Maria says that the core will be to continue to offer the HBDI® Profile tool. And to use Start Thinking,™ ThinkCentred® Selling and other Whole Brain® Thinking modules on top of that.

“[But] it’s also looking at how we can use the data we’ve got about our teams,” she says.

“So it may be when we’re forming a new team, establishing their different thinking styles. And the way we work with it now, managers will ask us: ‘Can we use it for this?’ So the next stages are around having those managers come to us and look for different applications.”

“The options really are limitless.”

Studies repeatedly demonstrate the financial benefits to a company of having happy, engaged employees: better customer service, higher productivity and enhanced sales. According to one, employees with the highest levels of commitment perform 20% better and are 87% less likely to leave their organisation.*

Lumo measures employee engagement twice a year — and has recorded a significant increase in scores over the last few years.

Maria explains that although engagement is driven by many variables, HBDI® is a substantial contributor to this improvement.

“In one area of our operations team, the engagement results increased by 30%,” she says. “A great deal of this was attributed by the leader of the department to the work done through Whole Brain® Thinking.”

She explains that, in the past, Lumo may have had very traditional left-brain thinkers in some areas.

“HBDI® does open up their perception and awareness around, well, ‘We are a team that is predominantly left-brained and when we interact with other areas of the business they are not the same as us.’ Just having that dialogue with each other increases engagement and HBDI® has influenced that.”

They also use HBDI® to analyse exit data and look for patterns of attrition and whether particular thinking profiles are leaving.

“We could identify, say, eight months ago, we were losing a lot of high yellows,” Maria says. “And now that seems to have changed: we’re not losing lots of high-yellow thinkers.”

The learning and development team has also analysed their HBDI® Profile database for trends and patterns in recruiting. In particular, Maria was curious whether managers were prone to recruiting new staff that matched their own profile type. As Maria points out, this could potentially lead to blinkered thinking — anathema to an organisation that needs to be agile and adaptive.

“I found that there’s no correlation,” Maria says. “There’s one team out of 20 where there’s a dominance of a profile type that aligns with the manager.”

“That also shows evidence for our recruitment team that what they’re doing is a good job. Because they’re recruiting for the best roles based on experience level and competency rather than on people who are an image of themselves.”

“This is a positive check for us.”

www.herrmannsolutions.asia Better Thinking. Better Performance. Better Results.

Using Whole Brain® Thinking to improve employee engagement and drive organisational growth

Tracking recruiting trends and patterns

The next step for Lumo and Whole Brain® Thinking

1300 558 524

*Nancy R Lockwood. Leveraging Employee Engagement for Competitive Advantage. 2007 SHRM Research Quarterly.

www.herrmannsolutions.asia Better Thinking. Better Performance. Better Results.

1300 558 524

The energy industry challengesINDUSTRY: Electricity PROJECT: Implement Whole Brain® Thinking

CASE STUDY: LUMO ENERGY

Lumo is a major Australian energy retailer that provides electricity to residential customers and commercial industry. It supplies energy to just over 540,000 customers and employs some 500 people in Australia and offshore.

About Lumo Energy

Energy retailers face a market environment characterised by constant change.They must contend with fluctuating energy prices within the wholesale market, as well as regular changes in legislation. That means Lumo’s people need to be very responsive to the market and wider industry trends and what’s happening in the industry and in legislation.

“We have to be very quick and agile,” explains Lumo learning and development consultant Maria Padbury.

“Otherwise there can be big penalties.”

Introducing HBDI® and Whole Brain® ThinkingMaria was already very familiar with Whole Brain® Thinking from her time in learning and development at Cadbury Schweppes.

“I really liked how easy it was to pick up the key concepts of HBDI® – the different quadrants. I really liked how portable it was, so I could take it and transfer it into any situation – it didn’t have to be just at work. It could be at home, it could be social circumstances. And it was very easy to recall and very easy to use.

When she joined Lumo in December 2011, she immediately saw the

potential for Whole Brain® Thinking within an organisation that placed a premium on agility and responsiveness and introduced it to her learning and development team members.

She says they immediately saw wider appeal and started offering it elsewhere in the organisation.

“We’ve got a lot of managers who are really interested in and dedicated to developing talent,” Maria explains. “And they quite easily saw the connection between thinking styles and developing talent within the team.”

By Maria Padbury, Senior Learning and Development Consultant

1300 558 524

leaders to understand what motivates individual team members and use that knowledge to communicate with and better coach that person.

“[It’s about understanding] what information would this person need versus that other person,” Maria says. “From a consultant perspective, it’s also about how ... you sell to a customer using HBDI®.”

She explains: “If I’m talking to a customer all about dollars and cents, how much a kilowatt hour cost over somewhere else I’ll save here ... that might not mean anything to a customer who does not think in terms of the

blue quadrant. They might be more concerned about their family.”

