Playing to your strengths: building diversity of thought into business

Korin Neff, senior vice president and corporate compliance officer, talks about leadership and development at Wyndham Worldwide.

GC: Could you tell me a little bit about how Wyndham approaches leadership and development training?

Korin Neff (KN): When I joined Cendant [which spun off into Wyndham in 2006], there was always a tremendous focus on leadership development. And what was really unique about that was the inclusion of all different disciplines. A lot of the development opportunities within Wyndham were primarily cross-functional. The common theme that emerged was the diversity of thought coming from different people, and that it didn’t necessarily hinge on what department you were in or your area of expertise; it was driven by personality.

There were a number of leadership programmes available at Wyndham. There was one called ‘Leading Your Organisation’ where we did all sorts of personality tests, learned about leadership and self-reflected on what we could do to be a better leader, a better communicator.

I engaged in a week-long Wharton [the business school of the University of Pennsylvania] programme, where we actually lived on campus and were taught classes. It was akin to a mini-MBA, covering everything from team building to philanthropic efforts, to really learning the basics of finance, and then doing some self-reflective work where we learned about emotional intelligence and the importance of that in the workplace.

I had the opportunity to send people on my team to training. How often does a company give you the opportunity to sit back and really reflect on what you can do to develop your leadership skills? Our company is really fantastic at putting those courses together, and throughout the year we put on little ones such as ‘Lessons from Leaders’, where panels of leaders in the organisation will talk about things that have helped them succeed. It’s giving the associate population a unique look into what has driven success as it’s defined by different people.

GC: What’s your experience of the personality profiling analysis used by the company?

KN: What’s amazing is that it’s very predictive; it perfectly describes you to a tee. Most recently we had members of the compliance team take the profile exam, and then we sat in a room and did a couple of exercises together to really learn about how to work together and what each of these profile characteristics means. We divided into groups and talked about some of the strengths of having a particular characteristic, how others may perceive people with that particular characteristic, and how to best communicate with somebody with that particular characteristic. That was really eye-opening. For example, a structural person likes to be communicated with in writing, with bullet points – short and succinct. Whereas a social person is like, ‘hey, why can’t you just pick up the phone and tell me what you’re looking for?’ There’s going to be pleasantries at the beginning of the conversation, or a ‘hey, I’m going to give you a call and then send you an email’, and that tends to make the social person feel a bit more at ease.

[See Patricia Lee’s interview for an explanation of the characteristics in the personality profiling system.]

So understanding what people’s different learning and behavioural preferences are has helped us to communicate better as a team.

GC: Do you have any other examples of how you’ve used it day to day?

KN: I think it’s also helped in terms of putting project teams together. For example, we’re working on the next iteration of our code of conduct and for that team we need somebody who can think about the big picture, the structural person who can put a project plan in place, the analytical person who can take the data that’s coming back and make sure that we’re meeting our key performance indicators, and the social person who’s thinking about the stakeholders, and reaching out to the areas of the business that might have a say in what we’re doing. You can’t always have four people on a team, each equally divided with those thinking preferences, but it helps you to be mindful of what you need to make a balanced team and what you need to effectively communicate with people outside of the team.

GC: Do you think there are takeaways from thinking about how people work (rather than their roles or their qualifications) that other legal teams can benefit from, even if they’re not going to use personality profiling?

KN: I think that there are sometimes preconceived notions in terms of what a particular function area is going to be. We have a mix of lawyers and non-lawyers in the compliance group, but we have almost a near perfect four quarters of analyticals, socials, conceptuals and structurals. A lot of people are what is called bimodal or trimodal, rather than having one dominant personality trait.

If I’m not conceptual but I’m still a team leader, I’m still going to need to think about the big picture, for example, even though that may not be where I naturally gravitate. Having the diversity really helps support the team as a whole and it leads to better results. We talked about how we need to strive to help each other on those areas that we’re not as strong in. It’s interesting to think about how you can also trade on your strengths to pull up what you might not be so strong in.

I think it also means that you need to be respectful of other people, try to pull out the comments from the quieter person, and if you’re among the more gregarious, learn to sit on your hands a little bit before you raise your hand in a meeting. It’s more being aware.

GC: What have been the advantages of formal leadership training for you personally?

KN: It has allowed me to grow as a leader in ways that I wouldn’t have been able to without those programmes in place; at least it would have taken me a lot longer to get there.

