GREENS REPRESENT APPROXIMATELY 17 percent of the overall world population. If you’re not a Green but would like to learn how to identify and communicate with one, go to Figure 5–1 on page 25.
ABC News television journalist Diane Sawyer is one the best-known Greens in the United States. She epitomizes many of the group’s artistic and interpersonal skills. For most of her early adolescence, she recalls being nonconformist, klutzy, and “tediously serious.” She and her friends would go off to a creek to read Emerson and Thoreau. They called themselves the “reincarnated transcendentalists.” “My sister was the elegant one,” she recalls laughingly. “I was the one who kept falling down the stairs.”
But others remember that in high school she won the U.S. Junior Miss pageant and after college moved to Washington, DC to serve as assistant to Nixon White House press secretary Ron Ziegler.
In 1978 she took a job with CBS, but Dan Rather and other senior figures were very vocal about the presence of someone tainted by Watergate. She ultimately won over her colleagues with her incredible stamina, spending a week at the State Department during the Iranian hostage crisis, sleeping no more than an hour a day. They also were disarmed by her typical Green charm and ability to let her ego go for the sake of the story.
Working with, instead of against, her natural Green core traits led to a string of successes. In 1981 she was promoted to the CBS Morning News Show; in 1984 she became the first female correspondent on the prestigious 60 Minutes. She became recognized for her interviewing skills, which she modestly attributed to being prepared. Others said she had an intuitive ability to surgically get under the skin of her subjects “without drawing blood.” Greens are among the most intuitive of all the Color types. In 1989, she jumped to ABC to co-anchor the news magazine Prime Time Live, which became 20/20.
Figure 5–1 How to Recognize a Green
Diane Sawyer evinces the typical polarities of the Green personality—the ability to be earnest and irreverent, intense and funny, authoritative and vulnerable. She is known as an intellectual who also excels at portraying glitz. Most of all, she is both intensely private and genuinely interested in people. True to her type, she prefers quality to quantity in her relationships.
Sawyer’s group, the Greens, need opportunities to use their creativity and to impact the lives of others. They excel in verbal and written communications and are heavily represented among writers, TV anchors, and biographers. In corporate settings, they excel in sales, marketing, and public relations. Whatever the work setting, they thrive when their uniqueness is recognized. Harmony and authenticity bring out a Green’s best.
Pulitzer Prize winner Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes, Tis, and Teacher Man, expresses Green characteristics through his teaching and writings. For thirty years he taught high school English in New York City, continuously seeking to engage students while battling administrators and bewildered parents. Defying established guidelines, he found ingenious ways to motivate kids: using a pen to teach parts of the sentence and cookbook recipes to spark creativity. Most of all, he turned his own poverty-soaked background in the slums of Ireland into a valuable lesson plan. He described the smell of one toilet shared by an entire street; the fleas in his mattress; and the roaming rats, along with the antics of his alcoholic father and depressed mother, without losing his humor or sense of compassion. In so doing, he formed a powerful bond with his students and actually learned to enjoy his job.
Hollywood producer Laura Ziskin demonstrates how far a Green can go in a creative industry. Several years ago, in a move that shocked the industry, she stepped away from a position of significant power as President of Fox 2000 to return to what she loves doing best—producing films. Leadership in business usually means building institutions—a natural goal for Golds and Blues. It is not a meaningful goal for Greens. They prefer leading small creative organizations that downplay hierarchy and rules and promote originality and fun.
“The most difficult thing about the film culture,” she says, “is that the main value is greed. My daily quest is to find things that will stimulate, excite, and keep people engaged while still providing the necessary profits.” About the financial aspects of filmmaking, “I look at it as an algebra problem. I like the deal-making part, which is creative,” she says. “The rest I can’t get too excited about.” Day-to-day management of expenses gets delegated to others.
Laura has put her stamp on U.S. popular culture, producing films such as A Star is Born, Pretty Woman, What About Bob? The Thin Red Line, and the recently widely acclaimed Spider-Man.
Greens often are found at the forefront of human interest causes. Two probable Green celebrities well-known for their humanitarian works are actress Angelina Jolie and U2 frontman Bono. Jolie is goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. She has traveled worldwide in her role as spokesperson for war-traumatized children and refugees. She is known for her work “on the ground,” spending far more time in actual refugee camps than ordinarily required. Her multimillion dollar relief donations go well beyond ordinary celebrity charitable efforts. She was recognized in 2005 with the United Nations Global Humanitarian Action Award. Making a difference in the world is paramount for the Green personality.
Bono toured Africa in 2003 with Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill to try to raise governmental awareness of the AIDS epidemic there. (That year, Congress appropriated $350 million toward the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.) Bono has called upon the United States to donate an additional 1 percent of the federal budget to help the poor worldwide. He has plans at this writing to sell fashion accessories with proceeds going to AIDS research and relief. He is encouraging credit card companies to include charitable giving as an option for reward points. Bono has a Green’s desire to live a meaningful life and improve the world any way he can. His creativity in accomplishing these goals shows a core Green characteristic.
Besides Diane Sawyer, Angelina Jolie, and Bono, other famous Greens in the entertainment world are Oprah Winfrey and Jane Fonda. Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Eleanor Roosevelt illustrate the Green leadership style in politics. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a well-known Green writer; Abraham Maslow a Green psychologist; and Pope John Paul XXIII was a prominent Green in the religious field.
This chapter will help you determine if you’ve tested your primary and backup personality Color correctly. It also will help you identify Greens among people you know, as will Chapter 4, A Tour of the Prism Company/The Green Department, and Chapter 25, Adjusting to the Styles of Others.
If the self-assessment at the beginning of the book has scored you as a Green, you are brilliant with people and communications issues, like Diane Sawyer. More than the other three Colors, you will enjoy this book because it will help you learn even more about people. You are likely to Color code everyone you know and test the tips supplied in here for communicating with them.
Of all the Colors, your skills are more often (unfairly) considered “soft.” This book will show how they can be put to economic advantage. Your highly developed marketing abilities make you a top choice for creating lasting product brands. Your people skills calm turbulent teams and departments in record time. Staff turnover can be staunched by putting a Green in charge; and productivity spikes when a Green is in charge of a team.
Go to your specific profile now to discover your most natural path to professional satisfaction and success.