“So the conversation needs to change towards, ‘this is the value for you because you’ll be able to save money for the things you really want — spending on your family.’ It might be a holiday, or whatever.”

“Those are very tangible ways that we use Whole Brain® Thinking that has a big impact on [sales] results.”

Exactly how big?

“Using Whole Brain® Thinking in training sales induction groups, the performance of the new sales team increased 300% over parallel groups,” Maria says, explaining that the result hasn’t just been a one-off, but a sustained increase.

“It’s been amazing.”

What is Whole Brain® Thinking?Research has shown that thinking styles directly affect behaviour, performance and results.

Whole Brain® Thinking acknowledges that while different tasks require different mental processes and different people prefer different styles of thinking, organisations will get better results when they can strategically harness the diversity of thinking available — analytical, organisational, strategic and interpersonal.

These are the four quadrants of thinking preferences as depicted in the Herrmann Whole Brain® Model.

By applying Whole Brain® Thinking, people and teams can learn to leverage their thinking preferences more effectively and think and act outside their preferences when necessary.

The Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument® (HBDI®) is the 120-question thinking styles assessment at the core of the Whole Brain® approach that reveals an individual’s thinking preferences in the form of an HBDI® Profile.

Because its premise is that we all have brains, we just use them differently, the HBDI® Assessment doesn’t pigeonhole people or put them into ‘types’.

Instead, it shows people that while there are some areas they may be less comfortable with, they aren’t limited in what they can do. It also reveals how teams and groups can work together in the most productive way by drawing on their cognitive diversity to better tackle specific tasks and problems.

Maria attributes much of the success of Whole Brain® Thinking to leadership and teams taking ownership of the HBDI® tools.

“It’s been very successful and popular ... because people have made it part of their own language,” she says. “Leaders refer to the tools and talk about it. They might use it, for example, in R&R or might look

Leadership training & talent identificationLumo also extensively uses Whole Brain® Thinking at the executive level.

“Almost all Lumo executives go through HBDI®,” Maria says. “It’s about having the right talent in the right place.”

She says that executives use Whole Brain® Thinking to understand the different thinking styles in their own leadership team.

“Like many companies, it’s about making sure that we have the best people in the roles that we have — that will help us with our competitive advantage over other energy retailers.”

LOGICAL

ANALYTICAL

FACT- BASED

QUANTITATIVE

ORGANISED

SEQUENTIAL

PLANNED

DETAILED

HOLISTIC

INTUITIVE

INTEGRATING

SYNTHESISING

INTERPERSONAL

FEELING-BASED

KINESTHETIC

EMOTIONAL

A

B

D

C

at pairing people up who have different strengths when it comes to the HBDI®.”

And individual team members use it because they want to understand themselves better and adopt Whole Brain® Thinking to be more agile and engage more effectively with their peers. Maria describes how staff will actively analyse their profile and decide to develop their least-preferred thinking quadrant.

“So they go out looking for programs or on the job learning that they can start to develop that competency,” Maria says. “Because [of this, we] haven’t had an issue where we have to force it on a team.

“It’s something they’re very open toward. They’re not sceptical. We’re not getting any pushback from teams or managers saying that this is all hocus pocus. There’s a genuine interest and curiosity.”

www.herrmannsolutions.asia Better Thinking. Better Performance. Better Results.

In just three years, Lumo’s learning and development team has rolled out Whole Brain® Thinking across nearly the entire organisation — 223 staff have completed profiles and the HBDI® is now used in almost every department.

“Probably the only area that we’re still to get into is finance – that high-blue quadrant. But it’s coming on board,” she says.

More, Lumo uses Whole Brain® Thinking for a wide variety of applications: teambuilding, teamwork, engagement and much more.

“We use it as a leadership tool as well, looking at different strengths and capabilities of people and where that may lead,” Maria says.

“A lot of people tell me that the biggest thing is that they don’t assume that everyone thinks the same way as them anymore.”

A 300% improvement in sales performanceInitially, Maria and her colleagues focused on integrating Whole Brain® Thinking into Lumo’s sales teams with induction, sales and service, and customer experience training.

Maria explains they particularly focus on the leaders, who are each responsible for around 10 to 13 sales consultants and how they interact with their teams.

“One of the applications is ‘how do you coach your team?’ according to the different thinking styles,” she says, describing how HBDI® enables

Ways that Lumo uses Whole Brain® Thinking

• Customer experience training

• Sales and service training

• Conflict management with teams and customers

• Engagement initiatives

• Forming new teams

• Aligning existing teams

• Problem solving

• Coaching

• Performance development and development action plans

A multi-purpose personnel improvement tool

Strongly embedded within the organisation

“In training sales induction groups, the performance of the new sales team increased 300%...”

