Do you find conflict, misunderstanding, lack of efficiency and production because your colleagues don’t understand each other. Adair Good will explain why and what to do about it.
This is Dylis Guyan and welcome to the Inspired Selling Podcast, the place where business owners who sell to bigger businesses discover how to attract, convert and retain more of their ideal clients. Once again, I’ve got a fantastic guest for you today, Adair Good is a high-performance coach and she’s going to talk about Emergenetics and Disc Profiling, and how this actually helps with recruitment and with increasing sales revenue by understanding personality types and so on.
She will tell us much more about this because she is the expert in this. But let me just tell you a little about Adair. She is a published author and managing director at Essential Coaching and is a business adviser and coach with the trusted adviser’s network and holds an advance diploma in learning and development in New Zealand. She is a certified associate of Emergenetics and Disc psychometrics and is an experienced facilitator and corporate learning and development professional. She has over 30 years of work experience in the government, finance and telecommunications industries including 16 years working and living in South-East Asia.
Really fantastic to have you here today and I’m excited to learn more about this because to be honest, when I first discovered this, and you first talked to me about Emergenetics, I hadn’t heard of it. I’ve heard of Myers Briggs, I’ve heard of Disc Profiling, I’ve heard of a number of these profiling processes that are available but not this one. So, could you just start by telling us more about it, give us some context around what Emergenetics actually is.
Adair: Sure, well it’s a profiling system that comes from where they all come from which is the theory of Carl Jung. It’s based on thinking preferences and…which is human brain dominance and theory and added to that is the behaviours that people have.
Now, your thinking preferences come from your mother and father and your ancestors and the things your actually born with so that’s the nurture side of things, and we can’t actually change those, they don’t change over time, we are who we are with thinking. But our behaviours is what makes us different from everybody else. Our behaviours come from the first five years of our life and our life experiences.
So, if we’ve have traumatic events from the age of two to five or even up to maybe 10 years old, we can actually show that in our behaviours. The behaviours how we measure that is in thirds. So, we say a first third assertive or a second third assertive or a third third assertive and those show us the level of behaviour we’re going to see when somebody meets us.
The one in between the second third is what we call the depends group and the depends group is depending on how the level of comfortability they have with a situation of a group of people is how much they will become first third assertive or third third assertive. They could actually change scale depending on the group.
So, for instance, if you’re a coach of a team and you’re quite a quiet person normally, because we measure expressiveness as well, and expressiveness is around how much energy you put out when you walk into a room, not necessarily how much you talk but quite often that’s part of it. But say a coach of a rugby team or something like that, with the team because they feel comfortable and they’re in a situation where they’re the expert they might feel very comfortable and so they show as a third third expressive. But in a situation where they don’t feel comfortable maybe in a group of their peers and their peers are more experienced than them then they might show first third but that’s not naturally who they are, it’s who they’re being.
So, one of the things we do…this is actually a profile, you’ll see it there, these are the thinking preferences up here. So, we have conceptual thinking, analytical thinking, social thinking, and structural thinking. This is actually my profile because I can’t use anyone else’s because it’s confidential, but it shows that I only have a very small sliver of structural thought which means I don’t prefer detail. So, if somebody starts talking to me about a lot of detail of something, my eyes will glaze over and as I’m married to an I.T project manager that can happen often. So, they need to keep bigger picture or into the steps of what’s involved to keep me interested.
I have some social thinking it’s not huge though which means I have empathy for others but I’m not empathetic as like a bleeding heart type, social worker type person who just listens to you and listens to everyone’s story and let them stay in the story. As a coach, I get people to move over, to after, to become something else. So, that shows in my profile and what shows in my profile is an entrepreneur’s type profile. What shows in my behaviours as you can see I’m third third for all of the behaviours and the behaviours are expressiveness, assertiveness and one we use in coaching all the time, flexibility.
Now, flexibility is a really good indicator of somebody managing change. So, in an organisation if I see someone I’m profiling that’s first third flexible, that’s a red flag. That’s a red flag that they could really have a problem coping with change in an organisation like with restructuring, all of those sorts of things that can really strike those people really hard and some people go, “Well, why have they been affected so bad?” It’s because it’s in their profile, it shows in their profile.
