The concept of the three states of the personality - Child, Parent and Adult--was developed by Dr. Eric Berne in Transactional Analysis. He popularized this idea in the book Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships published in 1964. For our purposes, we use the Child, Parent, and Adult to distinguish between the different states we operate in throughout the day.

The Child is the part of our personality that we are born with and it operates from feelings and emotions. It is why we do what we do. At the end of the day, the child must be satisfied one way or the other. We can think of it as a little boy or girl who is always with us, saying, "What about me? ... When do my needs get met?" Depending on your unique wiring, you will feel that your needs are being met based on whether or not your child is being satisfied.

The Parent is the part of your personality that is developed early in your life, probably by the time you are 5 or 6 years old. We get this part of our personality from our parents or the people who we are around in those early years. Depending on your dominant colors in the Parent, you will think you should be approached or managed in certain ways. For most, this is the opposite of the way you were approached by your parents. The parent personality is what we think we ought to do. It is our preferred way to be approached if someone needs to communicate with us. It also defines the way we learn.

The Adult is the part of our personality that is developed probably by the time we are 12 or 15. It is our preferred state. This part of the personality develops from our reaction to what we learn from our parents based on how our child (who we are when we are born) perceives the information. Recent research also indicates that it is influenced by our peers. You might think of it as what you have negotiated between your Child and your Parent to create a comfortable co-existence. How you are and how you choose to work when you are all alone, is your Adult personality or profile.

As an employer or a team member, understanding the characteristics of a person.s adult will give you tremendous insight as to where they will be the most productive and how long they are likely to remain in that position. Unfortunately, because preparing a resume and going for an interview creates a stressful environment, the person you are trying to match with the needs of the team is not the same person you are interviewing. I am sure you can recall a time in your own life when someone asked you a question about your life.s goals. Chances are you paused and quickly went to your mental instruction manual entitled .How I Should Respond to Life.s Important Questions. by My Parents. It is not that anyone is trying to be deceptive. We simple want to represent ourselves the best we know how and that almost always means we will go to .our ought to. ensuring we respond with the perfect answer. It usually does not occur to us to answer the question based on what we are comfortable doing. The event demands a well thought out and responsible reply worthy of the position for which we are applying. How you should perform in every situation is as basic to our parental instruction book as .you have to eat your vegetables before you eat desert.. While we all know, we will not vaporize if we ate the desert first, or even if we only ate desert, when dinning with someone that we would like to impress, we will usually order a responsible healthy meal.

The expense of hiring the wrong personality needed for a specific position goes far beyond the financial cost of employing that person. The issue of team moral and decreased productivity due to integrating a new team member is an accepted part of the cost of doing business. However, the goal is to make an investment in the personality that will provide the balance for everyone on the team to perform at his or her best. The Talent Coach Assessment will be instrumental in identifying the strengths needed to put your company on the fast track for utilizing your most valuable resource.

The concept of the three states of the personality—Child, Parent and Adult--was developed by Dr. Eric Berne in Transactional Analysis. He popularized this idea in the book Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships published in 1964. For our purposes, we use the Child, Parent, and Adult to distinguish between the different states we operate in throughout the day.

The Child is the part of our personality that we are born with and it operates from feelings and emotions. It is why we do what we do. At the end of the day, the child must be satisfied one way or the other. We can think of it as a little boy or girl who is always with us, saying, "What about me? . . . When do my needs get met?" Depending on your unique wiring, you will feel that your needs are being met based on whether or not your child is being satisfied.

The Parent is the part of your personality that is developed early in your life, probably by the time you are 5 or 6 years old. We get this part of our personality from our parents or the people who we are around in those early years. Depending on your dominant colors in the Parent, you will think you should be approached or managed in certain ways. For most, this is the opposite of the way you were approached by your parents. The parent personality is what we think we ought to do. It is our preferred way to be approached if someone needs to communicate with us. It also defines the way we learn.

The Adult is the part of our personality that is developed probably by the time we are 12 or 15. It is our preferred state. This part of the personality develops from our reaction to what we learn from our parents based on how our child (who we are when we are born) perceives the information. Recent research also indicates that it is influenced by our peers. You might think of it as what you have negotiated between your Child and your Parent to create a comfortable co-existence. How you are and how you choose to work when you are all alone, is your Adult personality or profile.

