You want to have a good team working together.
You want to also have outside consultants what fit in well too.
You want to be comfortable with them.

However, you might also want to be a little bit uncomfortable in certain situations.

If you’re totally comfortable with what you have, it could be a sign that you have assembled a while group of people much like you. If that’s the case, how are you going to happen to get varying viewpoints?

In certain parts of the company that there’s just going to be certain personality styles. That could be great because they may be just the right personality style to do well at what they do.

This reminds me of a couple stories. One happened recently, personally.

I was looking to change to a different landscaping service and had a referral from a neighbor. This person came very highly recommended. He came to talk to me and he said, "My English isn’t so good." My reply was, "I’m not so concerned about your English. What I want to know about and what really counts is your landscaping."

Another example would be when I was CFO and we had done the acquisition of several distribution companies in a nationwide roll up. One of our challenges was to integrate the different computer systems into one nationwide network. Out of the whole group of IT directors at the different companies, we saw one that stood out and we brought him out to corporate to help us with the task. He was a terrific guy who had the nickname Iceman. Now, this could be sometimes common in the technology area, he had his own little quirks, but nothing that distracted from the performances. One day he asked me about it. My replay was, "It doesn’t bother me. I’d be more concerned if you looked like somebody who came out of Harvard like me." In other words, I embraced the difference.

One way to look at people could be using different personality profiles. I happened to like the DISC profile, which breaks them into four different personality characteristics.

So, when thinking about your team or thinking about bringing on a new edition, either inside the company or as an outside consultant, think hard about what type of person you want. The person that you might be most comfortable with might not be the right one and the person who’s a little bit different from your particular style just could be the one to be strong in that area who could really bring in that new vantage point that could be missing from your team.

Jon Paul, MBA, CPA, CMC, CM&AA

President, Value Added Finance Resources
Bringing new insights on results and maximizing company value