So, somebody could have the same thinking preferences as me, have a different behaviour thirds and they would then show differently in behaviour than me, putting those thinking preferences into action. So, your behaviour preferences put those into action. This is and this our experiences. So, what they’ve done is they’ve taken the human brain dominance part of it and added the behaviours.
The woman who developed all this with a colleague at Colorado University many years ago, about 30 years ago I think it is now, Gale Browning, she wrote a book called “The Science of Success” which became a best seller at the time and she introduced this process over a holiday, I think, at a barbecue to the CEO of General Managers…at General Motors at the time, and he said, “Look, why don’t you come and do this in my company? Do this with my employees.” “Okay, I will.” To cut a long story short, she then started a business in it and left Colorado University and she’s been running that business successfully now for 30 years.
Dylis: Fantastic, so the difference between that and DISC is that you’ve got the additional information there that doesn’t come out through DISC profiling.
Adair: Yeah, DISC profiling tends to more…I prefer this system only because DISC profiling tells me behaviours, but it doesn’t necessarily tell me the thinking preferences although it does tell me the difference between somebody’s natural state and their state of being in a certain situation. So, they’re more…they’ve got the situational leadership more, but I find this tells me everything I need to know particularly when I’m going to start coaching someone or when I’m going to be looking at performing teams.
I would’ve love to have had this when I was in telecom as a manager in the briefing unit of marketing. Our role was to brief the sales force on the products before they went to market, and they didn’t need to know everything and with me they didn’t get everything but what they got was what they needed to know to help the sales process. If I had had this information available to me then, I think I would have probably done a better job of knowing who my sales people were, so I could attend to their learning needs in a much more effective way.
Dylis: Yeah, and very beneficial for recruitment.
Adair: Absolutely, they actually have a profiling system that actually helps you do the recruitment side of things as well. I haven’t been trained in that but it’s something I want to look into; it came in a few years ago but you can use it for recruitment. One company here, recruitment company uses me when they have three high-level managers to choose from, and the recruitment company they bring me in to profile the three that they have a choice of and then they then choose the one that’s going to fit the organisation best within the team that they’re going to go into because they want to complete the whole brain.
Maybe they’ve got someone that doesn’t have so much big picture thinking then maybe they need a CEO that has more or that or leading sales manager or something that has more of that. Like I profiled an engineering company, I did a workshop and there was only 12 in the company but 11 of them had the same profile basically and they all…but the owner was the only analytical thinker in a big way amongst them, but he was employing people that have what I call an engineering brain. They have a little bit of analytical but a lot of structural.
So, he didn’t have a lot of ideas happening around and he didn’t have a high level of social thinking either. So, his idea was maybe to get the boys together on a Friday night for a few beers, but he didn’t think about what sort of team events he could have, and I was the first person to suggest to him, let’s have a team event where these guys learn who they are and then learn how to more effectively work together. That actually worked really well.
Dylis: That’s very interesting Adair because I’ve got a very good friend who is head of L&D, learning and development, and she’s running a team and when they did the profiling, now I don’t know whether it was the Emergenetics or DISC or Myers Briggs, whatever it was, but the benefit of it was huge because she said that they were able to understand each other and understand how people were reacting to things because of their personality type and their behaviours and the thinking. When they didn’t have that there was much more conflict within the team, this reduced the conflict massively.
Adair: Yes, yes, I have a story about someone I used to work with in an insurance company, and she didn’t like me coming in when I came in from…when I finished with the government I joined the corporate world and I became a learning and development professional with them. She had been in the insurance company since leaving school, but she couldn’t see my big picture thinking. She was very structural and very social, she had a really busy social life in the company and all that sort of thing.
She couldn’t get it when I was trying to talk about vision for workshops and bringing people into learning induction program because I redesigned the induction program because nobody wanted to go, they found it really boring. So, I said, “Look, I’ve done this in a previous organisation, let’s make insurance exciting, let’s make it based on lifestyle, let’s make it based what we going to leave our people when we go type thing.” Show couldn’t get that, and it was because she didn’t have big picture thinking as part of her thing. And also, she was first third I found that much later on she was first third in all her behaviours.
