A Meeting of the Minds

"There are three kinds of things that can happen at an executive retreat," says Jane Moloney, a New York-based organizational psychologist whose firm, InterAction, has worked with companies such as AT&T, Condé Nast, and Ernst & Young. "One is, we are coming together face-to-face, and we are going at a slower pace so we can renew or build relationships. Two is, we are going to get the best thinking on something -- we are going to slow down from the day-to-day pace so that we can think deeply. Three is the commitment -- we are actually going to resolve to take action on something."

Given those aspirations, an executive team that understands how its members prefer to express themselves will hold more effective meetings -- and reap the benefits. According to a study conducted by professional services firm Towers Watson, companies where employees are highly effective at communicating showed 47 percent higher total returns to shareholders over a period of five years when compared with the least effective communicators.

But what if employees don't communicate well? Can they be taught to do so? Here's where a class of tools that specialize in psychological profiling can prove helpful.

If you've been an executive in an American company for any substantial length of time, chances are you've engaged in, or are at least passingly familiar with, psychological evaluation exercises such as Myers-Briggs, DISC, and Gallup's Clifton StrengthsFinder. These and similar tools -- practitioners who use them dislike the word "test" with its connotations of passing or failing, better or worse -- seek to define and explain the ways we process and share information, by helping to identify our personality traits and learning styles. This provides us with a framework for understanding how we communicate, whether as individuals or as teams.

Tools that categorize what type of person someone is, psychologically, have been used extensively in the past half-century by companies large and small, government agencies, and in MBA programs. The oldest and biggest, Myers-Briggs, has been used by more than 10,000 companies, 2,500 colleges, and 200 U.S. government agencies since the tool's debut in 1962, according to CPP Inc., which publishes the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The company estimates that more than 50 million people have taken the MBTI to date. An estimated 10 million have taken the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment in less than 20 years. 

"Myers-Briggs looks at cognition -- how does someone think," says Moloney. "Personality tools go to how you think at a very deep level."

The MBTI is intended to make psychologist Carl Jung's theory of psychological types more understandable and actionable in everyday life. Basically, it takes four pairs of common personality preferences and determines which of each pair is stronger in the subject, based on a 20-minute questionnaire followed by a validation interview with a trained facilitator. One pair that deals with decision-making is Thinking -- Feeling. Thinking means the person uses logic and analysis to come to decisions, while Feeling refers to someone who makes decisions based on personal values. By finding the strongest preference in each of the four pairs, the subject can be assigned one of 16 possible personality types. Knowing which type you are can help you understand your motivation, strengths, and the way you learn and communicate with others. 

Clearly, gaining insight into attendees' communication styles is both relevant and appropriate to executive retreats, which are, in the end, all about taking the time to get away from the day-to-day pace of managing a business in order to focus on larger or longer-term goals, says Moloney. And that means working together and talking through solutions.

"The executive's role is to think long term," she says. "If executives don't have a retreat, they will fail in their important role of thinking longer-term than the operations of the business."

Communicating More Effectively 
Making a fresh start after a change in leadership was the goal when the top managers of Rochester, NY-based Klein Steel Service, a 44-year-old metal distribution and processing firm with more than 200 employees, went on an executive retreat last October. The company's longtime president, John Batiste, had stepped down to head up a new venture in partnership with Klein Steel's owner, and former COO Todd Zyra moved up to assume the leadership post, while other company veterans also took on new responsibilities in the shift. 

"All of the faces were familiar, we all knew each other, but we knew each other in different roles," says Pat DiLaura, the company's chief talent officer. "Todd went from being a peer to the leader of the group, which changes the whole dynamic of the team. When you have change at the top of the organization, it reverberates throughout the entire company. That's the person who sets the tone for the whole culture."

And even though it was an amicable transition, DiLaura says, "change at the highest level of an organization is the hardest kind. You have a pretty small window in which to eliminate the fear and uncertainty. And if you don't do that successfully, there's a very real risk that you're going to lose some of the talent that you rely on to make your business successful. So we thought it would be important to take some time off-site, in a casual, informal environment, to begin the process of recreating relationships and redefining roles, and establishing a new dynamic as a team."

For several years, the company had been using a version of the DISC tool, which gauges a person's propensity for any of four personality designations -- director, intuitive, stabilizer, calculator -- in its employee assessments. So as part of the retreat agenda, a facilitator was brought in to use the tool in conjunction with reviewing team members' new responsibilities, says DiLaura. 

"It was an opportunity, in a formal, non-threatening way, to come together and speak openly, using the language of the tool, about work styles and preferences," DiLaura adds. "We had everybody retake the DISC about two weeks before the retreat. We then structured the meeting to start out with feedback on the results."

The DISC facilitator went through each person's results with the group. According to DiLaura, "He asked each of us, 'Does this resonate?' 'Do you think this is you?' 'Why or why not?,' and it led to a pretty fruitful discussion. The barriers dropped." 

