Adapting strong thinking styles for innovative growth

Whenever I had a meeting with Charlie Cotton, VP of Industrial Engineering, I always went in set to discuss the progress of our corporate-wide innovation program. We were engaging employees in using their creativity to solve problems that would reduce the impact of inflation on rising costs. At the beginning of many of our meetings, Charlie seemed to ignore the agenda, and I found myself struggling to keep up with what seemed to be rambling thoughts. He kept surfacing future challenges we might have to overcome further down the road. Charlie was hard to follow. He was a bit disorganized, but his ideas were good. 

Over time, I began to realize his Profile style was typical of an exceptionally strong generator, which features the following characteristics: 

• Hard to keep up with.
• Happy in their own heads. 
• Unaware that others can’t easily follow their thinking. 
• So divergent that they force others to rein them in.
• Comfortable in a future only they can see. 
• Focused on the next level of creativity beyond the present level.

With that knowledge in hand, I learned to adapt and became less uncomfortable, and even enjoyed working with Charlie in his generator mindset. From that point forward, we always ended our meetings with two or three new projects that would strengthen our program.