OK, no. That’s the problem.
Darren A. Smith:
Imagine we haven’t got one here just because of GDPR, but imagine this is your individual profile. Then we took that and we mapped it with thirty of your friends or teammates onto one of these, and so you probably come out as a red. Let’s call you a red. I’ve been mapped as in yellow and then we put George and Bob and Ron and Julie and blah blah blah, we mapped them all up here. And then what we do is we say to them, what does that mean? Now imagine if all of them were thinking in the Red Quadrant and they didn’t have any yellow, blue or green.
George:
Yeah.
Darren A. Smith:
So this is what happened when we did some work with the NHS. Now the NHS are largely about nursing about doctors, medical looking after people bedside manner and they were Reds all Reds, which has a strength of course as each quadrant does, but each quadrant also has a weakness. Now what was happening with the NHS? These guys were really looking after their patients. But the problem is they had no analysis on what was going on. They had no future and their processes were crap.
Darren A. Smith:
So that was the challenge for them as a team. Now the answer isn’t to try and shift who we are. We can only be the best version of ourselves. The answer is to try and make up for the weaknesses of the other quadrants by forcing ourselves to think in the other ways, because we can do all four.
George:
That’s super interesting and it leads me to follow up question. So let’s say in this example most of the in of the people in the company are red. Would you recommend for example in this instance that HR managers hire people from different quadrants in the future to help balance it? Or is it more like no, no, we like we don’t want to go to this extreme like how would you tack on this problem? OK.
Darren A. Smith:
Hmm. Hmm. We work with a lot of companies who use HBDI as a recruitment tool. But here’s the warning, the health warning. Make sure it’s one of a number of pieces of information you use to select the right candidate, not the only one. And if there was a first thing, it must be. Are they right for the job? Skills, capability, experience. Are they a good fit for our culture? And then second, we might use HPDI and 3rd. We might look at something else, but don’t let your recruitment policy be driven by trying to put all the colours together.
Darren A. Smith:
It’s part of building up a picture of people.
George:
Int.
George:
Yeah, I mean that is my question, yeah.
Darren A. Smith:
Alright, now if we’ve got 99% Reds and we’ve got to hire 100th person, should they be another red? Or if they are, then we know how to deal with Reds. That’s good. If they’re not on there a yellow, then they might become or let’s say even a blue, because opposites are where they struggle. You might bring this one person in, then they feel like a lone wolf. Their voice is not heard because it’s one against 99 and that’s the problem. And then these guys over time go hold up. I’ve been talking about analysis for three years and you guys aren’t doing it.
George:
Yeah.
Darren A. Smith:
We don’t need analysis and then all of a sudden she goes and they go. Why’d you go? Well, I wasn’t. You weren’t doing any of that analysis stuff. We don’t need it. So in the team we have to be very aware of our lone wolves, those people who aren’t part of, let’s call it the core, and we need to listen to them disproportionately because their voice can be very minimised.
George:
OK. That’s super interesting. That’s super interesting. And so OK. In general, like do you? Do you know which? So you said that opposing teams like red and blue are usually very much into opposition. Is it the same with green and yellow?
Darren A. Smith:
Yes, so it’s the toughest communication and the toughest understanding is across the quadrants and this is because they’re furthest apart from ourselves. So if I put that in the vernacular, the yellows can see the Greens as detailed monkeys.
George:
Hmm.
Darren A. Smith:
And the Greens see the yellows as we’ve got a head in the clouds, loads of ideas, but no clue what to do. And then if the Reds look at the Blues as sort of robots, they just want data and the Blues look at Reds as touchy feely, pink and fuzzy people. Now here’s the thing. It’s really easy to do that. It’s really easy for me as a yellow to see a green as just someone who wants to fill out Gantt charts.
George:
Yeah.
Darren A. Smith:
But here’s the crazy thing. A yellow and a green get together if they don’t want to understand each other. Two and two make 1/2 because they just don’t go on. This isn’t going to work. We’re never going to see each other’s world. OK, now, what about if they were to see the strengths in each other? The yellow has the ideas, and the green can make them happen. Two and two. Can it 3?
George:
Mm.
Darren A. Smith:
And that’s where the power of HBDI is.
George:
That’s interesting. Interesting. So OK. OK. Yeah. I’m just thinking in processing. It’s very interesting. I love it.
Darren A. Smith:
Here’s the power of HBDI is, yes, understanding our profile. If you want 1000 facts and you want the Excel spreadsheet to go to a four decimal places, but I get what you need, then you might say to me as a read I get that you need to get together. See the whites of my eyes and understand how we’re getting on the relationship is really important. So it allows us to talk about each other with each other in a third party perspective.
George:
OK. Interesting. OK, I I do have a question like, OK, so we talked about opposites, but what about, like, how do teams in the same quadrant work together?
Darren A. Smith:
Yeah.
George:
Like blue and yellow and red and green and. Which do you have like, is there more powerful or? A more performing team than the other in general. It’s the opposite.
