UNLOCKING THE NATURAL ENERGY OF YOUR COMPANY

By Belinda Doveston • January/February 2017 • Issue 53

In the previous issue we explored the four main ways to use the Contribution Compass to build effective teams. In this installment we take a new direction — aligning your founders, board and leadership team with the natural energy of the company itself.

So, what is the natural energy of your company? What is the contribution your company is here to make? If your company were a person, how would you best describe them along with their challenges and opportunities?

A meaningful promise

Natural energy indicates the way that you naturally think and operate. It is most easily observed in critical moments, when you will always respond in a particular way. In that critical or defining moment, which is usually a brief and intense pressure or turning point, the decision you make or the action you take dramatically impacts your journey, either positively or negatively.

It is indeed a curious idea that a company can have a specific type of natural energy or even a personality for that matter. There are two ways we can look at this. Firstly, perhaps the natural energy of a company comes from the collective natural energies of its founder(s) or leader(s). This would indicate that a company, as a juristic person, is the sum of its parts or its team. But what if a company is more than that? What if the company, as a juristic person, is a result of what it stands for and the business model it uses to create, capture and deliver its value? As an entity, perhaps it does develop a life of its own and becomes more than the sum of its parts.

My view is that any successful business must, at some point, cross the bridge from being a collection of people to something more than that — to an entity that lives and breathes on its own. Time is an essential ingredient and so is the level of activity and momentum. Yet perhaps the most powerful factor is its unique and purposeful reason for being in existence or what we call, a promise. This promise then translates into a specific business model that, over time, becomes more entrenched and singular.

What we should then see in the maturing organisation is a crystal clear persona that represents how the company creates value and lives its promise. The more this deepens, the greater the chance that, despite new appointments, that persona continues to strengthen its resilience to the influence of the personalities of its individuals, even at board level.

Balanced leadership

My observation has been that in the early stages of an enterprise, the personality of the company is oftentimes the singular result of the personality of its founders. The values are the same, the behaviours are aligned and the essence or core idea is an extension of the founders’ creative potential. As the organisation develops, and perhaps as the next generation of leaders take over, something else might emerge.

On the one hand, the original promise, if powerful and enduring, might deepen and strengthen. Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is a great example of a powerful idea that has deepened over time. Yet, should the idea be ill-formed or no longer relevant, the next generation will have the responsibility of clarifying the business model and forging a new path. McDonald’s and Starbucks are both great examples of businesses that were reinvigorated with a new business model that delivered success. Ray Croc, as a Calibrator profile in his own capacity, transformed McDonald’s into a Calibrator business model, as did Howard Schultz with Starbucks.

Yet for a business to cross the bridge from small business to significant enterprise, it needs much more than a leader aligned to the company’s personality and business model. It also needs a leadership team or board that has a balance of natural energy. When there is a balance of natural energy around a boardroom table or in a leadership team, there is a much more effective flow and, in turn, better results for the executives, directors, board and company. Imbalances at this level will result in polarised and potentially myopic decisions that are swayed by the dominant energy type which will neglect essential diversity.

Identifying, creating and sustaining your value, which you then leverage, is the cornerstone of working effectively with your natural energy. It requires that you have a deep understanding of your natural energy and that you actively seek to utilise that natural energy to create, build and deliver value — for yourself and others. As a founder and business leader it therefore makes sense that in understanding your own natural energy and profile you can unlock a deeper understanding of your company’s business model, its ‘zone of flow’ and the bigger promise or reason for its existence. n

Align Advertisement Language

The recruitment process can be an extremely expensive undertaking. Even if you do not use a recruitment agency, if you add up your team’s time to review, shortlist and interview along with the financial impact of poor recruitment decisions, it can be quite a staggering amount. If done well, the right person hired at the right time can unlock the next level of the game.

To improve your results and reduce the investment required in recruitment, we encourage you to be focused and specific in the way you advertise a position. A high Activating profile, driven by the quest for untapped potential, will be excited by words such as ‘dynamic, innovative, scope for growth, independent and driven’. If you write the position advertisement choosing language that will excite a Catalyst, for example, you will increase the volume of Catalysts entering the application process. If the same advertisement were to be read by a high Sustaining profile, such as a Custodian, they would tend to feel stress rather than excitement.

