Team-building session via colour analysis: 7 common mistakes

Suppose that, as an HR or department manager, you receive an instruction from your own manager to organise a team meeting so that everyone gains more insight into each other's personality, strengths and weaknesses. The consequence of that in turn: you can communicate with each other more efficiently and more effectively, which improves the collaboration. On receiving that instruction you soon think: which colour analysis am I going to choose? Because the use of colours is not only appealing, it also makes things immediately applicable in practice.

The next question is: which organisation is it best to work with? Answer: a team meeting has the greatest chance of success if you learn from the most commonly made mistakes during the selection process.

Mistake 1: no clear objective

I regularly receive requests to organise team meetings where it is not clear what the eventual outcome should be. It is important that the ’owner’ of the meeting has a very clear picture in advance of what the objectives are. A good partner is able to formulate concrete objectives together with the ’owner’ and to sharpen them where necessary.

Mistake 2: thinking all colour analyses are the same

There are a great many colour analyses in circulation. Some analyses focus more on the behaviour of an individual, others mainly give insight into people's deeper drivers. A behavioural measurement is a snapshot and depends on the environment. (At home, for instance, you behave differently than at work.) A drivers analysis is more stable over time and gives insight into ’why people do things the way they do’. Some providers work with 4 colours, others use 6 or even 7 colours. The rule of thumb here is often: the more variables, the more precise the working out of a personal profile.

Mistake 3: not knowing who is running the workshop

Meet the person running the workshop in person beforehand. Important questions to ask: do you click with the trainer? Are they able to run the workshop at the level of the target group? And: alongside the necessary theoretical knowledge, does the trainer have the necessary practical experience? The right trainer can also provide concrete references. A quick look at their LinkedIn profile often gives a clear first impression.

Mistake 4: not investing time in the preparation

Good preparation is essential to making the team meeting a success. Alongside aligning the objectives mentioned earlier, it is important for a trainer to know in advance what is going on in a team. The right trainer helps you make participants curious and enthusiastic. Simply sending an email with a short announcement of the meeting and a request to fill in a questionnaire is not done. It all sounds very logical, but in practice I regularly come across this uninspired way of working.

Mistake 5: working with unreliable results

A good questionnaire includes an indicator. It sets off the ’alarm bells’ when a workshop participant has not completed the questionnaire correctly, for whatever reason. Ask specifically whether the provider you want to choose offers this. That prevents you working with data that gives an insufficiently reliable picture of a participant.

Mistake 6: hiring the cheapest trainer

There has never been a heart patient who asked for the cheapest heart operation. An investment in the colour analysis itself is often not that high. A trainer who genuinely gets your team moving makes the difference. If the investment in the trainer initially seems high, look at what that investment yields you. One condition, though, is that the trainer has spent many hours preparing a workshop in order to offer participants an experience of real quality (see mistake 4).

Mistake 7: choosing a colour analysis too early

Colour analyses that give a clear picture of the individual personalities in a team are a perfect instrument for increasing mutual insight and communicating better with each other. There are conceivable situations in which a colour analysis is not yet desirable. That is the case, for instance, when employees think the outcomes of taking part in a workshop could be used against them within their own organisation. When that trust is missing, it has to be worked on first.

When you as an HR or department manager take these 7 common mistakes into account, you have an excellent basis for making your team meeting a success.