1300 558 524

leaders to understand what motivates individual team members and use that knowledge to communicate with and better coach that person.

“[It’s about understanding] what information would this person need versus that other person,” Maria says. “From a consultant perspective, it’s also about how ... you sell to a customer using HBDI®.”

She explains: “If I’m talking to a customer all about dollars and cents, how much a kilowatt hour cost over somewhere else I’ll save here ... that might not mean anything to a customer who does not think in terms of the

blue quadrant. They might be more concerned about their family.”

“So the conversation needs to change towards, ‘this is the value for you because you’ll be able to save money for the things you really want — spending on your family.’ It might be a holiday, or whatever.”

“Those are very tangible ways that we use Whole Brain® Thinking that has a big impact on [sales] results.”

Exactly how big?

“Using Whole Brain® Thinking in training sales induction groups, the performance of the new sales team increased 300% over parallel groups,” Maria says, explaining that the result hasn’t just been a one-off, but a sustained increase.

“It’s been amazing.”

What is Whole Brain® Thinking?Research has shown that thinking styles directly affect behaviour, performance and results.

Whole Brain® Thinking acknowledges that while different tasks require different mental processes and different people prefer different styles of thinking, organisations will get better results when they can strategically harness the diversity of thinking available — analytical, organisational, strategic and interpersonal.

These are the four quadrants of thinking preferences as depicted in the Herrmann Whole Brain® Model.

By applying Whole Brain® Thinking, people and teams can learn to leverage their thinking preferences more effectively and think and act outside their preferences when necessary.

The Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument® (HBDI®) is the 120-question thinking styles assessment at the core of the Whole Brain® approach that reveals an individual’s thinking preferences in the form of an HBDI® Profile.

Because its premise is that we all have brains, we just use them differently, the HBDI® Assessment doesn’t pigeonhole people or put them into ‘types’.

Instead, it shows people that while there are some areas they may be less comfortable with, they aren’t limited in what they can do. It also reveals how teams and groups can work together in the most productive way by drawing on their cognitive diversity to better tackle specific tasks and problems.

Maria attributes much of the success of Whole Brain® Thinking to leadership and teams taking ownership of the HBDI® tools.

“It’s been very successful and popular ... because people have made it part of their own language,” she says. “Leaders refer to the tools and talk about it. They might use it, for example, in R&R or might look

Leadership training & talent identificationLumo also extensively uses Whole Brain® Thinking at the executive level.

“Almost all Lumo executives go through HBDI®,” Maria says. “It’s about having the right talent in the right place.”

She says that executives use Whole Brain® Thinking to understand the different thinking styles in their own leadership team.

“Like many companies, it’s about making sure that we have the best people in the roles that we have — that will help us with our competitive advantage over other energy retailers.”

LOGICAL

ANALYTICAL

FACT- BASED

QUANTITATIVE

ORGANISED

SEQUENTIAL

PLANNED

DETAILED

HOLISTIC

INTUITIVE

INTEGRATING

SYNTHESISING

INTERPERSONAL

FEELING-BASED

KINESTHETIC

EMOTIONAL

A

B

D

C

at pairing people up who have different strengths when it comes to the HBDI®.”

And individual team members use it because they want to understand themselves better and adopt Whole Brain® Thinking to be more agile and engage more effectively with their peers. Maria describes how staff will actively analyse their profile and decide to develop their least-preferred thinking quadrant.

“So they go out looking for programs or on the job learning that they can start to develop that competency,” Maria says. “Because [of this, we] haven’t had an issue where we have to force it on a team.

“It’s something they’re very open toward. They’re not sceptical. We’re not getting any pushback from teams or managers saying that this is all hocus pocus. There’s a genuine interest and curiosity.”

www.herrmannsolutions.asia Better Thinking. Better Performance. Better Results.

In just three years, Lumo’s learning and development team has rolled out Whole Brain® Thinking across nearly the entire organisation — 223 staff have completed profiles and the HBDI® is now used in almost every department.

“Probably the only area that we’re still to get into is finance – that high-blue quadrant. But it’s coming on board,” she says.

More, Lumo uses Whole Brain® Thinking for a wide variety of applications: teambuilding, teamwork, engagement and much more.

“We use it as a leadership tool as well, looking at different strengths and capabilities of people and where that may lead,” Maria says.

“A lot of people tell me that the biggest thing is that they don’t assume that everyone thinks the same way as them anymore.”

A 300% improvement in sales performanceInitially, Maria and her colleagues focused on integrating Whole Brain® Thinking into Lumo’s sales teams with induction, sales and service, and customer experience training.

Maria explains they particularly focus on the leaders, who are each responsible for around 10 to 13 sales consultants and how they interact with their teams.

