Enabling a Famous Automobile Brand to ind Good Sales People

Selling automobiles in the top segment usually involves several hours of personal contact between a salesperson and a customer. In this segment, personal relationships are an even more important factor than in many other sales situations .

All Dutch salespeople of one a top automobile brand were profiled with MindSonar. A benchmark profile was developed using statistics. Their meta programs and criteria were related to the number of cars they sold per year. The benchmark profile— where different Meta Programs were given different weights — correlated highly with the number of cars sold.

From then on, all candidates for sales positions were profiled with MindSonar. How similar their profile was to the desired profile partly determined whether or not they were hired. Also, in the current sales force, salespeople who diverted from the desired profile were offered a training course, tailored especially to develop their underdeveloped Meta Programs.

Subsequently, benchmark profiles were developed for location managers, and service managers too, to be used in hiring and training.

The MindSonar professional running the project was Johan Hoevers (Netherlands). Jaap Hollander did the benchmarks for the location and service managers. Look them up in the Registry.

Enter your text here…

Helping Child Care Workers become better Auditors

In the Netherlands, a specific set of quality criteria is used to evaluate day care centres. These criteria are audited once a year by independent institutions. To improve quality, it is also important for the day care centres themselves to do audits internally with their own employees. Quite often this does not happen enough. So what exactly does it take to be a good internal child care auditor? 

A MindSonar Professional investigated two things: first of all what the Meta Programs of a good auditor are. And secondly, how this profile relates to that of a good child care worker. They already suspected these would be two quite different profiles.

They asked several organisations to tell them who their best Internal auditors were. They profiled these auditors, constructing an benchmark profile. Good auditors were found to score high on the Meta Programs ‘Visual’ and ‘Information’. They wanted to see what information had been stored about processes. Good child care workers typically had high scores on the Meta Programs ‘Kinesthetic’ and ‘People’.

So child care workers basically needed to shift their thinking style to be good auditors. The MindSonar Professional built a training program around these two Meta Programs. They achieved good results with child care workers who were starting auditing work.

The MindSonar professionals running the project was Johan de Haas (Netherlands). Look him up in the Registry.

Dutch Equestrian Team Winning in the Olympics

Olympic Dressage How MindSonar Helped

In 2012 the Dutch equestrian sports people won 20% of all the Dutch Olympic medals in London. Three times silver and one bronze medal.

 Imagine you’re a brilliant rider. To be specific, dressage is your expertise. Day in, day out you are training to be in complete harmony with your horse and to achieve the perfect result on the Olympic Games. You have formed your own staff with an excellent trainer, groom, vet, farrier and so on. You ride and train your horses every day and you’re probably doing all this on your own estate or equestrian center. You’re over twenty-five years old, not single anymore and if you would like to, you may imagine that you also have children.

And then when you’re selected to be in the National team, especially for the Olympic Games, circumstances really change. Now you are a member of the Dutch Dressage Team. You have to deal with the other team members for about ten days. Your own staff is not nearby. You will be staying in the Olympic Village and see and meet all those other top athletes. You have to share a room with another rider of your team. The distance from the Village to the stables is at least 45 minutes.

So how do you deal with this as an individual top athlete? How do you stay focused? What kind of a team will make you feel at your best or beyond this? What do you need from the other team members and what are you willing and or able to give? What is important for you in the context of being part of this Olympic Team? That’s what our coaching program is about: How can this team be the best possible team in this moment in time for every rider?

For example in a team that scores a high average on ‘solo’ you really have to find out how much solo is needed for everyone and when. High score on ‘solo’ means to someone really have a desire to concentrate on their own affairs, a need for working alone, undisturbed by other people. Normally this is not something that people are consciously aware of … they just start feeling annoyed if there’s to much emphasis on doing all kind of things together, like “where do WE have breakfast, lunch and dinner?” “At what time do WE leave for the training?”

Or the difference between the thinking styles ‘global’ and ‘specific’. “How was you’re training?” asks one team member with the Meta Program ‘specific’. “Fine” answers the other with Meta Program ‘global’. “Hmm”, goes our ‘specific’ thinking rider, “Why being so rude? Why not answering the question, I am really interested in how you’re training was. I think I am not going to ask this again”.  Our ‘Global’ rider doesn’t have a clue of what is happening, because “fine” was how it was, a genuine answer. He’s not thinking any more specific than this.

Understanding and insight in each others Meta Programs is really a wonderful way to avoid misunderstandings and, as we found out in the last few years, to create a team spirit of respect and empathy. Of course this is helpful for any team in any context. Management teams, Project teams, sports teams. What makes the top athletes so special is their eagerness, willingness and readiness to learn and to improve every day. It is such a privilege to work with them.The MindSonar professionals running the project were Lot Wielders and Jennet Burghard (Netherlands) They were asked to do this again in 2014 (World championship for Eventing), 2016 (Rio for Eventing) and 2018 (World championship in Tryon USA). Look them up in the Registry.

