How Karen Gordon Is Using Technology To Create Better Leaders

The art of leadership can be indeed complicated. A blend of intuition, listening and holding steady to convictions play various roles in the intricate management ecosystem needed to grow businesses and oversee talent.

Serial entrepreneur and educator Karen Gordon saw a better way to support leaders in the workplace navigating this journey, and in 2010 founded her company 5 Dynamics, which offers digital ways to maximize human potential. Gordon's team works with Fortune 500 companies, top universities, and nonprofits creating cultures that allow people to do their best work by understanding how others work.

“The biggest reason I was so drawn to this field as a young entrepreneur is that I realized many first-time leaders don't really understand what's going on with the dynamics of their team," says Gordon. “People who report to you end up listening to other people, mostly men who are saying 'you need to be harder, tougher,' this was one of the mistakes I made."

A serial entrepreneur and former educator, Gordon ran a successful business in data and telecommunications called GTCI before founding 5 Dynamics. After coming across the methodology now at the center of the company, Gordon realized she had on her hands "a game changing human performance system" that helps make the work environment more productive and fun. “I felt it had the potential to change people's lives," says Gordon. “It had the impact to help people understand what they do and why and how can they be more successful. It's about being the best version of yourself as a leader and a team member."

Using a backend that measures users' abilities to see, think, learn and collaborate, 5 Dynamics then offers a process model to show how to get things done. The company's 2.5-minute online assessment (which took 10 years to perfect) collects the data points needed to start the process.

“We want to get to the core of the dynamics of what is going on in a room, the insights and the factors we maybe didn't notice," explains Gordon. “Because we all have preferences in what we focus on, there's a psychology of experience. With our methodology, we look at the innate preferences, which is the first step to awareness."

When asked what is the most common question she is asked, Gordon answered quickly; “The number one question I've heard is, 'How do I manage my people?," she says. “All teams have people problems. It's such a simple, elegant, respectful way to understand people. The problem isn't people's differences, it's that we need to better understand what we need for each other, then find a way to compromise, and be satisfied while doing so."

Throughout her journey through the world of leadership, Gordon has learned that it's not always an even playing field. “I think women are judged more harshly for doing the same things that men do, even though those were the traits that made them successful," says Gordon, adding that her ultimate goal, beyond growing her company, is to even the playing field, bringing more diverse voices to the forefront of leadership. Here, we ask Gordon more about her game-changing technology and its implications for the workplace.

Karen Gordon.

People problems are some of the most costly and detrimental issues for organizations, and what's included in the broad-ranging “people problems" bucket can be a range of issues—employee conflict, dissatisfaction, burnout, biases, miscommunication, and more.

Human capital is one of the most valuable resources an organization can invest in, but important considerations are often overlooked when building teams, managing individuals, and scaling out, simply due to uninformed processes for recruitment, project management, and team development. Hiring and fostering talent whose minds will shape the future of a company – and even an industry – is an expensive endeavor, but current practices do not take into consideration a person's natural working style and preferences. Because so much of a typical job description is set in stone based on company needs and structure, conflict often arises when employees are given tasks that don't jive with the way their brains naturally function, putting conflict and burnout on the fast track.

There are unique challenges for women in leadership roles in male-dominated fields. Often times, the very traits that catapulted women to the top are the ones that lead to their ultimate demise. Those who have success in male-dominated organizations are often the hard drivers – the ones who portray traits typically viewed as male, but they are neither male nor female. They are simply a person's way of approaching any task. We expect female leaders to be more people focused on the mere fact that they are females, but this characteristic has nothing to do with gender. It is based on the way your brain is wired, which leads to the way you naturally accomplish any project or process.

It's a common adage in Silicon Valley that 90 percent of startups fail. A recent study from CB Insights revealed that incompatible team makeups and disharmony among co-founders were the third and twelfth leading causes of startup failures respectively. This means that roughly 37 percent of respondents felt that people problems were the cause of failure for their companies. Human capital opportunities (and challenges) go all the way to the top.

In the same CB Insights study, 13 percent of startups blamed disharmony of co-founders for their failure – and this is just the percentage of people who noted this disharmony as the number one reason for the failure. Think about it this way: You can bring two or three brilliant minds together to form an equally brilliant idea, but what if those minds ultimately end up not working well together? What if their work styles are too similar or different to be effective together? Often the failure isn't in the idea – it's in the execution and collaboration behind it. Even the most groundbreaking ideas will fail if the minds driving it forward remain ignorant to the flaws in the people processes.

People are a company's square one. Startups that realize from day one that human capital is a significant operating expense and that preservation of company culture is vital will have invested in tools and programs that facilitate one-on-one relationships among team members and support the development of their most valuable assets: you.