So, she found me very intimidating, and I didn’t realise that. I remember a situation where I said to her one night, at the end of the day, “Have I offended you in some way because you don’t seem to be very keen on some of my ideas and things?” And she said, “You want to change everything.” That’s what made me realise she was first third flexible, I was moving too fast for her. But if we’d had these done and I was aware of what her profile was, I would’ve known how to manage it.
Dylis: Yes, and this is very relevant in a sales team because not only does the manager understand his people to be able to talk to them in the way that they will receive it effectively, I think that’s probably the best way to say it but also the sales people can be more aligned with their potential clients.
Adair: Absolutely, yes.
Dylis: I know they can’t profile a client, of course, but they can look for the signs, can’t they?
Adair: Yes, but you can…there is some apps that come with Emergenetics. I’ll show you here here this is the app on here, once someone has a profile it’s free, it’s called Emergenetics+. Anybody that has been on here that I have requested like there’s a whole bunch of names I have requested and then sees you could have my information, well, that could be Barclays Bank, it could be…any organisation could have people on there.
So, from the point of managing a team that can tell me exactly the brain I’m going to have in that room when I go to speak to that team the next time I manage them because six of them are present and the brain is made up like this because this app can actually do the whole brain. So, if I’m going to talk to that group and try and get an idea across, I’m going to know that 70% of that brain in that room that day is analytical so they’re going to want a plan; that sort of thing. So, that is paramount at management.
The other thing they do is they have a program called Step and it’s for 9-18 year olds. Teachers and professors and universities are now using that information to actually…parents are giving teachers their information to help them teach them. This is how my child needs to learn, that’s really helpful.
Dylis: I think our education system falls down in this way because it’s a broad-brush education and we’ll give you all the same style of teaching.
Adair: Absolutely, yeah.
Dylis: People who are like us, big picture people, you’ve got people who are much more detailed, you’ve got the most social people and so on. I’m actually like you I’m a big picture person but because I know that, as I’ve had my profile done, I have to work hard at the detail because I know the devil is in the detail I have to be aware of it and do it but that’s not my natural way. So, if I’m being sold to, for example, I don’t…if I was buying a computer, for example, I don’t want to know the technicalities of it.
Adair: Me neither. I just want to know if it can do what I want it to do.
Dylis: Exactly, yes. So, with that in mind, I’m thrilled that the education system is starting to look at this and realise that children have got different learning styles. So, what can we look out for when we haven’t profiled so, we’re just…like, let’s say you and I meet or I’m meeting a potential client, what can I look for in that person that would give me some kind of guidance as to whether they’re the big picture person or the detail person, the social person?
Adair: If they talk about vision, talk about the big picture, talk about how they see things in the future, then they’re more likely to be conceptual thinkers. But everybody has a part of each one but it’s to the extent. Now, on the profile if you’re 23% it means that it is a preference for your brain.
So, to do with the thinking preferences, if something is 22% it’s not considered a preference. It’s like water that’s boiling, it only boils at a certain temperature. If it’s not at that temperature it won’t boil and it’s the same thing with your brain. You’ve got to actually teach your brain to think structurally if you’re not a structural thinker. But to go into a job that has structural thinking as its main need, bad choice, because you’re going to be a square peg in a round hole.
Now, I’ve seen a person that was clearly a marketer, great with ideas on how to brand and everything but was rubbish at sales. They were moved out as a result of it. They were in a sales team and they weren’t performing but they were studying on the side, marketing, and that was their passion. It was really obvious because of the way they talked about ideas all the time and how our communications group didn’t have good enough ideas.
But he wasn’t meeting his targets and sales and his boss came to me and said, “Look, I’ve got a problem, what can I do about it?” And I said, “You’ve got a square peg in a round hole.” This person, it’s in the way they think, and this was before I did this. I’ve done Disc at the time and Myers Briggs and stuff so I knew more about it but I was just saying you trying to get…I don’t know what reason they applied for sales role but they don’t suit that role. They don’t ask the questions of the customer to define a need; they’re telling the customer what they should buy, and that was the key thing.
Dylis: Going back to my friend who’s head of L & Dshe has recruited based on the need. So, she profiled and looks for the person that fits that role absolutely. So, she’s got her creatives, she’s got her detail people, she’s got big thinkers, she’s got some leaders in the group.
