how SDI 2.0 has contributed to my work

SDI and Me, by Peter Nixon

I was raised in a family that practiced and emphasised good management, so it was natural that in my career development with PwC legacy firm I was keen to gain technical and “soft” skills as they called them then, somehow suggesting they were less important than “hard” skills like auditing and accounting.

Following my first-year articling as a chartered accountant I was already in-charge of first year accountants and my annual training already included basic supervisory skills. I just two more years and I was already enjoying one-week offsite leadership and management development programmes (hosted at Bishop’s University) some of which was technical updates and most of which was interacting with senior leaders and learning more advanced “soft” skills. I wasn’t learning very much I didn’t already learn at home; the big difference was putting it into practice, “the practice of management” as one of my mentors, Dr Henry Mintzberg of McGill University, likes to call it.

In those days high potential (“HIPO”) chartered accountants expected to be named manager after five years and partner after ten. When I was overlooked as partner in my fifth year (note to self: promotions have as much to do with positions available as with candidate suitability) I jumped on the opportunity for an international secondment, a turn in my career which in the end was one of great fortune.

I met with the global managing partner of our firm (Mr Stevenson was at the time also a partner in the Montreal office) and asked his advice. He recommended London or Tokyo for career development. I chose Geneva instead because I was intrigued by the collapse of the Soviet Union, wanted to see Europe, and ski in the Alps (my definition of career development seemed to differ from that of the Big Boss).

Within a week of arriving in Geneva I was told to prepare for a one-week leadership development offsite in the Swiss Alps overlooking Lake Lucerne. It was here, in a session directed by Mr Kennedy (a UK based leadership development trainer) that I first encountered the SDI. At that time Personal Strengths Publishing was still owned and operated by its founder Dr Elias H Porter and the assessment was a paper three-fold coloured assessment introducing the user to the world of red, green, and blue. It was in Switzerland, in 1988 where I first encountered the SDI.

After a year in Geneva, travelling and skiing every weekend, I transferred to Hong Kong and quickly came to realise they had little training experience at all as compared to the Swiss firm which were perhaps one of the most advanced firms in the world in the late 80’s. It wasn’t long after expressing my interest in training and leadership development that I was asked to take over the develop the learning & development function for the firm. As part of the firm’s development senior leadership were in touch with the UK firm about organisation development and I soon found myself in touch with the principals at Behavioural Science Systems Ltd. Working closely with Drs David West and Robin Stuart-Kotze from BSSL, I quickly came to realise they too were big fans of the SDI and so we introduced it into the leadership development programme in Hong Kong.

I spent several years working with BSSL and the SDI introducing it to managers and partners within the firm across Asia. When my career clocked ten years with the firm I was leading a much needed function while maintaining my audit clients and the offer came to join partnership. It was at this point that several years of learning about my motivations and values, in large part because of my work with the SDI in the firm and in my Master’s degree, that I could confidently say I was no longer motivated to become partner in the big firm and opted instead to launch BSSL in Asia while building my own footprint in change management. This opened the door to me taking the SDI into hundreds of different organisations and countries but I skipped a key bit of history.

Sometime in the early nineties, while home to visit my parents in Montreal, I decided to call the toll-free phone number printed on the old SDI and see who answered. Completely by chance, Tim Scudder, then accountant for Personal Strengths Publishing in California, answered the phone and thus began a years long friendship which included me visited California many times and becoming certified and accredited and even joining the EH Porter Institute.

Tim Scudder, now Dr Tim Scudder and the driving force behind what the SDI has become today, was in the office when I called because Dr Porter’s widow had decided to sell the company to their closest distributor, Bob Tomkinson, who led a social needs consultancy in LA. Bob and Tim had just become the new owners and were very excited to be taking to a potential distributor in Asia, especially one that had connections with their UK distributor famous for working mostly in the corporate world (the USA was mostly in the not-for-profit sector then reflecting Dr Porter’s history of research).

It wasn’t long after this that I decided to start my doctoral studies at the Fielding Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. My thought was I could visit the home of the SDI in Carlsbad California and write off my travel as a business expense. Tim Scudder also enrolled to complete his doctorate at Fielding around the same time. Unfortunately, SARS forced me to postpone my doctoral studies and focus instead on keeping my little business afloat. Once again fate turned an unfortunate situation positive because instead of publishing my thesis, I instead published my first book on Negotiation.

Personal Strengths Publishing went through tremendous changes as the internet forced assessments online and new investment capital was going to require a different approach to market. I was happy I never agreed to become a distributor, happy instead to be a Master Trainer and look after my own client base instead. I don’t believe any of the original distributors or master trainers in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Korea or elsewhere in the world (apart from Tim Scudder), all of whom I have worked with over the years, are still working with SDI.