Psychologist/psychometrician W. Michael Sturm spent over half of his career developing the tools and methodology that form the heart and soul of the 5 Dynamics products. Mike developed this methodology with over 25 years of research and testing on well over 10,000 subjects, combining counseling, Gestalt Therapy/process thinking, learning and educational psychology sciences. This enabled him to create an assessment and related applications that are beneficial in virtually every conceivable business and personal situation. It draws from Gestalt's orientation toward perception, action, energy and goal completion, and maps individuals to a five-phase process that explains many of the business results companies achieve.

I came across this methodology and fell in love with it. The knowledge of this science really had the potential to change people's lives and have a significant impact on helping people understand what they do, how they do it, and how to be more successful. I often refer to it as the best version of yourself, an employee, a team member, a leader, an entrepreneur. Whatever the case, there's value in the content and knowledge shared from that methodology, and so I decided to build 5 Dynamics around it.

The energy you have to spend in the five different dynamics is not mutually exclusive - you are not just considered energy efficient in one dynamic. Everyone has a capacity for each of the five workflows, and the varying degrees to which you have the energy to work in each of those is what makes up your unique profile. The five dynamics/phases are Explore, Excite, Examine, Execute, and Evaluate.

In a nutshell, Sturm looked at assessments in terms of inputs and outputs based on neural pathway efficiency. The brain comprises only 4 percent of body mass but consumes 20 percent or more of blood glucose, the compound that the body converts to create muscular and mental activity. In this sense, the brain is inherently inefficient, so it seeks to conserve energy through the principle of synaptic efficiency, routing neural messages along the most efficient (electrically least resistive) pathways.

Skills or tasks that you are “naturally good at" follow these least resistive neural pathways in your brain, making it a fairly easy, and in many cases enjoyable, task. If you find yourself struggling to complete a certain project or focus on the specific goals you're trying to accomplish, that might mean you're forcing your brain to follow a neural pathway that is resistant.

For these reasons, cognitive and behavioral theory, rather than personality, were used to design the 5 Dynamics assessment. Personality is highly context-sensitive, where in some situations people might be introverted, but not in others.

Armed with this research and science behind its assessment and collaboration features, the 5 Dynamics methodology directly addresses people problems and everyday team management and collaboration by providing individuals the knowledge and understanding of how they work effectively and how to best engage with team members based on their unique learning, working, and collaboration styles. Using a quick 2-minute online assessment completed via survey, responses are designed to reveal the brain's most efficient neural pathways. Each person's results are then compiled into an interactive online tool that teams can use to get personalized information about themselves and their team members so they can (1) build a team that consists of diverse workflow energies, (2) learn how to work with each team member based on their work preferences to mitigate unproductivity and miscommunication, (3) provide feedback and have difficult conversations with guidance from the tool to circumvent conflict, and 4) establish a foundation for team performance and culture that supports the extended growth and success of startups from day one.

I think there's a common misconception that there's a picturesque profile of the character traits needed to be a successful and effective business leader. But stereotyping anyone is dangerous. Many effective business leaders may have common traits, but they also have unique attributes that aren't stereotypically associated with the textbook definition of a leader. Some are very focused on people and tend to build happy and productive teams as a top priority. Others are focused on details in the data and keep a sharp eye on metrics. All need to understand their unique gifts and how to lead from those gifts and all need to understand their potential blind spots, but there is no one-size-fits-all profile that people can or should compare themselves to.

Our most successful clients are utilizing the 5 Dynamics software in a strategic way. They give all of their employee's access to the software, which creates a unified language and a unifying methodology to build upon. We see proof every day that our methodology is working. Barriers are broken down. Hierarchical organizations move from command and control to cooperate and collaborate.

People are valued for their unique gifts, and development shifts to focus more on moving people from good to great instead of from poor to mediocre. If you let people focus on aspects of business they love, you and they will be more successful and more satisfied.

Understand your working preferences and the preferences of your teammates. Have open and honest conversations about what you are trying to accomplish together and devise a plan that allows you to work from your strengths. Ask for support and give support to others. The biggest mistake I see people make is acting like they have to know it all and can do it all. We all have areas of strengths where we are able to operate in a state of flow, and no one finds all phases of work effortless. The best piece of advice I can offer is to get comfortable with that fact and find a way to align your daily activities with your greatest gifts.

Honestly, I think their greatest challenge is overcoming the negative rhetoric that has been so prevalent in the media over the past several years. They think and act differently than generations before them, but I love the fact that doing meaningful work is more important to them than making obscene amounts of money. They want to leave the world a better place than they found it, and we need to give them the tools that will help them to do just that. Part of that support happens by building work environments that allow them to be their best selves at work.

I think that the most successful organizations will be the ones who stop creating a department to focus on “people development," and instead give all employees access to the tools and support that will enable them to optimize their performance and enhance their lives. Spend money on your people, but stop spending on week-long leadership programs or other event-based activities. Instead, give them tools that will allow ongoing development and will enhance communication and collaboration.