But aside from that, it becomes an amazing bonding experience for the people that go through the programmes together. You watch others move and change roles within the organisation, and we all stay connected. And you also learn about different areas of the business through interacting with people. It’s a tremendous value add to the organisation because we’re gaining skills, and our ability to work as team, to outreach and effectively communicate with other people, only gets stronger.

GC: With the right training, can lots of different types of people be leaders?

KN: Absolutely – diversity of thought leads to really great leadership. What might work for a really great leader at one organisation might not translate to the culture of another organisation: if you took somebody in Silicon Valley and you put them on Wall Street, that might not translate.

I think it’s about trading on your strengths, but I also think it’s being in tune with your constituency, and dealing with the people around you. It’s like a good teacher who teaches to the class – they don’t just teach according to their style.

GC: Do you have any thoughts for readers who are interested in harnessing their own and their team’s leadership potential?

KN: Sitting in a room with your team, really starting to understand what makes them tick, and talking about the clients that you serve and the needs of those clients and how you can really meet those needs, is a really nice exercise and it doesn’t cost anything. It’s just people brainstorming and saying ‘this particular department likes things done in this particular way, or likes to be communicated with in this particular way: how can we lead a project?’ If you start with project-based leadership, then you can take those principles and carry them through to your day-to-day life.

But also, any time spent just discussing leadership with your team, or even mentoring people that have an interest and want to understand how to navigate through an organisation is useful. I’ve seen that people who participate start looking at things differently. I’ll walk into someone’s office and they’ll have a leadership book on their desk. It becomes a little club of people who get interested in personal development.

Patrica Lee

Patricia Lee is senior vice president of HR at Wyndham Worldwide. She talks GC through the nuts and bolts of Emergenetics, the personality profiling system used by the company to develop leaders and their teams.

The profile assessment gives people the opportunity to have a common language to talk about personality traits, which is not something that you normally sit around and have conversations about. It allows people to really just open up, be who they are and be proud of it.

The personality profiling method we use measures our preferences for thinking and behaviour. There are four colours: blue (which stands for analytical), green (structural), yellow (conceptual), and red (social). The assessment not only tells you what your preference for behaviour is, but it also tells you to what extent, by giving you a percentage score. You might be using two, three or all four of those colours, but no two profiles are the same. For example, I’m a blue-green. I have very high green (32%), very high blue (29%), so I’m analytical and structural. I’m pretty high conceptual at 21%, but very low on social. So when I’m interacting with my team, they know that if they come in here, they better have their facts, they better have their data. Whereas other leaders in the organisation might have a different approach.

It also talks about not only the way you think, but the way you behave, like are you a peace-keeper and easygoing, or are you more competitive and driving? Do you like defined situations or are you very spontaneous and quick to offer different opinions?

When you start sharing this, you realise that everybody has strengths. We might then understand why a person is a little bit more quiet at meetings, and we also realise that we all bring this diversity of thought that really enables each one of us to add to the team dynamics in a different, positive way.

Often people say: ‘this is what a leader looks like’. They have to be outgoing, charismatic, bring this certain high level energy. Our approach is different. We now have an ability to look at a very broad spectrum of leaders and say, ‘look, our leaders are made up of very different things.’

It debunks this whole cookie-cutter approach to leadership. It’s a high level of self-awareness and emotional intelligence, so that you know where your preferences are, but then it also demonstrates where you might have some blind spots, or where you might have to spend a little bit more time, energy and focus. That ability to flex to different environments and situations is a very powerful tool.

It also does bring an element of fun. People have their profiles on their doors, on their workstations, so that when you’re walking around you can get a sense of who different people are and what makes them tick. When you enter into a discussion with them, you already know how to approach it.

It’s not an assessment to determine whether a person is a high performer, but we have used it to form better teams. For example, if nine out of ten people are high blue, high green, then that might not be the best combination of team members, because they’re not bringing the different perspectives, preferences, or thinking abilities that a more creative team might have. So it might influence the make-up of how I put a team together.

When we’ve seen a team that is a bit one or two dimensional we might add another team member into it, or work with the team in understanding the roles that different people are going to have to play in order to fill in for the diversity of thought we think they might be missing. For example, if your team didn’t have a lot of conceptual thinkers, we would say, ‘you have to play the role of the conceptual thinker now’, and that would give you an opportunity to really dig in and figure out how those people think. It gets you out of your comfort zone, and allows you to stretch your brain in that particular area.

We also use the profiling when we’re trying to get people together to do some brainstorming. One cautionary note is when you do that you need a strong facilitator, because your very assertive people might overpower other individuals in the room, and you have to figure out ways to allow everybody to have the opportunity to express themselves.