In 2001, in the small New Zealand city of Dunedin, four brave brains leave the security of paid employment, step into the wild, and build something special: AbacusBio.
Today, AbacusBio provides agriscience services to clients from more than 30 countries. We have 56 people, based in seven countries, representing around 15 nationalities. Our youngest employee is 26; our oldest is 67. Some opted out of high school early, while others arguably spent longer than was necessary at university. We have introverts, extroverts, extroverted introverts, people with brains like a pocket calculator, and some with brains like a pinball machine. Some who love to get out with clients as much as possible, others who prefer the back office. We are a big ol’ mix, but what we do have in common is that we all have a brain.
During the working week – 24 hours per day, across the globe – at least one AbacusBio brain is awake and working on a solution for a client. The more demand for our services, the more talented people we can bring on board. This is great, but with growth, there is also complexity.
We are a team of smart people with good “hard” skills – it’s the basis of our business model. But it’s the so-called “soft” skills that make and/or break a team, especially one scattered across countries and time zones.
Our clients sometime ask: “What do you do to maintain a strong global team culture?” It’s an astute question.
Communication
“The great enemy of communication is the illusion of it.” – Journalist William H. Whyte, Fortune magazine, September 1950
Just because you have told someone something, does not mean they understood you. People communicate differently. Understanding how you communicate, and how others communicate helps make communication more effective.
A key method we use at AbacusBio is the DOTS framework, developed by Amy Scott. Everyone who starts work with us is quizzed to understand their primary (and secondary, tertiary and quaternary!) communication type – that is, their “dot colour”,
Everyone at AbacusBio knows at least the primary and secondary dots of their immediate team members. Care is taken to write emails, internal newsletters and presentations that cater to the different communication styles. (It is not unusual for someone to ask for “a red dot” version in a set of slides, or to clarify the picture for yellow dots in the room.)
More communication
We also undertook a series of communication workshops with Kakapo Consulting | Transform Your Leadership Today.
Communication is about taking what we are thinking and trying to send it to another person’s brain. We need to encode what is in our brain into language, and then the other person’s brain needs to decode that language and try to understand it. When we do this, we process this information, according to our paradigm, on many levels of a ladder.
A large focus was The F Word: Feedback. Through the course, we learnt several ways to approach communication and feedback within the team. Understanding our own unique Feedback Profile and using the 3 Es of giving feedback (Engage, Exchange, Empower), and the 3 As of receiving feedback (Acknowledge them, Acknowledge you, Acknowledge impact) has helped us give and receive feedback more gracefully. These tools, along with the Ladder, have all made a huge difference to how we approach our work.
But training and tools are only as effective as our ability to embed them into our culture and everyday vernacular.
A healthy dose of self-awareness, goodwill and humour help. But to do the important work we need to do, to have those hard “soft” conversations. We need to be brave – to stick our neck out with an unpopular opinion, an unwanted outcome or some necessary feedback.
I hope that my brain was able to communicate something useful to your brain today. If you want to pick our brain(s) more about how we run our business or how we can help you with your agribusiness, email info@abacusbio.com
Keep up to date with AbacusBio news, by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Bluesky.
