Don’t Let them Sell you Purple

“Just One More Thing…” is a short-form way that I share ideas, questions and guidance with more substance than a LinkedIn post and less academic rigor than my articles. I hope you find it valuable.

Your Teams window brightens as an HR consultant appears breathlessly telling you about their consulting firm’s revolutionary discovery. This discovery will fundamentally change how talent performs/develops/engages at your company! Everyone will be smarter, work harder, engage more and behave better! This is brand new and never seen before! Their discovery is called “Purple”!

Now, if you know your primary colors, you’d quickly conclude that this consultant is trying to pull a fast one on you. Purple isn’t new. Purple is just a combination of the primary colors of red and blue. Slapping a shiny new label on it, adding a TED talk, a book, an Ivy-league pedigree and claiming “statistical significance” doesn’t make it new or different or better.

But, if you don’t know your primary colors, Purple sounds pretty new and exciting. In the real world, Purple sounds like: People can be more successful if they have “grit.” Understanding and regulating emotions makes you more successful. Learning agility predicts upwards potential.

Unfortunately, those are each primarily red and blue sold as purple. “Grit” is just the personality factor of conscientiousness relabeled. It’s largely born, not made, so it’s tough to make people grittier, no matter how many speeches you pay the author to make. Just red.

Emotional intelligence is just parts of intelligence and personality, maybe with a little something extra, but also maybe not. It’s certainly not a different intelligence and it’s certainly not more important than IQ. Just red and blue, sold as purple.

Learning agility is almost entirely personality and intelligence, again almost entirely red and blue, perhaps with a little something added. But still mainly red and blue, now with clever new headings to appear to be unique and different.

The challenge for us in HR is that we consume consulting and academic information as readers, not critics. We trust that when the sellers claim that something is true, proven or effective, it is.

We consumers need to do our part by learning the basic science of our field (the “primary colors”). You don’t need to go back to school – just ask ChatGPT to build you a Psych 101 course and reading list.

Once we do, when academic, consultants and salespeople say Purple, we can scream, “No, that’s just Red and Blue!”