Who inspires you? Most of us can think of someone. Maybe we wonder how we can be more like them or work towards that goal. It’s human nature to want something we admire in others.
When we’re young, most of us want to fit in with our peers. We wear the latest fashions and listen to the same music.
It gives us a sense of belonging through a common cultural language. We are safe as long as we look like our cooler classmates.
Once we reach the workplace, we are usually more free to be ourselves, but it’s the rare person who feels they can be fully themselves at work. I was one of the lucky ones.
I believe the healthiest workplaces embrace the natural diversity of human experience, capitalise on our strengths, and support us in our weaknesses.
We’re used to hearing about diversity of race, gender and culture, but we’re all different in terms of our fundamental approach to life — an aspect of diversity many employers overlook, creating tension in the workplace.
I’ve always been aware I’m not part of the in-crowd. I’m wired differently from most people I meet. I’ve worked hard to find my place in the world, but I’ve also been lucky.
After school, I found an entry-level job with a small academic publisher specialising in library and information science journals. The employer had attracted a larger proportion of “odd” people than usual.
For the first time in my life, I wasn’t the geekiest nerd in the room — and believe me, that was saying something!
That place gave me back the confidence I had lost at school that I was an intelligent person with good ideas.
Years later, when I’d worked my way up to become the network manager at a large museum in London, I was sent on a training course on how to create and maintain a brilliant team.
I had never wanted to manage people, so this was daunting in the extreme for an introvert who had only escaped from the bullies at school about six years earlier.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but what the course prescribed was an exercise in embracing diversity that I’ve carried with me to this day.
The course described the nine character types (“roles”) according to a model developed by Meredith Belbin.
We examined each role, from the “Shaper” brimming with ideas and enthusiasm but perhaps inclined to dismiss genuine obstacles, to the “Completer Finisher”, whose quiet focus on small details ensured nothing would be missed but could irritate dynamic people like the Shaper.
Each role had strengths and weaknesses. The most important lesson was that no one role was deemed perfect.
The team’s success hinged on me placing people in the right jobs for their temperament and pairing them up so that their strengths balanced out the others’ weaknesses.
For the first time in my life, I felt valued for being pedantic and cautious, while appreciating that I would never have succeeded if I hadn’t been paired with someone like my boss at the time, a visionary with no patience for fine details.
The traits that most irritated me about him were the things that allowed me to be myself at work.
It’s surprising how much better you can tolerate someone’s different approach once you see them as a missing puzzle piece that matches up with yours.
It’s also surprising how much more we value ourselves when we see how our strengths support other people’s weaknesses.
Maybe we don’t need to work harder to become the person we admire. Maybe we’re already there.
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