Suppose you started a new venture in a field that you love and enjoy. At first, you’re only focused on survival and getting into the market. After the initial struggles, however, your business takes off. Over time, you hire more and more talents to join your venture. In most cases, their styles, views and interests are similar to yours.

At some point in time, you realize that you don’t know enough about the mix of personalities on the team. You wonder:

• who’s the right person on the team and in the right job;
• who the right person on the team but might do better in another role; and
• who’s missing on the team whose skills and talents are needed to take your company to the next level and move on in the company life cycle.

Viva Creative Studio Co., Ltd. is a full-service, regionally integrated creative agency based in Bangkok. Viva provides a comprehensive service range to its corporate clients that include branding, communication strategy, advertising, online communications, in-store communications, launch events, packaging design, and digital and print design. Viva was started in 2008 by the creative couple Anond Charutrakulchai and Cherie Yip, who both were educated in the UK and met each other while working at award-winning agencies in London. Over the past decade, Viva has steadily grown its business and evolved into one of the most progressive agencies in Thailand.

Viva’s founders realize that if they want to continue to grow their agency in both revenues and impact, it’s vital that they attract and keep the right mix of creative and —going forward also digital— talents. No wonder that when Thinkergy approached Viva’s founders with the idea of doing a TIPS Talent Mapping & Alignment Project with the entire agency, we found open ears and minds.

How did we approach this TIPS Profiling Project with Viva Creative Studio?

• First, Thinkergy profiled all Viva team members individually to reveal their TIPS result and profile. Thereby, we offered a Thai test version to those Thai team members who preferred doing the test in their native tongue.
• Then, Thinkergy founder Dr. D did a session with Viva’s Human Resources Manager, Khun Ben, to go through the job descriptions, roles and responsibilities of all team members. Using a gamified consulting approach, Dr. D identified a primary and 1-2 secondary TIPS profiles that fit each functional role in the agency.  
• Next, Thinkergy created a set of TIPS Team Profiling Maps for the entire agency and its key teams (such as creative team or client services).  
• After that, we analyzed the maps and checked if the right person is in the right job. Interestingly, while we didn’t find a need for talent realignments.
• In a 1-day training, The TIPS Innovation Profiling Workshop, we introduced the mechanics of TIPS to all Viva team members and ran a lot of practical exercises and learning games on show everyone how they may apply TIPS to improve the agency’s business. For example, going through “The TIPS Empathy Exercise” not only taught everyone how to better work together inside the agency but also provided Viva with a blueprint on how to approach their client counterparts (who in a given industry, often tend to revolve around a certainTIPS base).  
• Finally, we concluded the project with a results presentation session to Viva’s management team. We went through all the outstanding deliverables (such as the TIPS Team Maps and the TIPS Profile-Job Fit Descriptions) and presented our findings and action recommendations.

So what were some of the outcomes of this combined TIPS Profiling Project & Training for Viva?  

1. When we analyzed the overall talent mix, we found that even for a creative agency, VIVA has an unusually high number of Ideators on board. (Predictably, they work almost all in the creative team.) The exceptionally high concentration of Ideators suggests that VIVA has the potential to become known as the agency with the boldest campaigns in the market.
2. Interestingly, Viva has counter-balanced the large cohort of progressive Ideators with a sizable number of Systematizers (and selected Organizers) in customer service and the backend of the business, who focus on the bottom line and customer needs and remind the creatives to “get real”.  Dr. D summed-up this unique overall mix by characterizing VIVA as an “imaginatively experimental” creative agency.
3. Predictably for VIVA’s founders, we noted that at present, the agency lacks rational-conceptual Theories-people in its ranks. Given that in the coming years, digital value offerings will increase in importance for most agencies  Thinkergy suggested adding a few trendy, technology-savvy Conceptualizers to the team. This profile type tends to also contribute strategic viewpoints to both the agency’s evolving (digital) service range and its sales proposals and pitches.
4. Thanks to both the TIPS report and the 1-day TIPS training, all delegates gained a deeper awareness of the TIPS profiles and preferred cognitive styles of themselves and their team members. They learned why there are occasional conflicts between the different profile types and how to mitigate these situations by showing more respect for other’s talents and styles. Last but not least, the team explored how to produce better creative outputs and results for VIVA by approaching its clients with greater empathy by relating to their preferred styles.

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