BRASIA is an international consulting company that offers an extensive portfolio of services focused on companies that intend to establish or develop their business in Asia.

Established in 2005 in Hong Kong, BRASIA now also operates in China, Switzerland, and Brazil. A mixed team of international and local specialists offers services in corporate structuring, tax & legal advice, accounting & auditing, sourcing & shipment control, supplier certification & quality control, and banking services, among others.

BRASIA’s consulting business has to keep up with an increasingly tight regulatory environment that affects the structures recommended to its clients. Insofar, BRASIA’s leadership team has identified innovation and the ability to quickly and creatively respond to the challenges posed by an ever-changing market and regulatory environment is one of the firm’s key success factors.

Against this background, BRASIA’s founder Samuel Notz approached Thinkergy to run a 1-day innovation training for its annual team-building event. After exploring the current challenges of BRASIA, we suggested running “The TIPS Innovation Profiling Workshop” (1-day) with the team.

Ahead of the training, Thinkergy profiled all of BRASIA’s employees to bring out their TIPS profiles and their preferred styles to think, work, interact, and live. We also consolidated the individual results and mapped them out in a set of TIPS Team Profiling Maps for BRASIA.

At the start of the training day, we first introduced the background and design logic of the TIPS profiling method. This morning session allowed training participants from BRASIA to understand how TIPS builds upon —and improves— earlier concepts to profile people’s personality or preferred cognitive styles. Then, the delegates learned about the design features of TIPS (bases, styles, survey, map, and profiles). Thereby, they became aware of the importance of the 4 TIPS bases (theories, ideas, people, systems) and how these drive individual behavior as well as major technological and social changes. Next, each BRASIA member introduced their TIPS profile to the team and explained why and how they add value to BRASIA’s business.

The afternoon session focused on how to apply TIPS for better performance and greater personal satisfaction in business and innovation.

The afternoon kicked off with a fun ideation exercise. The participants were divided into 4 “TIPS base teams” (based on their highest TIPS score) and worked on an internal innovation challenge for half an hour. The activity  allowed the delegates to realize the differences in people’s preferred style to innovate. The exercise also gave BRASIA a pool of ideas on how to improve teamwork, and one idea that popped up in every team got selected for implementation right away.

In part 4 of the training, we moved to the business applications of TIPS:

• The teams experienced the difficulties of hiring the right person for a vacant position by playing “The TIPS Staffing Game”.
• They also learned about how people differ in the way they preferred to be managed at work.
• By playing “The TIPS Conflict Game”, the delegates began to understand why there is conflict at work. Differences in people’s cognitive styles and base orientations explain why we get along well with some people and regularly clash with others. However, those people with opposite talents should be our best friend, because they enjoy doing those things that we dislike.
• Finally, “The TIPS Empathy Game” allowed the teams to develop strategies on how to communicate more empathetically with clients and team members of each other TIPS base orientations (theories, ideas, people, systems). In the game, the teams used the AIDA model (approach & attention, interest, desire, and action) to track and map out differences in empathetic communication between each base.

What did BRASIA and its team members take away from the training day?

1. Respect for the importance of each single team member for BRASIA’s success regardless of one’s role, cultural background and personality.
2. Insights on how to moderate conflict situations at work, and how to interact with greater empathy with both clients externally and team members internally by adjusting both message and delivery to the preferred ways of the recipient.
3. Last but not least, BRASIA’s leadership team got important hints on how to strengthen the team even further with two HR initiatives by: a) Closing an identified delivery gap in their back-office team when they make their next hire, and b) transferring one team member to a new role that might better cater to her natural talents.

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