1974 – Enhancing Team Collaboration and Performance with Simpli5’s Karen Wright Gordon

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1:05With us right now, it's Karen Gordon. Karen, you are the CEO of Five Dynamics, and your website, kind of a cute domain name, it's Simpli5.com. So it's kind of like Simpli5, except it's the number five.com. S-I-M as in Mary P as in Paul, L-I, the number five.com. Karen, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me, Josh. I'm looking forward to our conversation today. Tell me a bit about what Simplify, I just want to call it Simplify, but it's actually five dynamics. Tell me what you do. So what we do is that we help organizations to understand how to get their people to work together effectively.

1:48We have a core methodology that starts with a three-minute assessment, literally takes three minutes or less to complete, but took 10 years to get to the three minutes. And what the assessment shows is how people prefer to work, learn, and collaborate. What we measure are your most efficient neural pathways. So what do you see first? Where do you go to readily? Where do you enjoy working within any project or process? And also, what are those things that you're likely to miss? What are the areas that you don't enjoy being in? And so we start with that information. And then from there, we look at how do any two people work together?

2:21How does a team work together? We give customized advice, let's say, for myself as a leader, how should I lead my marketing team versus how should I lead my product team? Because now we know that they show up differently and we have very specific terminology to understand exactly how they show up. So this may come across as kind of a dumb question, but why should leaders be a bit more cognizant of this? Or with all of the things that they could be focusing on, why should we, you know, again, hit the pause button and really start to dig into how these organizations are communicating, certainly how we're showing up with the people that we work with as well?

3:03Well, it helps you to go from zero to 60 in three minutes instead of six months. So when you add a new person to the team, you can understand right away how they're going to show up, where they're going to lean in, what's going to take more energy from them versus what will take less energy where they can be most efficient. So you have this common language, you have a common methodology. And also, by the way, the way that we show up from an energetic perspective is also how we trust. It's how we acclimate to new projects. It's how we show up in meetings. It's how we are why there's conflict. It's not about personalities.

3:40It's about energy. And it's about the fact that I want to be option oriented and keep my options open longer. And I'm working with someone who just wants to get to the finish line. And so you get friction between the two. And so what this does is it takes away all of the people problems. It just allows you to work together efficiently and effectively. Yeah. And Karen, you have been at the helm of Simp... I love the brand simply5.com. But in terms of your work, you've been the CEO of Five Dynamics since 2008. So for 16 and a half years, you've been making impact in the world. Maybe just take a second to brag about some of the clients you've worked with or organizations that you've been able to create real change.

4:32Sure. And I'll tell you, I was a customer first. My first company, I had in telecommunications and data for 16 years. And so we were focused on RF engineering and training and documentation. So it had nothing to do with what I'm doing today. But as a young leader in that first company, I had challenges around trying to figure out how to be a leader, how to work with others, how to get the best out of them, how to ensure that they were happy, how to build trust and engagement. And so when I came across this methodology, and I had tried other things that just did not really provide a lot of value for me.

5:03But when I came across this one, it changed the way that I worked with people. it gave me a simple methodology for understanding how to be more effective. And so my very first sale when I bought the intellectual property and built the company was to the CEO of a Fortune 100 company. And he just happened to be in a room where I was giving a presentation. He loved the methodology and he brought us in. And so we, you know, LinkedIn is a massive user of ours. We worked with Harvard Medical School. We work with Stanford. So we have educational clients as well as many, many corporate clients. But enterprise customers, which are customers who have a thousand employees or more, that's really where we focus and where we shine.

5:45Because, again, it levels the playing field. It gives everyone a common language and it's applied in many different ways. So you're able to capture benefits not just at the very beginning, but as you work through projects and processes together. Yeah. To our friend that's listening, they may be in leadership. They might be the founder of an SMB. And if we were to give them some things that they could focus on this week or next week, maybe some tasks for themselves, how they might be able to improve how they are personally showing up. I think it can be very easy to maybe look at who we are and maybe we look at our past successes and we think things are going pretty well.