As an employer or a team member, understanding the characteristics of a person’s adult will give you tremendous insight as to where they will be the most productive and how long they are likely to remain in that position. Unfortunately, because preparing a resume and going for an interview creates a stressful environment, the person you are trying to match with the needs of the team is not the same person you are interviewing. I am sure you can recall a time in your own life when someone asked you a question about your life’s goals. Chances are you paused and quickly went to your mental instruction manual entitled “How I Should Respond to Life’s Important Questions” by My Parents. It is not that anyone is trying to be deceptive. We simple want to represent ourselves the best we know how and that almost always means we will go to “our ought to” ensuring we respond with the perfect answer. It usually does not occur to us to answer the question based on what we are comfortable doing. The event demands a well thought out and responsible reply worthy of the position for which we are applying. How you should perform in every situation is as basic to our parental instruction book as “you have to eat your vegetables before you eat desert.” While we all know, we will not vaporize if we ate the desert first, or even if we only ate desert, when dinning with someone that we would like to impress, we will usually order a responsible healthy meal.

The expense of hiring the wrong personality needed for a specific position goes far beyond the financial cost of employing that person. The issue of team moral and decreased productivity due to integrating a new team member is an accepted part of the cost of doing business. However, the goal is to make an investment in the personality that will provide the balance for everyone on the team to perform at his or her best. The Talent Coach Assessment will be instrumental in identifying the strengths needed to put your company on the fast track for utilizing your most valuable resource.

Jim Collins latest bestselling book, GOOD TO GREAT " Why some companies make the leap... And others Don't", states that successful companies focus first on who then what. He says you have to get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus and I would add you have to get the right people in the right seats.

It is the attraction and development of the right people for the jobs that need to be accomplished that will make your business effective and efficient in the short and the long run. Understanding the four personality types can assist you in attracting the people you need to have a successful business.

The Red personality is the Doer. Because of the urgency, the focus, the practicality, the task orientation and their ability to maintain their direction, Reds are the people who produce results in any organization. They are effective at bringing revenue in the door. If you want something done, give it to a Red. Their ability to produce is essential to the effectiveness of any organization. They are always focused on the next opportunity to win. Their contribution is necessary, but not sufficient for the long-term effectiveness of an organization. Their production creates short term effectiveness.

Long-term effectiveness requires the contribution of the Blues. Because of their innovation, their ability to solve problems, their creativity in finding alternatives, they give the Reds the ideas and plans they need to be effective in the long run. Classic entrepreneurs are both Red and Blue and therefore have a natural tendency to innovate and create in whatever they do. This is why the early months of a new business can be very difficult for an entrepreneur because when results are not happening fast enough they tend to create a new program. Blues need to discipline themselves to focus their innovation on the implementation of the system and not the re- creation of the system. Of all the colors, they struggle most with reinventing the wheel. Their direction needs to be how they can be innovative about implementation until they fully have executed and understand the system.

The Green personalities bring organization and administration, and that makes your business more efficient. Effectiveness produces revenue and efficiency reduces cost. These two qualities produce the most successful and profitable organizations. Greens-- because of their ability to control, their cautiousness, their attention to details, their ability to monitor and be systematic, and their tendencies toward structure and follow up--bring efficiency to the organization. That same focus makes the efficiency short-term because they are more concerned with controlling what happens to them than what happens to the organization. Again, their systems and organization are necessary but not sufficient for an organization to be truly efficient in the long run. They are much better at telling how you are doing than they are at getting the rest of the team to pull together and implement the systems they have developed. That is why we need Yellows.

The Yellows develop long-term efficiency by integrating the systems of the Greens with the rest of the team. Because of their desire to be part of a team, Yellows work at getting people with opposing positions to work together. Yellows can communicate the value of team work, they are flexible and adaptable, which lets them meet people where they are, and they can organize and coordinate the strengths of their teammates so that the whole team works better together. Over time, they will bring long-term efficiency because of their ability to build the team around the Vision, Mission, and Values of the team.

A well-balanced organization will recruit and develop all four-personality types in order to have the most effectiveness and efficiency. Organizations that focus on this objective and commit to its realization will be more successful than those that ignore this approach. Most owners bring Red to their organizations but need to recruit Green and Yellow to make sure that they are more balanced. The bottom line is that once we understand our unique talents, abilities and strengths we need to recruit people who have talents, abilities and strengths in our areas of weakness. A balanced team has strengths in all four colors.