The 4 Personalities That Lead to Innovation

In turbulent times, companies that constantly innovate achieve significant competitive advantage over those that do not.

Innovation in a custom installation company can take many forms.

It involves a process of questioning everything you do, including what you sell, how you bundle products and services, your back office and installation practices, your levels of customer service and how you come to market.

True innovation creates value that is measurable and bankable. However, innovation requires a company to learn to do things that it doesn't already know how to do.

The question becomes, "How can a business transform its entrenched organizational culture to become a business that embraces innovation as a core company value?"

In short, how do you teach an old horse new tricks?

According to Jeff DeGraff, the keynote speaker at last year's PARA Management Conference and author of "Leading Enterprise Innovation and Growth," in order for companies to truly innovate, they need to develop faster, more flexible organizations with lower overhead, less scale and more scope to diversify.

Most importantly, leaders must populate their companies with individuals who embody four distinct managerial styles that work together to create a dynamic that is conducive to creating and sustaining innovation.

Each of these four types embodies a distinct set of positive corporate values that work together to enable companies to innovate effectively.

However, certain value sets also create inherent tensions with other value sets. When unaddressed, the internal friction created by these competing sets of values can frustrate and undermine a leader's efforts to spearhead and execute meaningful change.

The Four Management Value Profiles

DeGraff's Competing Values Formula (CVF) delineates four main innovation types/profiles that produce value.

Each profile is a description of the biases, preferred activities and management styles of particular types of individuals, together with the outcomes they tend to produce.

Each type also refers to an area of functionality within the company. To find your dominant profile type, log on to http://www.competingvalues.com and take the test.

Compete Types are intensely competitive. They are totally focused on performance and goals.

Companies with a competitive culture emphasize results and the discipline necessary to achieve them. Their driving purposes are profit and speed of response.

Competitive leaders build the organization by clarifying objectives and improving their companies' market position through hard work and productivity.

At their best, they keep everyone focused on short- and long-term goals. They are good motivators, good managers and quick decision makers.

At their worst, they create tension for collaborate types when their style of managing and decision-making neglects important team and people factors.

A company dominated by compete types can alienate people and create high turnover and low morale.

Collaborate Types are the "people" leaders who believe in something greater than the business itself and run their companies to reflect shared values.

They are generally warm, affable and trustworthy types who are known to do the "fair" thing. Their actions are motivated by knowledge, learning and building relationships.

They are good communicators, community builders and diplomats. They are excellent trainers and tend to lead by consensus.

At their best, collaborate types build trust and foster commitment, loyalty and team spirit. Both employees and customers are treated like partners in an extended community. They make great managers and sales people.

At their worst, collaborators can drag their feet when it comes to making unpopular decisions or having to fire long-time employees, and they tend to lose sight of timetables and short-term goals.

A company dominated by collaborate types can sometimes feel more like a party than a business. Because they are generally slower decision makers, collaborators often come into direct conflict with compete types.

Control Types represent incremental innovation by taking something that already exists and modifying it to make it better.

Control types are totally focused on control issues and business process, with a strong emphasis on creating rules and enforcing them. Controllers are systematic, careful and practical.

Their key words are efficiency, quality and predictability. Control leaders build the organization by optimizing systems, cutting costs and establishing company policies and procedures. They are very role-oriented.

At their best, controllers are good at improving existing products and services with minor variations.

At their worst, they create bureaucracies that stifle innovation and fail to capitalize on new ideas and market trends. Controllers, with their emphasis on rules and regulations, create friction for creators.

Create Types are all about creativity, innovation and growth. This is the profile associated with radical breaks from the past and breakthrough ideas.

Creators are visionary, free-thinking, risk-taking, optimistic, quirky, expressive and future-oriented. They tend to be generalists or artists who enjoy exploring new ideas and changing directions to solve problems.



For the most part, create types are unstructured and less concerned with details and protocol. Creative leaders build the organization by developing a compelling vision and emphasizing new ideas and technologies.

At their best, creators provide the ideas that fuel innovation and constantly seek new ways of doing things. They do well in marketing, research and development and design.

At their worst, creators come up with too many ideas -- some good, some less good -- and have a tendency toward distraction and starting too many new projects that never get finished.

Companies with too many create types can become chaotic and unfocused. Creators work best in an unstructured environment and feel constricted by a workplace dominated by too many rules from the controllers.

Connecting the Types

In an ideal scenario, leaders understand their own profile bias and either surround themselves with a group of offsetting profile types or learn to become ambidextrous by developing more sensitivity to the important functionality each group contributes.

In this way, innovation leaders connect the profiles to allow create types to take the lead and generate new ideas, control types to edit those ideas and create systems to control the risk, compete types to implement and stay on task and collaborate types to hold the group together with shared values, goals and group communication.

Says Leon Soohoo of Paradyme in Sacramento, Calif., "Though I am primarily a control type, I try to assume the role of other profiles for certain tasks, especially in meetings where the other types [aren't represented]."

Most companies falter in their innovation efforts when the organization becomes too dominant in one profile or, as is the case in most companies, lacks one of the profile types altogether.

This is not unusual since human nature leads most leaders to unconsciously hire people just like themselves, which creates and fuels imbalance within the company.

PARA dealers attending DeGraff's workshop participated in an exercise to help them identify their own dominant profile, learn about the value of creating teams that combine all four types and understand the importance of resolving the friction that naturally occurs between compete and collaborate types and control and create types.