The Four Essential Elements of Leadership

MEASURING THE LEADERSHIP MINDSET – PART 1

Clinton on leadership
What is leadership? One of the most concise and yet comprehensive descriptions was given by former US president Bill Clinton, in a Fortune magazine interview in 2014.

“Leadership”, Clinton said, “means bringing people together in pursuit of a common cause, developing a plan to achieve it and staying with it until the goal is achieved.

Leadership also requires the ability to respond to unforeseen problems and opportunities when they arise. 

Leaders need to be able to clearly articulate a vision of where they want to go, develop a realistic strategy to get there. They need to attract talented, committed people with a wide variety of knowledge, perspectives and skills. In the modern world, I believe lasting positive results are more likely to occur when leaders practice inclusion and cooperation rather than authoritarian unilateralism.”

Mindset
Leaders, like everybody else, achieve goals through their actions; what they do and what they say, how do you it and and how they say it. All these behaviours result from a certain way of thinking. Behind all those actions is a certain mindset. Somebody’s mindset includes how they feel, what mood they are in, their attitudes and beliefs and their thinking processes. A different mindset will results in different actions and different actions will result in different outcomes.

The Inner Game
Mindset is what sports coach W. Timothy Gallwey calls the Inner Game. Gallwey has pointed out that a sports person actually plays two games, or as he calls it: acts in two arenas of engagement. There is an inner arena and there is an outer arena. Gallwey started out developing its principle for the game of tennis and later expanded the application of his theory to cover professional excellence in all kinds of fields.

A tennis player has external goals like how to hold their racket, how to keep their breathing steady, how to focus on the ball, and so on. “The inner game”, Gallwey says, “takes place within the mind of the player and is played against such obstacles as fear, self-doubt, lapses of focus and limiting concepts and assumptions. The inner game is played to overcome the self-imposed obstacles that prevent the individual or a team from accessing their full potential.” The interaction between the inner game and the outer game is essential for both tennis players and leaders.

Any team and any leader will sooner or later run into obstacles. Markets changes, technologies appear, environments collapse. Say you are leading a photo press agency and ‘suddenly’ anyone with a smartphone can send their pictures to the paper. Or you direct a cab company and Uber appears.

When a leader combines an outer obstacle with a an inner obstacle of their own, problems tends to spiral out of hand. Take Volkswagen for example. They ran into a huge outer obstacle with their Audi A3, and VW models like Beetle and Passat. The engines in these cars (11 million world wide) emitted pollutants up to 40 times above what is allowed. Volkswagen leadership  met this outer obstacle with inner obstacles like fear and a desire to hide. Rather than ‘practicing inclusion and cooperation’ as Bill Clinton would probably have advised them, they decided to illegally change the testing software to obtain ‘better results’. The rest is history: great damage to the Volkswagen brand and a slow, painful recovery. An outer obstacle was met with an inner obstacle.

So one essential quality of effective leaders is their ability to meet external obstacles with internal resources. This can turn a difficult challenge into an achievable goal. After the dust had settled a bit, Volkswagen leadership finally met the emission challenge with awareness, courage and vision. They are now envisioning Volkswagen as an electric car company and they have made a huge financial effort towards that goal. One wishes for Volkswagen that their leadership had met this outer obstacle white that inner resource 10 years earlier.

The leadership mindset as a resource
In this series of articles we will look at a set of inner resources for leaders: the Leadership Mindset. With the psychological tool MindSonar we can measure how people think and what they find important. In other words: MindSonar measures mindsets. What does the leadership mindset look like in terms of meta programs and Graves drives, the two types of human qualities MindSonar measures?

Leadership versus management
Leadership is closely related to motivating people. It is something entirely different from management. Management is often defined as ‘getting things done through others’. Leadership on the other hand, may be defined as ‘getting people to want to do things’. Management is usually associated with the improving productivity,  establishing order and stability and making things run efficiently. Leadership is what sets the direction and keeps a group moving forward, even when there is a lot of uncertainty, upheaval and resistance.

The Four Elements
Taking Clinton’s definition as a starting point, we can distinguish four eseential elements in leadership:

  1. VisionClearly articulating and uplifting view of the future.
  2. PlanningDeveloping a realistic strategy.
  3. EngagementAttracting talented and committed people.
  4. ResilienceResponding effectively to unforeseen problems.

We can distill three more aspects from the Clinton definition’. But we will set these aside for now:

  1. TenacityStaying with it until the goal is achieved.
  2. FlexibilityBeing able to deal with and appreciate a wide variety of perspectives.
  3. CreativityMaking use of unforeseen opportunities.

These three do not seem as important as the first four. However, when later in this narrative we get to the fourth essential element, Resilience, we will see that it has a lot to do with tenacity, flexibility and creativity.The next article in this series is about the vision element. We will look into the question what vision is, in a leadership frame, and how is shows up in a MindSonar profile.

Strategy in Leadership – The Path towards the Vision

The Big FourThis is part three of our series on the Leadership Mindset. In the first article we discussed the four essential elements of leadership. We started from a compact, yet complete definition by Bill Clinton. In the second article we constructed a vision benchmark defining the meta programs that make up the working parts of ‘envisioning’ so to speak. In this third article, we are looking into the second element: strategy.

