Foreword
If you’re reading this, I’m guessing that many of you are leaders or members of a team. I know you’re busy, so I’ll cut to the chase and share a few of the many reasons you will want to read this entire book.
Be advised, Leanne has not given us a simplistic or formulaic read. Rather, she’s lived these chapters. She’s researched and experienced all she describes in these pages. She shares a wealth of “learned in the trenches” wisdom along with practical ideas based on her decades of corporate experience.
My leadership journey began in 2002 when I was allowed to succeed my father, Dr. Roger Birkman, who created the Birkman Method.
As a young pilot, my father flew nineteen missions on a B-17 bomber in the Second World War. What stayed with him wasn’t the flying. It was noticing that trained pilots could look at the same instruments, the same sky, the same briefing, and come back describing different missions. Same facts, different readings. He spent the rest of his life building a way to measure that difference, and the work that carries our family name grew out of it.
What he found still holds. Most of what drives a person sits below the surface: their needs, their expectations of how people should treat them, the interests that energize them or drain them. We see the behavior on top and guess at the rest. And our guesses tend to be wrong in a predictable direction — we assume other people are wired the way we are. They aren’t.
Now put ten capable people in a room and ask them to solve a hard problem together. The misreads compound. The fast mover reads the careful one as an obstacle. The careful one reads the fast mover as reckless. Nobody says any of this out loud, so the friction goes underground, and the leader ends up as the interpreter for everyone. Before long, every decision routes through one person, because one person is carrying all the translation. That is the bottleneck Leanne Terrace has written this book to break.
Leanne is an outstanding Certified Birkman Professional who uses the Method the way my father intended: to open conversations, never to close them. A profile in her hands is the beginning of a team learning to see itself. She’s done that work inside companies for over thirty years, and what she’s built here goes further.
She treats self-awareness as an operating capability that belongs to the whole team, then surrounds it with the structure a team needs to apply it — clear authority, disciplined problem-solving, agreements people hold each other to.
“I’ve read many books that advise leaders to trust their people; this one tells you how to build trust.”
People ask me whether understanding human perception still matters now that machines can generate answers in seconds. It matters more. A tool that accelerates a team’s thinking will also accelerate its misunderstandings, and no software resolves a conflict that no one has named. The companies that thrive in this next chapter will be the ones where people see each other clearly enough to think together. Leanne has written the manual for becoming one of them.
I’m grateful for experts like Leanne who use the Birkman Method in their coaching and consulting. I can assure you, though, that while she includes Birkman in Chapter 6, she packs a great deal more into this book.
Read this book with your team, not just for them. Discuss it. Argue with it in the open. Let it change how your meetings sound. My father believed that every person has a value that the people around them cannot see until someone builds the conditions for it to surface.
This is my “why” and this book will show you how to build these conditions.