Among the findings, says DiLaura, was that while Batiste had been an "off-the-charts extrovert," meaning "director" and "intuitive" were his strongest DISC traits, new president Zyra leaned slightly toward introvert, with a propensity for the roles of "stabilizer" and "calculator." "We needed to understand what that meant in a practical way, as we were going to have to adapt our styles to meet the needs of the new president," notes DiLaura.

"Most people think that introverts are just shy and quiet and extroverts are outgoing and really talkative," says Meghan Lowrey, director of organizational development consulting for St. Louis-based Psychological Associates, noting that these types are best known as a key part of the MBTI. "That's not it at all. Extroverts tend to get their energy from being around other people, while introverts get their energy being alone and being thoughtful about what they want to do, being able to plan." Thus, extroverts like to talk through an issue and think on the go, whereas introverts put a greater emphasis on preparing before a meeting.

An extrovert himself, DiLaura says that discoveries from using the DISC tool gave him valuable insight on how to communicate effectively with the new president. As a result, DiLaura says, it was agreed that he would give Zyra materials to read in advance on specific issues that were going to come up in meetings. "And I'm not going to hit him with too many different topics in a single meeting," he adds. 

Thinking Strategically 
"The most effective retreats are ones where the work with personality type tools is wrapped into a company's own business agenda," says Jacque Merritt, senior practice consultant for Washington, D.C.-based Gallup, Inc.'s Clifton StrengthsFinder tool. That way it's not just a discussion about each person's strengths and how he or she views the world, but actually using that understanding to communicate more effectively on real issues that affect efficiency, effectiveness, impact, productivity, and performance. "We know that people perform better when they do what they do best," she says. 

This lesson was brought home to Merritt when working with a client during the 2008 financial crash, she says. "The client found their business collapsing and, after layoffs and budget cuts, decided that it needed to refocus on operations. They went from being these creative, visionary people that had this entrepreneurial mindset [to saying], 'We've got to focus on targets, on giving our clients exactly what they need,'" Merritt says. "What happened is their business started tanking even more."

Shortly after, the company's top executives went on a corporate retreat, hiring Merritt to facilitate the StrengthsFinder tool to help them figure out what was going wrong. 

StrengthsFinder uses 34 strengths like "strategic," "futuristic," "developer," discipline," and "learner" grouped into four broad categories: executing, influencing, relationship building, and strategic thinking. The assessment produces a list of those 34 strengths, or talent themes, that describe patterns of thought or behaviors, ranked based on how dominant each theme is in that subject's personality. The top five are "your autopilot," Merritt says. "They're your natural reaction to the world in front of you. It's how you think, how you relate to people, how you influence others, how you get things done. It's such a unique fingerprint ... there's only a one-in-33-million chance that you'll meet somebody who has your same top five in the same order."

More importantly, Merritt says, is that when you get people to talk together about those strengths, "you start to look at people and understand what makes them tick. You can look at the world from their perspective and understand where their behavior comes from."

One important point to make sure participants understand is that tools that determine your psychological type have "no right or wrong answers," says Aidan Millar, talent development and performance consultant at Edmonton, Canada-based Psychometrics. "The assessment doesn't pretend that it captures all of who you are. What it is, is a starting point for your development. We want to know what your natural inclinations are. It simply helps us identify certain attributes about you ... [and use them] to talk about how you can become more effective, and then apply it in a very practical way," to issues like team building, change management, and conflict resolution.

After taking the assessment, Merritt's clients mapped out their strengths and sought patterns. "They found that their competitive edge as a team was really around being visionary," she says. "They realized that they were working against themselves by trying to focus on the operational side of the business at the expense of the creative, entrepreneurial side. They came out of that retreat saying, 'We're going to go back to the core of who we are as human beings and really tap into that natural ability.'"

Taking Action
Merritt's client did not simply give up on operational improvements, though. "They took the StrengthsFinder to others in that leadership level below them, and they mapped their strengths," she says. "They realized that they had people who had operational talents, as well as those who had more creative, entrepreneurial, visionary talents. They reorganized their organization around that." As a result, the company not only survived a downturn it was not expected to, Merritt says, it thrived, and today is a well known, award-winning firm. 

At Klein Steel, the action came after lunch. After using the DISC tool to figure out how they could best work with each other and the new president, DiLaura and his colleagues created a Workplace Covenant, a two-page document that spells out explicitly what their expectations are for each other in terms of communications and follow through, he says.

DiLaura also saved the DISC profiles on a management-only online folder, so he and his colleagues can refer back to it if they are having trouble communicating with a colleague.

"With the changes that happened in October of 2013, we had maybe a one- to two-month window where we needed to get people feeling comfortable, secure in their role, and feeling confident in their relationship with our new president, and vice-versa, so that they could get refocused on doing what they do best, and not go back to their office and worry about whether or not they're going to have a job," DiLaura says. "I think that is the single most important dividend that this exercise paid, in terms of return on investment."

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