A colleague and I were talking about her children recently. They have the same parents, grew up in the same house, and lived by the same rules. And yet, as she described them, they could hardly be more different from one another: how they approach a problem, what energizes them, what wears them out.
Anyone with siblings, or with more than one child, knows this. We don’t find it strange at home. We expect it.
So why does it surprise us so much at work?
Members of a leadership team often have a lot in common: the same company, the same goals, sometimes the same professional background. It’s easy to assume that people with that much in common should see things the same way. When they don’t, we tend to read the difference as a problem. They’re being difficult. They don’t get it. They aren’t committed.
More often, they’re simply different, in the same way siblings are. “Difficult” is often the word we reach for once we’ve stopped trying to understand someone and started managing around them. I wrote more about what that label costs a team in What Difficult Usually Means.
And Then the Surprises
The other part of our conversation was just as interesting. Alongside all those differences, her kids share some traits that surprise her, things no one taught them that show up in each of them anyway.
Teams are like that too. Two leaders who seem to be opposites, who clash in every meeting, sometimes discover they need exactly the same thing to do their best work. That discovery can change a working relationship faster than any number of conversations about communication style.
Why We Use Birkman the Way We Do
This is a big part of why we use Birkman in our work with leaders and teams. Birkman can go very deep, and in trainings I’ve noticed a pull, among those of us who are passionate about the tool, to go as deep as we can. The detail is fascinating, and knowing it well is part of doing this work responsibly.
But depth for its own sake isn’t our purpose in the room. We’re not there to show what we know about the assessment. We’re there to help people understand themselves first, and then understand the people they work with every day. When that happens, the question shifts from “Why are they like that?” to “What do they need, and what do I need?”
It Still Takes Energy
Here’s the part I want to be honest about. Understanding our differences doesn’t make working with different people effortless. Self-awareness doesn’t remove the friction. It changes what we do with it.
We get better at it. We recognize what’s happening sooner, assume less, and adjust more. It still takes energy, every time. What changes is where that energy goes. A team that understands its differences puts its energy into understanding and working with each other, instead of misreading each other, labeling someone as difficult, or talking about a colleague instead of to them.
For a leadership team, this shows up in execution: in how quickly decisions get made, how openly people raise concerns, and how much gets escalated back to the leader that the team could have resolved on its own.
I wrote about the other half of this, understanding ourselves before we can see others clearly, in Understanding Self So We Can See Others.
Think of the person on your team who is most different from you. What do you know about what they need to do their best work?