Darren A. Smith:
It’s easier, it’s easier for the top, let’s call them the top guys, to get on the bottom, guys to get on the left, guys to get on the right guys to get on because they’re just adjacent. It’s sort of putting my arm here and put my arm around the next person. That’s almost easy to get on. But the real power of achieving a high performing team through HBI is getting past that opposite bit because naturally, you and I, let’s say as opposites, walk into a room. We’re just not going to get on.
Darren A. Smith:
We like people like ourselves, and we don’t like people who aren’t like ourselves. But what about if I could see the power of what you bring and you see the power of what I bring? Wow, we could move mountains. Weather.
George:
Well, actually it’s a little bit out of context, but I think it gives a good like explanation overview. It’s something I do on my own work on the side and that I wrote in my book, which is in a way about masculine and feminine. So I’m trying to relate it in a way that we all have both masculine and feminine inside of us. And what you are looking for is the part that is lacking in the other and it’s the same thing with HBDI is what I’m trying to say. So the red, for example, has a dominant red and has a dormant blue.
Darren A. Smith:
Yes. Yes, that makes sense.
George:
And he’s he or she is trying to look at the blue outside of himself or herself in the other person to complete themselves. So This is why there is this constant. Yeah. And so once they are actually go and understand this, this other person, they can become more complete or more home. And this is where the all the alchemy starts to happen and the magic in the in the dynamics in the team building and teamwork starts to happen.
Darren A. Smith:
You’re very right. Yeah, absolutely. Right. And yes, it is very much and I’ll take your analogy and I’ll just give you a quick story. I used to have a business partner who was agreeing. So I’m a yellow. He was a green and his wife who worked with us was a red. Now she once said to him.
George:
Mm hmm mm.
Darren A. Smith:
We’ll call him Bob. Bob, do you still love me? And Bob said back to Julie. I told you on our wedding day that I did. And if that changes, I’ll let you know. It is a wonderful piece of communication between the red and the green. They were both absolutely right in what they asked and what they said, but they weren’t guessing it.
George:
Yeah, beautiful.
Darren A. Smith:
Yes, so let me share another piece around teams getting together. Let’s say they’re all in one quadrant. We use red before we use yellow. So there’s a bunch of people in, in the yellow. The challenge is that they can end up having what I recall a yellow off. I’ve got 1000 ideas, I’ve got 2000. I’m more creative. I can do more brainstorming. So there’s a danger of just having a team within one quadrant because they can just compete with each other in being the best at that quadrant. So the real challenge here is not to change.
Darren A. Smith:
The team profile the challenge is to understand our profile and then try to overcome our let’s call them weaknesses. So if we’re predominantly a bottom half brain team, we think in the green and the red, then we need to force ourselves when we come to a team meeting, what is the big picture? Let’s just start by asking that question. And when did we last do some data analysis and what did it say? And that’s how we force ourselves as a team to slightly change our profile without changing our profile.
George:
That’s interesting. That’s interesting.
Darren A. Smith:
So if we come back to our title of our podcast, my team is not performing well. What can I do? Use HBDI to build a high performing team? What other questions does that put in your mind?
George:
So let’s try to take an example like just one of the examples I’ve had. Let’s say for example, the team has a lack of clarity, so this is something that sometimes happen in in teams and how can HPDI help us? Remove this lack of clarity or clarify the purpose or the mission or the vision that the team is trying to achieve there.
Darren A. Smith:
OK, let me answer it this way and it might be a two-part answer. If the first part doesn’t answer it like I hoped. When a team get together, let’s say they’re having a team meeting. They’re trying to deal with business and a few problems that they’ve got. The problem is shared by, let’s say the most senior person and then eight people almost start talking from a blue perspective, a green or whatever colour they are. So all of a sudden we’ve got all these perspectives going on and then the green tries to push theirs a bit more. We need a process to solve this, and the yellow’s good.
Darren A. Smith:
I’ve got four ideas and the Red’s hold them. We need to think about. You can see how these and every team meeting around the world happens exactly the same. Bored about this? We’re going to take HBDI and I’m going to connect it with Edward de Bono. Bear with me. Edward Debono came up with the 6 thinking hats and what he said was that we need to put a hat on as a team and think this way. Then we all put this hat on to put that just there. Take HBDI and let’s resolve the problem by all thinking in one quadrant together.
Darren A. Smith:
So the senior person might say we’re all going to think in the blue quadrant. Now we can all do all four quadrants for some of you. It’s easier, some of you it’s harder and he says, what facts do we have about this? OK, so the red’s all right. I’m going to think about some facts. The Greens, and I think they’re all thinking of facts. OK, let’s do that. What do we have that on a flip chart? We’ve got 10 facts about this problem. We’re missing our sales budget by 7.7 million. Great. Got that. And a bunch of others. Now let’s move into the yellow. What we’re trying to achieve.
Darren A. Smith:
I want everyone’s thinking yellow and they do all four hats, like Edward de Bono’s sixth thinking hats, but using HBDI. And what happens is the whole team starts thinking in the same way, but not such a same way that they’ve got group think going on. But thinking the same way they think about the same perspective and all of a sudden we start to start to solve problems much quicker. Yeah.