As I delved into knowing all I could about the SDI, I quickly learned that Dr Porter had built on the work of Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers (and others), an author I knew of from my childhood in Montreal where we discussed his book The Art of Loving. I read all of Erich Fromm’s books and realised that Porter’s contribution was to make Fromm’s productive orientations more easily identifiable (red, green, blue) and measured (via the SDI). Dr Tim Scudder built on Porter’s work by leveraging the now huge database of SDI results to further refine the measures and then to refinance the company and launch the backend to support SDI 2.0 which also incorporates the Portrait of Strengths and Portrait of Overdone Strengths which used to be separate assessments complimentary to the SDI.

The SDI 2.0 is now a robust online assessment combining all three assessments with lots of added features like the ability to compare people in the team, receive communication prompts, immediate feedback on your own motivations, strengths and overdone strengths and more.

As part of my client work using SDI, I systematically captured participant scores and once I had well over 1000 I engaged a doctoral student to crunch the numbers to give me a different view of the data which California were briefed on but chose not to use. My data focused on the conflict sequence. SDI 2.0 call this Stage 1-2-3 but my focus includes Stage 0 (which they call MVS) and that is because in Asia, where a lot of scores tend to the hub, I needed a way to differentiate people in the Hub and realised that how people change from Stage 0 to Stage 1 is very important for two reasons.

How people change from Stage 0 to Stage 1 is what people get to deal with most of the time at work because work tends to be pretty stressful nowadays. Adding Stage 0 also helps identify the last of the three colours to appear in your sequence which I call your weakest dialect (or blindspot), not because you aren’t good at this colour but because you prefer it least and use it least, it tends to be your weak point. Thousands of participants later have borne this out and appreciate how quickly I can spot these two things. SDI 2.0 doesn’t do this because it doesn’t highlight one colour for MVS and blends hide the blindspot.

So now that SDI 2.0 is completely online and people get to know and share their results immediately, what remains my contribution? Actually, my contribution is stronger than ever and it relates to the following areas. For years I have helped leaders learn their blindspot and learn to overcome it in the following ways:

· Speak their dialect teaches leaders to speak to people of a different colour, and the ones they find the hardest to speak with are of course those motivated by the leaders blindspot. For example leaders should engage their blue direct reports using a blue dialect but if the leader’s weakest dialect or blind spot is blue, this is where they tend to make the most mistakes.

· StarNegotiator tactics remind people to match the motivation of the other party is e.g., red, green, or blue to help improve influencing power especially with those people whom they had previously struggled to influence. For example, the blue direct report trying to influence the red boss would fail using their preferred blue tactics and instead should use red tactics.

· Aspiration helps people realise their motivational style influences what they want in life also influences a negotiators range where reds ask for the most, blues make concessions to maintain relationships and greens fall in the middle where it makes sense based on e.g. inflation. Since we know people who ask for more tend to get more (and have more conflict) this helps us remind leaders to ask for more AND work on your conflict de-escalation skills.

· De-escalation tactics resulted from my work with thousands of leaders in conflict while at the same time studying Buddhist philosophy about destructive emotions. This led to my list of de-escalation tactics and tips to help resolve conflict and resume dialogue to enact the change leaders want to see in their world.

So now that SDI 2.0 is all online and respondents know their results and understand Productive Orientations before I even get to work with them, I can now skip straight to helping them better manage their conflict sequence individually (as above) and as a team (by analysing their colour chart described below).

The Team Colour Chart started as a way for me to explain to individuals how to make sense of their conflict sequence, especially the change from Stage 0-1 as described above, and to readily see their weakest dialect (blindspot) described above. Interestingly, in analysing the team as a whole and looking at how the team as a whole changes under pressure, an additional insight arose in that some teams (especially those that hire people like them to fit the culture) tend to react in the same way meaning as a group they are more suited for some situations than others as conflict escalates. This too is a powerful insight not presently visible in how SDI 2.0 show their results online in the triangle.

Contact me if you want additional insights based on how I interpret your team’s SDI 2.0 results. By looking at your Team Colour Chart, facilitating your team Challenge Map, and asking your team to reflect on the TMS Wheel, I will be able to give you a pretty accurate estimate, based on my years of experience, whether or not your group of people can achieve the outcome you want in the time you have available. The solution is in the dialogue.

Kindly,

Peter

Peter Nixon FCPA, professor, corporate trainer, author, speaker, consultant +852-9188-0056;

“the quality of our dialogues today determines the quality of our future tomorrow”

Peter has helped tens of thousands of leaders in >600 organisations & 60 countries worldwide to achieve optimal outcomes through improved decision making based on dialogue, negotiation, and leadership. Peter is a Canadian citizen currently resident in Hong Kong.

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how SDI 2.0 has contributed to my work