The challenge is that we tend to write position advertisements and most types of communication using our own natural energy or the way in which we would like others to communicate with us. A Catalyst will write a Catalyst position advertisement — usually in a rush and without thinking it through. A Custodian will struggle to get going with a blank page, yet will eventually articulate Custodian notions. Without consciously adjusting our language to the specific profile we seek, we will just get more of ourselves.

Listen Carefully, Shortlist Expertly

In the interview process you can also use the Contribution Compass to understand your candidates, clarify what they value and how they create value. In the initial rounds of interviews, listen carefully for those cues. Gear your questions around understanding how the candidate creates value and responds under pressure.

A great question to ask is: what has been your greatest success in the workplace and what has been your greatest failure? Another might be: what are you known for or what are you famous for in the workplace? These questions will highlight self-understanding and indicate how they will naturally create value for your company and whether their ‘zone of flow’ is in alignment with the position you seek to fill.

Once you have your shortlist, you would then require each candidate to complete the Contribution Compass, which could then be used to inform and guide your reflection on the candidates before making a final decision.

As a closing thought, even if a candidate has the ‘right’ profile, it does not mean the person has developed the level of emotional maturity and self-awareness that will unlock their profile within your team. An immature Catalyst, be it the right profile for you now, may still not be able to deliver the value required.

One of the best ways of using the Contribution Compass is to get to grips with that level of maturity. We ask candidates questions about their profile and the insights they have had on reading their report. It quickly highlights the person’s level of self-understanding, their honesty on their talents and where they yet have some road to travel.

It goes without saying that as leaders we also need to develop new skills and enhance our recruitment processes. Instead of trying to quickly fill a gap or to employ the person we like, why not take the process deeper and increase the likelihood of a game-changing appointment.

Value creation through natural energy

The Contribution Compass is a profiling methodology that characterises the four main types of natural energy into eight profiles or ‘zones of flow’. Using the Contribution Compass profiles, let’s explore what the eight company personas or profiles would look like and the types of business models and value creation one would typically find.

Catalyst
A Catalyst creates value through ideas, innovation and product development. This would align well with a company where innovative product design is a critical means of unlocking value. To excel, the company must invest in its product development processes to remain ahead of the pack. Apple is a great Catalyst example.

Value creation through natural energy

The Contribution Compass is a profiling methodology that characterises the four main types of natural energy into eight profiles or ‘zones of flow’. Using the Contribution Compass profiles, let’s explore what the eight company personas or profiles would look like and the types of business models and value creation one would typically find.

Catalyst
A Catalyst creates value through ideas, innovation and product development. This would align well with a company where innovative product design is a critical means of unlocking value. To excel, the company must invest in its product development processes to remain ahead of the pack. Apple is a great Catalyst example.

Champion
A Champion creates value through a meaningful cause, a powerful brand and a strong market presence. A company that is Champion in nature would therefore create its value primarily through its brand and marketing activities, with Richard Branson and the Virgin Group epitomising this kind of personality.

Coach
A Coach creates value through people, relationships, accountability and performance. A Coach company would have at the core of its business model the growth and engagement of its team and its customer base. Zappos.com, as the ‘poster child’ of culture and employee engagement, is an example of a company that creates value in this way.

Connector
A Connector creates value through its web of contacts, partners, resources and opportunities. So too would a company with this type of personality create value and generate financial return through its connections. Facebook certainly demonstrates the value it has created through its social capital and is a great Connector personality.

Custodian
A Custodian creates value through supporting others to bring an idea to life and to honour the promise made to the customer. A Custodian company would create value through protecting assets, delivering processes as defined and providing excellent customer service. Examples would include cloud-based data storage, property trusts and outsourced contact centres.

Cultivator
The Cultivator creates value through managing long-term complexity, risk and asset value. This, as a business model, would translate into reducing client risk and maximising a return on assets or project outcomes. Insurance companies, investment houses and asset management firms would naturally be aligned with this profile.

Conductor
The Conductor creates value through efficiency, optimising processes, precision and unlocking the value of data. A Conductor business model would therefore create value through cost reduction, improved efficiencies, wastage mitigation and big data analytics. In my opinion Google’s search engine business epitomises this value chain.

Calibrator
The Calibrator creates value through a duplicable system and continuous improvement. Value through this type of profile is activated through a company with a system that leverages the activities of others or a platform that enables other types of value creation to be accelerated. McDonald’s, and any type of franchise in general, is largely a systems-driven Calibrator business model.

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