"The exercise was both fun and very educational, about how different management styles work or don't work well together," commented Dean Miller, president of cable manufacturer AudioQuest.

"It was also fascinating to see what type other industry colleagues were and how accurately the exercise nailed everyone's profile type."

Managing Against Type

Many people find that though they are predominantly one profile type, they can also function, with some concentration, according to the values of their opposite type.

Josh Lissman of Cincinnati-based Entertainment Solutions describes himself as a strong compete type, totally focused on objectives and making the numbers as his three-year-old company continues to grow.

"After attending DeGraff's 'Competing Values' workshop, I made a deliberate effort to develop my collaborate skills, to let go of always hammering on the numbers, to spend more time cultivating relationships within the company," he says.

Lissman adds that in the short term, it was worthwhile. He helped to strengthen team spirit and foster "a greater sense of 'warm' and fuzzy."

When the company didn't hit its projected sales goals, however, Lissman says he had to shift back to his compete style and "drive the business more forcibly."

In all, Lissman says, "The exercise was very worthwhile to help me understand more clearly where my strengths lie, and why I get along with some types and not others.

"We have a lot of collaborators and some compete types on our sales staff, and our install team actually incorporates all profiles, but I see now that we could do with another control type or two, and we are completely lacking in creators. In this regard, we tend to be more evolutionary than revolutionary."

Jeannette Howe, executive director of Specialty Electronics Nationwide, is a collaborator, but has been other roles, too.

"Though I am predominantly a collaborator, in my past role as a buyer, I was called upon to develop my compete qualities to make business happen and stay competitive. I found I could rely on my collaborate qualities to nurture longterm, win/win relationships with our vendor partners," she says.

"Internally, I needed to be a driver. In my current position, I need to be both, using my collaborate skills to create a sense of purpose, community and belonging for my buying group members, and my compete qualities to make decisions quickly and drive new initiatives through to completion."

Howe also adds that it is interesting to look at high-profile companies in terms of their dominant profile type, such that Apple is a create/collaborate enterprise while Microsoft is clearly more compete/control.

Hard to Innovate Without Creators

Interestingly, most companies interviewed reported a dearth of create types, who actually provide the ideas that fuel innovation.

"This was a phenomenal session for me," says Myer-Emco's Gary Yacoubian.

"I realized the degree to which my organization is biased toward execution [compete] and the necessity of including more innovative [create] energy in my company. This means listening more completely to what the create types have to say before shutting them down, understanding that out of ten ideas, nine may be ridiculous, but the tenth may well be brilliant."

Though the best solution for assembling a team biased toward innovation is to hire a create type, aware leaders can make it a point to attend conferences, network with fellow dealers and buying group members and read the trade magazines to access innovative ideas that they can then process through their existing management teams.

Dealers can also choose to outsource create and control profile types by hiring a consultant to brainstorm new marketing ideas or to help create better systems and controls.

Find the Right Fit

John Flanner of Flanners Home Entertainment in Brookfield, Wis., was impressed with the profile breakdown.

"The CVF opened my eyes to the value of diversity, and to the value each profile type brings to the process of innovation -- not only in terms of a top management team, but also within subgroups of teams working on various projects," he says.

Flanner calls himself "a total control type." So was most of his company, he recalls.

"So, we've been slow to innovate, and we've often been frustrated trying to get new projects off the ground."

Since attending the DeGraff session, Flanner reports that his company has hired a new general manager with strong compete profile characteristics, which has made a "huge difference" in the company's ability to get things done.

"We recently reorganized our buying department to include people with all three profiles so we can hit the numbers and initiate new campaigns [compete], control the data [control] and negotiate and communicate in a timely fashion [collaborate], which covers all aspects of the buying function," Flanner says.

"We also have a lot of collaborate types in our back office, which creates a sense of family and belonging. We still lack create types, but just being mindful of it has helped us move forward."

In the end, Flanner acknowledges the value of the different types outlined by the CVF.

"I realize now it takes a lot of courage to move past your comfort zone to hire people with profiles unlike your own," he says, "but we are making an effort to diversify the team as people leave and we replace key positions in the company."

Bjorn Dhybdahl, of Bjorn's in San Antonio, Texas, tells a similar story. "We've been working very hard recently to be sure we have the right profile types in the right jobs," he explains.

"Compete types and collaborators make the best people managers, but we need the control types to keep everything together."

Looking at his own company, Dhybdahl says, "Our COO/CFO is a compete, our GM is a control and I am a collaborator with a lot of create [attributes]."

He adds, "We had a custom division manager who, by being such a strong control type, was good at his job, but had a harder time managing the people. We have since moved him to head up project management, where he has flourished."

Innovators Need Editing

David Stollmack, an industry consultant, reflects on his past company, Audio Video Systems in Charlotte, N.C., in terms of what he learned at the conference.

"I am a strong create type, and my partner of many years was a strong control type," he says. "When he left the company, I moved people around to fill his shoes, but I put many people in the wrong positions and never actually hired more control types, which is what we needed to keep my create energy in check.

"Without [his partner], there was no one strong enough in the company to edit my ideas for soundness and viability, or limit the number of new projects we started at any one time."

Since the conference and his company's subsequent changes, Stollmack has come to recognize a few things.

"I realize now that we all have our strengths, and it isn't a personal failing to lack competence in all areas. The key is to understand my own strengths and be sure I surround myself with strong managers in the other three profiles."