Problems, Opportunities, and Possibilities: Giving Generators a Chance

I had just finished speaking with Adriana, a young business school graduate beginning her third year of employment in a large multinational corporation. She was seeking some career counseling from me, her former professor. She said, “I still belong to the Generator style and I can see how people like me don’t feel like they belong in the business world, or they deliberately avoid it. A lot of times in the business world or in large organizations, you don’t get a chance to start anything new. You are just a link, a small part somewhere in the middle of a much bigger picture. You are usually just doing routine things that you have done many times before. You never get that fulfillment of having created something new or discovered a brand new problem to solve or new idea to pursue.”

What Adriana was talking about is her preferred thinking and problem solving style measured by the Basadur Profile. Our research shows that Generators are the smallest group at every level in organizations. However, more Generator thinking might just be what a CEO needs to discover new problems to be solved and new opportunities to be exploited. 

Generators might seem to be continuously dissatisfied and have difficulty explaining themselves because sometimes their ideas are still fuzzy. They become bored with work that requires applying routine procedures to increase efficiency or to execute already defined assignments. They may be perceived to be somewhat unfocused or even disruptive, as their behavior reflects more of an orientation to introducing (generating) a new problem and less of an orientation to defining, understanding, constructing, or formulating (conceptualizing) an existing problem or developing (optimizing) or putting into practice (implementing) solutions to an existing defined problem.

Organizations serious about becoming leaders in their sector should create a non-threatening environment, or psychologically safe space, where new and different ideas can be generated, incubated, and hatched, not only reward optimization and implementation of safe initiatives and sure bets.