6:32But I also believe that most of us as leaders don't believe we know everything or we've reached the pinnacle of our evolution. You know, there's always room to grow. What's an area that you think might be surprising as we start to look inward or how we might be showing up and maybe get some honest feedback and some honest direction on some things that we could work on? Yeah, well, the first thing is to recognize that your way is not the way and that none of us have high energy in all five dynamics. So to take it back to the five dynamics piece, the four measured dynamics are explore, excite, examine and execute.

7:11And so someone who's high in explore, they're a big picture thinker. Someone who's high in excite, they're very connected with people. They think about the people in the process first. Someone who's high in examine is focused on the data and someone who's high in execute is focused on getting things done. And so we're all a blend of those energies, but none of us are high in all four of the energies. And so it's just recognizing what we don't see. So for me, I'm explore execute. And as that leader in that first business in my 20s, I didn't focus on how is this going to affect the team? I didn't take time to tell them about the big ideas and get their buy in.

7:49I didn't take time to do the detailed planning. I just went from idea to action. So very entrepreneurial, very typical. And so for people out there, first of all, think about what you do and what you don't do. Think about the things that you do every day that you enjoy doing that don't take energy from you. And think about those things that are really draining to you. And those areas that are draining to you from an energetic perspective, that's where you need support. That's where you need to find someone on your team. So instead of trying to create a team that's just like you, find people who are very different than you, who can compliment you and be big enough to admit you don't know it all and that you don't have high energy and all the dynamics, no matter how seasoned you are.

8:28There are absolute consequences to working outside of, you could call it your zone of genius, your free disposition, the things that you excel at, the things that you really love. You know, when we're forced to do stuff that we just like for some reason, like we've noticed, I don't like doing customer support or service like are engaging, you know, trying to fix problems or something like that. I know I can speak for myself. Like I'll do it if I have to. But I know that where I just absolutely excel is teaching, is vision, is, you know, bigger picture strategies, direction. It's certainly like, you know, that high I, you know, kind of in a disc profile or type seven.

9:10I like my variety. I love connection, that sort of thing. But, you know, Karen, I think that, you know, what we're pointing out is, you know, to a business owner, if you find yourself, I think particularly among entrepreneurs, if you find yourself dreading going to work, it's probably because you're doing stuff that's either outside your values or outside of just your predisposition or, you know, just the way that you're wired. And that's a one-way ticket to burnout. Yes. What I'm hearing from you is that you're high explore, high excite in our terminology. You picked up on that, did you? Yeah.

9:48Oh, I've been doing this for a long time. So, so I can do that. And that's another thing. The more that you work with this, the better you become at trying to kind of figure out. So whether you're working with someone from a sales perspective, you can quickly say, okay, this person needs more data, or this person needs the big picture, or this person, we need to have a personal connection before we try to talk about sales, or this person just wants me to show them how I can make them faster, better, quicker, whatever the case may be. And so you can apply it again in so many different directions, but you absolutely need to understand where you're going to enjoy being.

10:24And it's not, to, we say it's not to get out of jail free card. If you're low in an energy, it just means that you need to be intentional about going into that space. I need to make sure that I'm not skipping over the excite dynamic or the examine dynamic, just because it's not where I prefer to play. But I also wouldn't want to roll where I focus 80 % of my time in those dynamics where I have lower energy. Yeah. So when, when somebody does find them, so maybe they feel stuck, right? And I don't know what this free negotiation looks like. But, you know, maybe they might say, you're right, Karen, it does stress me out.

11:02It does burden me. It is hard. But I don't know. I don't see a path where I can delegate. I've just kind of been roped into this position. We just don't really have anybody that has my superpowers. You know, and again, this might just be sounding like an excuse, or they might be looking at the obstacles and not the solution. But I'm sure you've had these types of conversations where maybe the way forward didn't seem apparent initially. So it's just like with me today, I'm low in excite. Doing something like this is actually very energetically draining to me. I'm loving the conversation, but it doesn't mean that I can't do these things, it means that I tell my team an hour before I have an interview, don't email me, don't try to call me on something.

11:52I need that time to get in the zone. And that's what I say when you're lower in an energy, that's where the intentional part comes in. If I need to look at Excel spreadsheets, close my door, turn off my phone, really have to go into it and know that I'm going to be a little bit tired at the end of that. And I need to just take a break, step back, maybe go for a walk to just regain that energy. So again, it's not competencies. It's not what I can or can't do. It's just saying I need to be more intentional about going into those areas. Yeah. Karen, let's talk a little bit about what engagement looks like through your organization.