Adair: Like a natural facilitator? That sort of thing.
Dylis: Yes, so she’s got a really good mix and because they all understand each other’s profile they can understand why certain reactions occur and she will say “Right, so how does this affect our blue people?”
Adair: Yes, we talk about colours too. Analytics are the blue, the yellows are the…and the thing is too it’s not that you should listen to any one particular type, it’s the whole brain that actually creates the genius. It’s actually attuning to the whole thing because the manager might be the analytical thinker but if they only think like that they’re not going to make the right decision, they have to get everybody’s input, particularly if it’s a major project or something, everyone’s input to actually get the best ideas out.
But then the behaviours come in too because the people that are most comfortable with speaking, will be the ones that are heard the most, but they’re not necessarily got the best ideas. So, you’ve got, as a manager, you always have to be a brilliant facilitator too to draw out the best in everybody as well.
Dylis: So, this is quite critical really Adair isn’t it?
Adair: Yes, definitely.
Dylis: It’s like working blindfolded in a way if you don’t understand or you’re just going from your gut or as a leader you haven’t even stopped to think about the types. I’ve seen leaders in the past who think or recruit in their image, so they recruit clones.
Adair: Yes, they clone, get clones of themselves. Yup, that’s very common.
Dylis: And they don’t recruit for diversity across the team. Also, because the leader has a particular or a more dominant style then they will treat everybody in that way. Which can also bring problems in itself can’t it?
Adair: Well, that’s where situational leadership comes in. Where you should manage to the situation not necessarily the type of person you’re dealing with, but you have to be aware of who they are to be able to know how to manage them best, and every single person should be managed differently. I learnt that through management and through making mistakes as well.
One of the things I truly believe is that to be really good at what we do we’ve got to be very self-aware. And that means we know our strengths and we know our challenges. I don’t call them weaknesses I call them challenges because they’re things we don’t know we’re not good at until we try them and then we find that there is room for growth, and so they’re challenges. But one of the thing is we’ve got to know that first, before we can manage other people. Because if we don’t know what our fallibles are or what where we can fall down in things then we don’t know how to be resilient when…so that’s about emotional management.
Dylis: We must arrange another interview Adair sometime in the future where we can talk about resilience and how to cope with that.
Adair: Yes, resilience is huge right now and this is part of the resilience thing is it’s just been repackaged, it’s always been there in organisations, but it’s about coping mechanisms for things. What we see is stress.
Adair: Yeah, so much stress being created, and it doesn’t have to be there because stress is a state of mind. It comes from people not being comfortable with what’s happening or what’s going on. So, they get it and it can internalise and actually make you very ill. It’s because the coping mechanisms aren’t there to cope with something.
One of the best things one of my managers when I was quite young said to me, “Take every day at a time, take an step to the plan, take micro steps until you’re comfortable taking bigger steps. But take a step and take action.” They always said that and it’s like when you’re stopped in your tracks, what is the next thing you can do?
That’s like when you’re on a…like for instance I used to do cold calling, when you’re on a cold call and you’ve made your fourth one and you’ve got rejected whatever, it’s really difficult to pick that phone up and make another one. But what they said to me was “You do it” because that stops the habit from forming that you believe that that’s going to be another rejection. So, it’s about picking yourself up, dusting yourself and just getting on with it, and I think that that’s a good thing to look at life like.
I remember when I had my first child, same thing happened. I was out of my comfort zone having a baby, not quite sure what I was doing, floundering around with the first child, always been in control of my work life and things like that and suddenly this child was sort of in control; as they do. Same thing happened, my mother said, “Take one step at a time, one day at a time. Don’t think about what’s going to happen next week or the week after because then you’ll get yourself all stressed.”
Once I started doing that I started coping. Because I was living in another country as well I…my children were born in Hong Kong and so I didn’t have the support networks there. I found them through play groups but that’s once the children are born. And that sort of thing we sort of come together as expatriates do in any country in the world. They come together, and they sort of support each other as their families’ sort of thing. But you don’t have your mother or your mother-in-law to sort of support you. But one of the things I recognise is resilience comes from experience and those experiences almost have to happen, so you understand that you actually can cope when things are difficult.
Dylis: Difficult, yeah. So, I think we should have another conversation on this at a later date
Adair: Yes, resilience is a good topic.
