Opinions expressed by Digital Journal contributors are their own.
When I was halfway through completing an MBA program at the London Business School, I was offered a position with McKinsey in New York, a dream job of every MBA student at the time.
Charles Handy, the first dean of the Sloan program at London Business School told me not to take it. Rather, he told me that business success comes down to one skill, and one skill only — being good at one-on-one meetings. And sales is the best teacher.
So, instead of taking my dream job, I went into sales. During sales training at International Computers Limited (ICL) in Australia, a British competitor of IBM, we were taught how, by quickly identifying someone’s temperament based on the Humm-Wadsworth model of emotional intelligence, we would know how to relate and sell to them.
According to the Humm-Wadsworth model, our personalities are based on a combination of one or more temperaments, of which there are seven. The seven temperaments are the Socializer, the Doublechecker, the Artist, the Politician, the GoGetter, the Engineer, and the Regulator.
In short, Socializers are extroverts whose motivation is communication. Doublecheckers are agreeable and have a strong desire for security. Artists are individualistic and want to create. Politicians are competitive, assertive, and want to win. Engineers are conscientious and want to bring projects to fruition. GoGetters are looking for what’s in it for them, and have a strong desire for material success. And Regulators are unemotional and pursue order.
Most of us possess a combination of two or more of these temperaments. In general, successful salespeople, being very social and motivated to make money, have both a high Socializer and GoGetter component.
One day, we were joking around with our teacher Kevin Chandler, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Chandler Macleod Group, about Doublecheckers and Artists, who possessed personality traits antithetical to our sales team.
It was then that Kevin Chandler told us this precautionary tale. In 1961 Dick Baker established Mainline Corporation in Sydney, Australia. What started with building apartment houses expanded into corporate development. In 1968 it went public on the Sydney Stock Exchange. Mainline became the darling of stockholders, akin to today’s Tesla. By 1972 it was doing $123 million in contracts. By 1974 it was liquidated to pay off creditors.
Many have speculated on how Mainline fell from grace. Chandler told us it was none of those reasons.
He went on to explain how Dick Baker had brought in the Chandler Macleod Group to audit the executives at the C level.
“We went in and interviewed each of them and administered personality tests. When we were finished, we went to deliver the results to Baker,” recalled Chandler.
Baker was a high Socializer and Politician, a classic profile for a CEO — highly energetic, enthusiastic, competitive, assertive, and a quick decision-maker.
“Well, what’s my team like?’ Baker asked. “Haven’t I got the best team in Australia?”
“Well actually, no, you’ve got a big problem,” MacLeod responded.
“What do you mean?” asked Baker.
“Well, you’ve hired clones of yourself. You’re in property development. It’s a very risky business, and there’s no one on your C-level team who is a Doublechecker – someone saying, ‘Wait a minute, there’s a risk here, there’s a risk there.’”
Baker looked at him and said, “That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of in my life. Get out. And I’m not paying your fee.” And that’s what happened.
Nine months later, the company went down. It was the biggest crash in Australia’s corporate history at the time.
MacLeod then went to another up-and-coming property development company named Leighton Contractors, which was run at the time by Wal King. MacLeod told him the Mainline story. Wal King looked at him and said, “That’s very interesting.” Wal King then went out and hired as the CFO, Deda Erasmus, who was a high Doublechecker, the complete opposite of him. Wal King wouldn’t make a move without first getting Deda’s approval. And Leighton Contractors became the biggest property developer in Australia.
The golden rule of people is that we like those who are like ourselves. As a result, most managers make the mistake of hiring people exactly like them. So if people share a similar strong component, they effectively end up liking each other.
The corollary is that we dislike, or don’t emotionally connect with, people who are not like ourselves.
The thing is, you need diversity on your team. You need people with different points of view who do things differently than you, who can see the pitfalls you don’t see, and the opportunities you don’t see.
Two weeks after being hired, I was told to get rid of 30% of my staff. One member of my staff. the admin manager Bruce, was a high Doublechecker. I needed someone on my team like that because I’m basically a low Doublechecker.
I used to go into his office and say, “I’m thinking of doing X,” and then I’d rush around to my office, which was next door to his, put a glass up against the wall, and hear what he was saying.
“You can’t believe what that idiot next door is thinking of doing now. He doesn’t even remember that six years ago, we tried doing that and this and this happened,” I’d overhear Bruce saying.
So I’d wait a day, and then go back and say, “Bruce, I’ve been thinking about it. if we did X, well, this could happen. So we shouldn’t do it.”
When I eventually left TNT, Bruce said to me, “Chris, I have to say, I’ve never had more fun working with anybody than you.”
And I said, “Bruce, we were a brilliant team together,” which we were because we complemented each other’s weaknesses.
The moral of the story is this: Hire people whose strengths compensate for your weaknesses. The easiest way to do this is by quickly assessing their emotional intelligence.
Unlike Myers-Briggs which assesses people based on 16 personalities, the Humm-Wadsworth, which I’ve modernized into the Seven Motivational Temperament Factors, or 7MTF, is based on seven. It can be learned and mastered in just five hours.
Hiring without quickly assessing emotional intelligence can bring down seemingly invincible corporations. Hiring based on diverse emotional intelligences, can turn small businesses into invincible corporations.
—
Chris bio:
Chris Golis is a graduate of Cambridge and the London Business School and now lives in Sydney. His first career was in IT where he progressed from systems engineer with IBM to a salesperson with ICL, to a Divisional General Manager with TNT. He then switched careers to Financial Services becoming an investment banker with BT Australia and then a venture capitalist for 25 years where he was the director of some 30 private and public companies following the raising of five venture capital funds.
In 2007 Chris semi-retired and decided to pursue a vision of lifting people’s emotional intelligence by teaching them that the secret is to learn a model of temperament (your genetic emotional pre-disposition) that is practical, scientifically valid, easy-to-use, and trait based. Since 2007 Chris has developed the 7MTF model of temperament publishing eleven books, writing over 200 blogs, and developing practical EQ courses in Sales, Management and Leadership taken by over 20,000 people. In 2020 he used the lockdowns to produce three online video courses on Practical Emotional Intelligence using the 7MTF technology for Leaders, Managers and Salespeople.