Leadership”, Clinton says in the famous 2014 Fortune interview, “means bringing people together in pursuit of a common cause, developing a plan to achieve it and staying with it until the goal is achieved. …. 

Strategy Strategy is the link between vision and action. The vision gives direction:  we want to go in the future. It is the motivator that empowers the leader and – if it is expressed well – inspires other people to work towards it. The strategy describes the path,  we want to get there; what we are going to do to bring that envisioned better world closer. 

A strategy contains a sequence of steps. Strategy says: First we will do this, in the meantime we will take care of that, then we will do that and finally we will achieve such and such. This is typical procedural thinking. When someone thinks procedurally (as opposed to thinking in options), they are aware of a sequence of actions or outcomes. Although phases or steps in the sequence may overlap, basically each phase needs to be finished to make the next phase successful or even possible.

What is realism?Clinton mentioned “developing a realistic strategy”. Of course, procedural thinking on its own can just as easily lead to unrealistic strategies. Pipe-dreams can have strategies too. Being procedural is no guarantee for realism. There are plenty examples of failed – and often very well strategized – ventures. Take the TouchPad for instance, HP’s iPad challenger. HP gave up the TouchPad after just a month and a half on the market. It was not a bad product. It did what is was supposed to do, but there wasn’t anything it did better than the iPad. One retailer ended up with 250.000 unsold TouchPads. Or take the Galaxy Note 7, one of Samsung’s flagship phones. It would occasionally catch fire and/or explode.… The Note 7 was banned from airplanes, and to this day it still is. Samsung had to recall the entire line.

A good example of a successful, realistic strategy is offered by Toyota. When Toyota started selling Japanese cars in the US, the government responded with protectionist taxes on all imported cars. This made Japanese cars as expensive as US-made cars. Within a few years, Toyota established production plants in the US, avoiding the import taxes. Toyota continued to output cars significantly cheaper than US companies could. Their production processes were so efficient and lean, that they were able to beat USA car makers at their own game. Toyota spent years studying the production lines of American car makers such as Ford. They tried to copy what the Americans did well. Then they blended these processes with strengths of their own, and came up with something even better. 

What makes a strategy realistic? 

  1. Practical limitations are addressedHP didn’t seem to realise that the reception of their TouchPad would be limited by its minimal advantages over the iPad. Toyota did understand that their price advantage would be severely limited by tax-raised prices.
  2. Possible dangers are consideredHP didn’t seem to have considered the danger of the TouchPads being sent back by the retailers if they didn’t sell right away. Toyota did understand that their whole USA venture would fail if they could not deliver equal or better quality for a lower price.
  3. Actions to execute the steps in the strategy are specifiedAll HP could do when the Touchpad didn’t sell right away, was to discontinue it and take their loss. This happened in only 6 weeks. Toyota responded to the protectionist taxes with a long term plan to establish US factories and refining their production processes over decades.

Vision and StrategyIn leadership, with a vision we communicate an emotionally charged, uplifting image of a better world. But just expressing that vision is not enough. How many times have you heard someone say: “Wouldn’t it be great if…”, without any consequences? A vision needs a path. A good leader not only defines a desirable endpoint. They also sketch the journey that will lead us there. And that sketch needs to have enough detail and enough realism. If the vision appeals to our feelings, the strategy appeals to our rational mind. 

Martin Luther KingA great example of vision is Martin Luther King’s famous speech ‘I have a dream’. He very specifically depicts what freedom and equality for black Americans will be like. When I was watching this speech again, I did notice that he actually starts with contrasting the oppression of black people (“The life of the negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation”), with the vision(“that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of slaves and the sons or slave owners will be able to sit down at the table or brotherhood”) Here we see not only ‘towards’, but also ‘away from’ thinking. The starting point of the strategic journey is defined as well.

I would like to point out the strategy element in this speech. At the very moment Dr. King is giving the speech, he is literally on the path toward his end point, his vision, the realisation of the dream. He is in Washington DC, surrounded by a mass of many thousands of protesters, who are obviously moved by his vision, but who are also taking concrete action by being there. Here we see and hear a wonderful synthesis of vision and strategy. After describing his dream, Dr. King goes on to describe the path: how they will keep on protesting and fighting for freedom together: “With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together”. Although in this case I have to note that the sequence is not very clear. It’s more something like ‘let’s do all this and we will get there’, rather than ‘first step A and then spep B’ and so on.

Another aspect of Dr. King’s speech I would like to call your attention to, is the aspect of tenacity. Clinton says: “Leadership means bringing people together in pursuit of a common cause, developing a plan to achieve it and staying with it until the goal is achieved…. Staying with it. King literally talks about ‘struggling together’ and ‘going to jail together’. This represents strong tenacity in the face of resistance.In the next article in this series we will look at the nuts and bolts of strategy. What is the mindset that helps with strategizing? And does it show up in a MindSonar profile?