Dylis: It’s a really great topic. So, just going back to profiling, just give us three top tips for our audience that are listening or watching today.
Adair: Three top tips to do with?
Dylis: I think we agree that this is an essential in business people should be profiling themselves and their teams because this all enhances the outputs and efficiencies and productivity.
Adair: Yes, definitely increases productivity because we’ve definitely measured that. Feedback that I’ve got from companies that I’ve done profiling and have said, “Ah the teams communication has improved, the conflict management we’re not seeing as much conflict now as we did before, people seem happier, they seem more settled, we’ve got higher retention levels,” these sort of things. HR managers say it all the time, “Retention levels are something…you can’t keep people unless they’re happy in their job.” They will move on.
One of the things we notice when someone’s profiled is that there is a self-esteem that comes with it as well because what we said to everybody is their profile is unique, it is who they are and it’s all fine. Whatever it tells us is perfectly fine because that’s who that person is and what they need to recognise is the areas they need to work on which are their own challenges.
So, what I’d say is being self-aware is key, and it’s key in business and in life. The more self-aware you can be, the better you can cope because you know yourself better, better mother you can be, the manager you can be, the better person as well. So, I think self-esteem and self-awareness is key and its perseverance is also key in business is keeping going to know that things will get better.
So, for instance, when I was a first manager it’s like I wanted to be everybody’s friend when I become a manager. I recognised straight away that there was a barrier because I was the manager. So, I couldn’t be everybody’s friend and I recognised that that had to go, and I had to become the manager and step up as leader, and lead from the front. Once I recognised that everybody else felt comfortable because I was trying to be the friend and they were like, “Well, who are you being?”
So, in my past life I was a quite a classic people pleaser as a child and I was trying to please everybody and not please everybody at the same time. So, I think that’s key is knowing self is really important and that self-awareness comes from know that about yourself.
Dylis: Yeah, so how can people get in touch with you then?
Adair: Oh, well I’ve got a website and it’s adairgood@essentialco.nz because I’m in New Zealand. So, it’s A-D-A-I-R G-O-O-D at essential, E-S-S-E-N-T-I-A-L co.nz.
Dylis: Excellent.
Adair: Yes.
Dylis: What about LinkedIn and other social media channels.
Adair: I’m on LinkedIn so anybody who wants to connect with can connect with me on LinkedIn. I haven’t got the link or anything, but I’ve got 1331 connects. So, anybody who links with me has got a massive network they can link to. I don’t post that often. I tend to just look at people’s post and comment, it’s just because I’m so busy I don’t have time to write lots of articles because I’m actually writing a book as well and working on that. That’s going to come out hopefully later this year and I’m writing it for the pro-woman’s network of America. They’ve asked me to write a book and it’s a coaching book, and it’s about people, it’s going to be called “Duck”and it’s about people and how to get out of being stuck in your life and some of these things are in it; about what tools you can use to figure that out.
Dylis: Do you have any resources that people could refer to Adair?
Adair: Well, there’s my book which is available on Amazon which is called “The Glass Ceiling: How to Break the Glass Ceiling Without a Hammer” it’s called and it’s on Amazon, but there’s also four or five different one I’ve written for and what they are is co-authored coaching books. So, they’ve been written by people that have got something to say about a particular subject and it was written as a woman’s leadership series but the book I’m writing as my own full book and it’ll be 10 chapters long and hopefully it’ll be released around October/November.
Dylis: Well, thank you so much it’s been so insightful Adair and I hope our audience has enjoyed and got some really good tips from that and it has got them thinking about, yeah, maybe I need to take the step into profiling both themselves and their teams.
Adair: Yes, well if they want to…if they want to do the profiling then I provide that service, they can do the analysis on Skype. How it works is it’s a bunch of questions, I don’t get the answers they’re all done online but what I do get is the results and then I send the results out but then I do an analysis of those results. I can do it for an individual or I can do it for a whole team and I can do it for whole company.
Dylis: Excellent. Thank you so much again Adair, great to talk to you. Bye for now.
Adair: Lovely, thanks Dylis, thanks for having me on.
Dylis: You’re welcome, bye.
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Email: dylis@dylisguyan.com
