LEADer/ Engaging with Stakeholders

Manila, 1 May 2024 — How to connect deeply in conversations and meetings.

Story

It happened last week. My colleague kindly agreed to share her experiences in how to connect deeply with her company’s stakeholders. Lei Motilla, a Gen Y Millennial, is the co-founder and innovation lead in AI4GOV. Her startup provides AI solutions to various levels of government in the Philippines. Over the past years, she and I have collaborated in supporting emerging leaders.

Motilla talks about benefiting from Work In All Colors, a method and leadership course to decode what drives people around you. “Every time I hear someone speak,” she says, “I adopt a second layer of translation.” This helps her to understand her stakeholders in a more nuanced manner and decide how to communicate with them in a way that meets their needs.  

Taking the example of a stakeholder meeting on product development, Motilla describes how she can facilitate a discussion with more sensitivity to different stakeholders when she uses Work In All Colors as a framework. She picks up what drives the stakeholders by listening to how they phrase their questions, and then replies by speaking in their language. 

Challenge

For decades, researchers have studied how leaders should communicate in a manner that bridges the gap between ‘sender’ and ‘receiver.’ Last month, a new book was released on the topic, called Supercommunicators, by Charles Duhigg, a journalist known for his earlier book on habits. I wasn’t too impressed by his latest work as it seems to overlook the challenge of decoding what drives different people with different worldviews and how to respond to that.

Motilla skills, on the other hand, are finely tuned to hone in on exactly that. She knows how to reframe (translate) her messages into the languages of her different stakeholders. In each case, she makes it a point to speak their language. Her practice follows the footsteps of President Nelson Mandela, who spent three years learning the method we now call Work In All Colors. The framework is based on the remarkable research of developmental psychologist Clare W. Graves, who passed on in the 1980s. His work was then continued by two of his students, Don Beck and Christopher Cowan. 

In her examples of developing AI tech to serve public sector clients, Motilla shows how connecting deeply with stakeholders can work when they express their needs in BLUE, ORANGE, and RED. These are three of the seven color languages covered by the method. Motilla notes how it can be complemented by other models, such as design thinking, empathy mapping, and personality tools. Where Work In All Colors stands out, she says, is in being more intuitive for a leader to immediately sense what drives different stakeholders in the audience. 

Question

Forging better connections with your audience is what effective communication is all about, and Motilla has mastered that skill through years of patient and persistent practice. “You cannot make change happen,” she reminds us, “if people are not aligned or not having co-ownership … to create something together.” She concludes that Work In All Colors can make us more effective as leaders and facilitators.

Research has long shown that influencing change requires our communication to reach our audience’s hearts, not just their heads. Mandela was emphatic about that as he worked hard to bridge social divides and build a rainbow nation. Many leaders we have coached and trained have had similar experiences. How did this start? We created Work In All Colors as a self-directed online leadership course because learning and applying the method has transformed our lives and leadership styles profoundly. We were determined to make it easy for leaders to discover and learn this method online rather than being required to travel at great expense to offsite retreats.

With the right communication skills and behaviors, each of us can lead more positive changes in our world. My question for you this week is an invitation to see for yourself how this method can help. You will learn how people around you see the world in very different ways, and how you can learn to speak to them in their languages. By taking the Work In All Colors leadership course, you will discover what each of the seven color languages looks and sounds like. After that, the worksheets allow you to reflect on what that means for your life and leadership. Then you can start connecting more deeply with your stakeholders in conversations and meetings like Lei Motilla does daily and weekly.