5 Voices summary

What’s your dominant voice? Let’s find out. If you’re highly imaginative, always looking to the future and daydreaming about the next big invention or business idea, chances are you’re a creative. This is the voice of innovation and change.

You’ll find creatives in every walk of life. The mind behind the Post-it Note is a creative. So are artists, engineers and hobbyists tinkering in garages or coming up with new ways to insulate buildings. What they all have in common is that they’re interested in answering old questions in new ways, and set on redefining the questions being asked.

If you mapped different voices onto political beliefs, guardians would undoubtedly be conservatives. Whether you regard conservatism as a hidebound defense of old evils or a necessary bulwark against new ones, there’s no disputing that it’s an important voice in society.

So what exactly do guardians stand for? Well, as the name suggests, their primary aim is to protect the tried and tested ways of doing things. Like nurturers, guardians are focused on the present. Their motivation isn’t to protect the interests of people, however, but to prevent what they see as unnecessary change. That’s because they see more positives than negatives in the current system, and emphasize its successes rather than its shortcomings.

Imagine throwing a party and inviting people from the different areas of your life – your friends, family, colleagues and neighbors. It might be tricky to get everyone on the same page and feeling comfortable around each other, right? Well, it’s in such situations that connectors come into their own. These are the people who effortlessly bring individuals together, and who can get on with strangers as if they’ve known them for years.

You can spot a connector by a couple of telltale signs. If there’s a problem in the office, a connector will reach out to a peer who’s well placed to resolve the issue quickly and efficiently. Connecters also tend to be generous with their contacts. If you’re looking for a new job and a connector knows someone who’s hiring, she’ll almost certainly put the two of you in touch. The downside of having such brilliant people skills is that it’s easy to end up with lots of acquaintances but few true friends – the most common drawback of being a social butterfly.  

Some people are simply impossible to argue with. It’s not necessarily that they have the loudest voices – though they often do – so much as the fact that there’s no budging them from their position. Whether they’re right or wrong, they’ll argue their case with such conviction that countering them is like trying to turn back the tide. If that rings a bell, there’s a good chance you know a pioneer!

If pioneers are stubborn, it’s because they’re strategic thinkers who have a very strong and clear vision of their personal and professional goals. Getting in the way of this is like stepping onto the tracks in front of a freight train: you’re going to get flattened. Their other defining trait is ambition. Pioneers don’t open a mere coffee shop or burger joint – they envisage their modest enterprise as the first step toward a globe-spanning commercial empire as ubiquitous and successful as Starbucks or McDonald’s!

By now you should have a good understanding of the five voices. But what happens when you bring them all together in one room? If you’ve been in a team meeting lately, you may already know the answer: the loudest people end up talking at cross purposes while the quiet types sit it out on the sidelines. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In the next couple of blinks, we’ll take a look at what you can do to improve each team member’s experience.

Let’s start with nurturers. As we’ve seen, nurturers often undervalue their own contributions and rarely speak up. The key here is to explicitly encourage them to make themselves heard, and to rein in more vocal members when nurturers are talking. That’s important because the more opinions a nurturer hears before his own turn comes around, the less confident he’ll be about presenting his ideas.

So far we’ve looked at how to encourage the quieter voices in your team to share their ideas and insights. Now it’s time to explore how to manage the more boisterous types, starting with guardians.  

As we know, guardians are skeptical about change. While others might view them as a nuisance, they see their tough questions as an essential part of a healthy company culture. And here’s the thing: they’re right. That means it’s your job to explain to other team members that guardians aren’t the enemy and that when they show up to meetings with reams of carefully structured notes and insist on going over every point in minuscule detail, it’s for the good of the organization.   

When a flight attendant runs through a plane’s safety features, he reminds you to secure your own oxygen mask before helping others, especially children. There’s a good reason for this: you’re not going to be of any use to anyone if you’re unconscious! Team leaders are in a similar position in the workplace – if they’re not in control of their own voices, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to help other team members control theirs.

That’s why it’s so important to lead by example and remember that your voice is responsible for the team. Of course, it’s hard to keep track of your main voice when you’re getting bogged down in discussions that aren’t really your priority. The key is to focus on the attributes of your authentic voice.