12:32How does it work? How does Five Dynamics, what does that begin like? Is it a lengthy process that your clients typically work with you for a year or are there short-term solutions as well? Well, we're a SaaS-based platform. Because we offer so much information and so many different ways of utilizing the methodology, we've had clients who've been with us the entire time that I've owned the business. So it's typically a long-term engagement. It starts with getting people into the software. And it's not just about me, as I said from the beginning, it's more about me and you and me and the team and getting customized and contextualized advice as we move through different projects or processes.

13:19And so it starts with the three-minute assessment. Typically, we'll have some sort of a training event or a facilitated event where we baseline people when we're working with the organizations. Typically, what they like to do is to get their people certified in the methodology because we want them to be able to roll it out internally without having to call us every time. Because again, our focus is on the software and not on the services piece of it. Yeah. Brilliant. So is the, do you mind maybe sharing a little bit about the model or the pricing model or how the, how it works or how it's priced?

13:56Yeah, it starts at 120 a license. And we have volume pricing. We have packages starting with 500 all the way up to 100 ,000 users based off of the ranges of clients that we have. And so it's based off of the larger the package, the better the per unit price, the longer the commitment, the better the per unit price. Most of our customers, they'll commit for three years at a time because they know that they love the methodology and they want to continue to use it. Yeah, excellent. So, you know, in your history in, you know, in making impacts within organizations, I suspect that there's likely some feedback that you've gotten in terms of outcomes that have been positive, especially like I'm sure that you work or the platform has been used in environments maybe where there's a merger, there's you know some sort of reorganization you kind of put together a bunch of people uh that that maybe previously had different roles i mean that that is an environment that could be rife um for um friction and so wouldn't it be great if we could kind of grease the tracks a little bit uh as you're kind of slamming together people that uh come from different uh areas it It absolutely unlocks people.

15:16And that's the whole thing. It's about getting you unstuck. And we have a lot of clients in healthcare. In healthcare, it's a very hierarchical organization. And typically, people who wouldn't speak up or wouldn't feel comfortable speaking up, it frees them and it unlocks the capability for them to now feel empowered to speak up because they realize that they see something that the physician might miss. whether you're the scheduler or you're a physician's assistant or you're a nurse, any of those roles now feel empowered to speak up because they recognize that just because you're the power person in the room, you're not going to see 100 percent of the picture and that they have value.

15:59And so it frees you up to be more honest and open and collaborative. And yes, I absolutely love doing it because what it does is it changes people's lives. It opens their eyes. It unlocks these relationships where there have been challenges over the years. And that's why I've continued to do it for so many years. So I just, again, I'm on your website right now, simplythenumber5.com. And so if someone's like, cool, let's take it for a spin. Let's try it out. Let's test this. What is that enrollment process? Basically, they just send an email to salesatsimplify.com and we'll start them with the process.

16:38but we can have people up and running within 20 minutes once they're ready to move forward with this. It's a really quick process. To our friend that's listening too, I think it's valuable if you kind of visually look at what this is. And I love the report. Like I'm seeing some mock-ups of what it looks like and how valuable that would be for a leader to have a profile on their entire team. And I mean, I'm sure in terms of like decision-making and, you know, how we put together projects, this would be very valuable intel for any organization. Well, Karen Wright Gordon, again, CEO of Five Dynamics, website is simply5.com.

17:21I appreciate the conversation. Thank you so much. Anything else in terms of like next steps or, you know, kind of what you would advise or recommend for folks who are in that leadership capacity? Yeah. As a next step, I would say definitely go to the website, and I would click on the resources page. And a great place to start is looking at a document. It's called Organizational Dynamics Survey. And most businesses have a teamwork problem is the title of the article. And this was an article that was put together. It was created based off of a third-party survey looking at effectiveness of the tools that are out there.

17:57and it really talks about why simplify. Love it. All right, Karen Gordon, thank you so much for joining us, CEO of Simply or Five Dynamics. Website is simply5.com. Thanks, Karen. Thank you, Josh. Have a great afternoon. Bye.

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