COLOR Q PERSONALITY SYSTEM

THE COLOR Q PERSONALITY SYSTEM: ITS FOUNDATION AND HISTORY

The idea of defining and describing personality types is as old as civilization itself. Famously, in 400 BCE, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen believed humans were dominated by one of four “humors:”

people were cheerful and confident

people were pensive and gloomy

people were calm and steady

people were mercurial and ill-tempered

The field burgeoned when Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung theorized that humans engaged with reality using predominantly four “functions,” which he identified as thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuition. In the 1940s, Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers, avid students of human behavior, used Jung’s theory of types to develop a personality assessment model; they believed that understanding the needs, behaviors, and motivations of workers would help wartime employers more effectively and successfully match people new to the workforce — primarily women — to jobs that would suit them best. Since then, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) assessment has become one of the most widely used and extensively tested personality assessment instruments available. Other type-based assessment models exist, with the best of them (notably the Keisey Temperament Sorter) based on or drawing heavily from both Jung’s work and the MBTI model. The Color Q personality assessment instrument also draws on the seminal work of Briggs and Myers.

Zichy’s Color Q personality assessment divides the population into four groups and assigns a color name to each of these dominant personality preferences:

“Creative” Greens are empathic, humanistic, and compassionate theorists with highly developed written and verbal communications skills. Happiest in egalitarian, idea-oriented, supportive environments, they embrace change and pursue it enthusiastically.

“Action-oriented” Reds resist rigidity, schedules, and hierarchies, preferring to act on instinct, follow their impulses, and rely on their ability to remain calm and capable in crises. Excellent negotiators and troubleshooters, they value flexibility, variety, and fun, collegial work environments.

“Visionary” Blues excel at dealing with complex, theoretical issues, developing new systems, and strategic thinking. Competitive, precise, and unfailingly logical, they value knowledge for its own sake. They prefer setting their own high standards and benchmarks to explaining or maintaining someone else’s procedures and systems.

. “Grounded, realistic” Golds excel as administrators and protectors of systems, people, goods, services, and schedules. Detailed list-makers and organizers, they appreciate procedures, respect chains of command, happily rally the team and lead the effort, and gladly accept responsibility. They resist change and dislike abstractions, hypotheticals, and untested ideas.

Each of the four colors can be further refined by the addition of a “backup” personality style, a set of secondary characteristics: Greens can have Gold or Red backups; Reds can have Blue or Green backups; Blues can have Gold or Red backups; and Golds can have Blue or Green backups. In addition to falling into one of these eight subcategories, people will be further classified as either extroverts or introverts.