“One of the applications is ‘how do you coach your team?’ according to the different thinking styles,” she says, describing how HBDI® enables

Ways that Lumo uses Whole Brain® Thinking

• Customer experience training

• Sales and service training

• Conflict management with teams and customers

• Engagement initiatives

• Forming new teams

• Aligning existing teams

• Problem solving

• Coaching

• Performance development and development action plans

A multi-purpose personnel improvement tool

Strongly embedded within the organisation

“In training sales induction groups, the performance of the new sales team increased 300%...”

Maria says that the core will be to continue to offer the HBDI® Profile tool. And to use Start Thinking,™ ThinkCentred® Selling and other Whole Brain® Thinking modules on top of that.

“[But] it’s also looking at how we can use the data we’ve got about our teams,” she says.

“So it may be when we’re forming a new team, establishing their different thinking styles. And the way we work with it now, managers will ask us: ‘Can we use it for this?’ So the next stages are around having those managers come to us and look for different applications.”

“The options really are limitless.”

Studies repeatedly demonstrate the financial benefits to a company of having happy, engaged employees: better customer service, higher productivity and enhanced sales. According to one, employees with the highest levels of commitment perform 20% better and are 87% less likely to leave their organisation.*

Lumo measures employee engagement twice a year — and has recorded a significant increase in scores over the last few years.

Maria explains that although engagement is driven by many variables, HBDI® is a substantial contributor to this improvement.

“In one area of our operations team, the engagement results increased by 30%,” she says. “A great deal of this was attributed by the leader of the department to the work done through Whole Brain® Thinking.”

She explains that, in the past, Lumo may have had very traditional left-brain thinkers in some areas.

“HBDI® does open up their perception and awareness around, well, ‘We are a team that is predominantly left-brained and when we interact with other areas of the business they are not the same as us.’ Just having that dialogue with each other increases engagement and HBDI® has influenced that.”

They also use HBDI® to analyse exit data and look for patterns of attrition and whether particular thinking profiles are leaving.

“We could identify, say, eight months ago, we were losing a lot of high yellows,” Maria says. “And now that seems to have changed: we’re not losing lots of high-yellow thinkers.”

The learning and development team has also analysed their HBDI® Profile database for trends and patterns in recruiting. In particular, Maria was curious whether managers were prone to recruiting new staff that matched their own profile type. As Maria points out, this could potentially lead to blinkered thinking — anathema to an organisation that needs to be agile and adaptive.

“I found that there’s no correlation,” Maria says. “There’s one team out of 20 where there’s a dominance of a profile type that aligns with the manager.”

“That also shows evidence for our recruitment team that what they’re doing is a good job. Because they’re recruiting for the best roles based on experience level and competency rather than on people who are an image of themselves.”

“This is a positive check for us.”

www.herrmannsolutions.asia Better Thinking. Better Performance. Better Results.

Using Whole Brain® Thinking to improve employee engagement and drive organisational growth

Tracking recruiting trends and patterns

The next step for Lumo and Whole Brain® Thinking

1300 558 524

*Nancy R Lockwood. Leveraging Employee Engagement for Competitive Advantage. 2007 SHRM Research Quarterly.

www.herrmannsolutions.asia Better Thinking. Better Performance. Better Results.

1300 558 524

The energy industry challengesINDUSTRY: Electricity PROJECT: Implement Whole Brain® Thinking

CASE STUDY: LUMO ENERGY

Lumo is a major Australian energy retailer that provides electricity to residential customers and commercial industry. It supplies energy to just over 540,000 customers and employs some 500 people in Australia and offshore.

About Lumo Energy

Energy retailers face a market environment characterised by constant change.They must contend with fluctuating energy prices within the wholesale market, as well as regular changes in legislation. That means Lumo’s people need to be very responsive to the market and wider industry trends and what’s happening in the industry and in legislation.

“We have to be very quick and agile,” explains Lumo learning and development consultant Maria Padbury.

“Otherwise there can be big penalties.”

Introducing HBDI® and Whole Brain® ThinkingMaria was already very familiar with Whole Brain® Thinking from her time in learning and development at Cadbury Schweppes.

“I really liked how easy it was to pick up the key concepts of HBDI® – the different quadrants. I really liked how portable it was, so I could take it and transfer it into any situation – it didn’t have to be just at work. It could be at home, it could be social circumstances. And it was very easy to recall and very easy to use.

When she joined Lumo in December 2011, she immediately saw the

potential for Whole Brain® Thinking within an organisation that placed a premium on agility and responsiveness and introduced it to her learning and development team members.

She says they immediately saw wider appeal and started offering it elsewhere in the organisation.

“We’ve got a lot of managers who are really interested in and dedicated to developing talent,” Maria explains. “And they quite easily saw the connection between thinking styles and developing talent within the team.”

By Maria Padbury, Senior Learning and Development Consultant