George:
I love it and I do have a question. Just maybe in case some of our viewers are not familiar with Edward de Bono and the 6th thinking hats, could you maybe let us know what are the six thinking hats and how do they compare to HBI because HPI, we have 4 quadrants and the 6th thinking hats we have 6. So we have two in a way two additional. Natural thinking. Yeah, he has lots of them. They’re amazing.
Darren A. Smith:
So Edward de Bono came up with the six thinking hats. I think it was in the 80s. He’s a Maltese guy. Fabulous for books on Thinking 6 thinking hats is possibly his most famous. His other is DATT natural thinking. So when people have heard of natural thinking, it probably came from de Bono. Now the other thing that people have heard of is Black Hat thinking. And they know that sort of doom. Well, it came from the six hats. And what a team do is they put on a hat at a time. And the Black Hat is what’s wrong with this situation.
Darren A. Smith:
Well, all our customers are leaving us. OK, let’s all think about that for a moment and then we move into the green hat. The yellow hat, the Red Hat. And each one asks us to think about the problem in a different way from a people perspective, a process perspective and so on. Now, if you get deeper into sixth-thinking hats, you’ll know that blue is controlling all the hats, and then you need to put all the hats in order. But also, you don’t need to use all the hats all the time.
George:
Yeah.
Darren A. Smith:
Now, if anyone’s still confused about 6 thinking hats, we’ve got a great article. So if you Google Six Thinking Hats, read it. We’ve made it really, really simple. In essence, it’s a way of solving problems as a team by putting on metaphorical hats to get the team to think in the same way.
George:
Love it. Love it.
Darren A. Smith:
So all we’ve done is taken Edward de Bono’s idea and maps it over to HBDI from 6 hats to four hats. But the Direction’s the same, we’re getting the team to think in the same way.
George:
Very powerful. Maybe we can try to think of another example or another topic we can go through. Would you be? Would you like that? Yeah.
Darren A. Smith:
On the team. So if we think about.
George:
Yes.
Darren A. Smith:
Giving feedback as a team so feedback’s really important as we know particularly for line managers, but actually for anyone.
George:
Mm.
Darren A. Smith:
So feedback is generally done. I think the research says 4 * a year, but we’re not talking about big feedback. Sit down for two hours. We’re talking about cheers, George, and that’s it. Now if we take this and we think about the feedback we’re giving, we can really improve our team by giving feedback in the language that they want to hear it. So these guys want more facts around their feedback. These guys want bigger picture and so on and that will help to build our team because they’ll understand it better.
George:
I’d just like another question popped in. Would you be using in parallel the five love languages for work or like, is it different completely? OK.
Darren A. Smith:
I think it’s different. I mean, we like a very simple model for feedback, which is you’re good because you’d be even better if a simple two-part sentence. If you overlay HBDI on that, you’ve got to. If you’re blue, try and get some facts in there. If you’re yellow, try and get some big picture in there. You get the idea. What we don’t do enough as of as a team and to become a high performing team is give each other feedback. And I don’t mean feedback’s the F word. It all has to be horrible. What I do mean is it can be you’re good because.
George:
Yeah.
Darren A. Smith:
You did this and let’s make sure we add the because otherwise if you tell something, they’re good, they don’t know why. And if you tell people what they do well, they’ll do more of it. So let’s do positive feedback for a while with a because.
George:
Very true.
Darren A. Smith:
Alright, George, I think we’re coming up on our time. Any last questions around my team is not performing well. What can I do? Use HBDI to build a high performing team.
George:
Well, I do have lots of questions unfortunately, as you said, like we’re kind of running out of time, maybe we can have an exact one more example. In case like I was thinking maybe a low transparency, if we have a problem of transparency or teams withholding information. One of the two. Ok.
Mm hmm.
Darren A. Smith:
Yeah. I think the example would be Blues tend to hold on to the information because they value information more. So the challenge for being a blue is because they’re fact monsters. They’re Blues, they love facts. They can have a tendency to grab it all and hang on to it, which can feel like the other quadrants as though they’re not part of the inner circle. Now, if you’re a blue, it doesn’t have to happen. It’s rule of thumb, but it can happen.
George:
OK, great.
Darren A. Smith:
I think that the biggest take away from HBDI and this podcast.
George:
Yeah.
Darren A. Smith:
Is enabling HBDI means people can talk about people with people in a third party perspective because we no longer we now have the language to say you’re a blue. I know why you need that. Instead, before our language was sort of passive aggressive. Why that hell does he want this Excel spreadsheet in 19 tabs? He’s an idiot. So we really progress our language onwards and it helps us to build high performing teams.
George:
Beautiful. I love it. I love.
Darren A. Smith:
OK, George, we’re gonna wrap up because. We’ve probably been longer than we’ve said, but I think they’ve enjoyed it.
George:
I’m sure they will.
Darren A. Smith:
Right, George. Thank you. I’ll see you next time. Our next podcast is.
Darren A. Smith:
Another one around HPDI and we’re going to do I really don’t know how to manage conflict at work use HBDI to manage conflict to work.
George:
Very interesting.
Darren A. Smith:
All right, that’s our next podcast. See you soon. Thank you, George, for your input.
George:
Thank you, Darren. See you soon.
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