Business Development: Perceptual Styles Theory in Action

At Vega Behavioral Consulting, we help businesses unleash the power of teams by fitting the right people to the right tasks—and showing people powerful skills for understanding themselves and others. It’s all based on the Perceptual Styles Theory, which holds that all people, regardless of race, class or culture, fall into one of six unique Perceptual Styles that has everything to do with who they are, what they value, and how they see the world. Early in my career a clinical psychologist in solo private practice, I was overwhelmed by many of the business functions I had to perform for which I had no natural talent. As a corporate executive, my business partner, Lynda-Ross, had experienced the disasters that accompany projects that fail to put the right people in the wrong roles. After working together for a number of years in corporate consulting, we knew that Perceptual Styles Theory could revolutionize the way that small businesses operated, too. But in order to launch this new business, we had to learn many of the things we had worked so hard to teach our own clients. We call this ‘Living the Theory.’ When we started this new business, ACI for Entrepreneurs, we faced what many of the entrepreneurs we work with face at the outset. We had a great product, passion for the services we offered, and a deep belief that it would be of value to others. But, just as with many other entrepreneurs, we didn’t have the natural skills and talents to build a significant market presence. Traditionally, we had worked together in marketing our services to large corporate entities. We soon discovered, however, that building our new business around the natural skills and abilities we had—the way we advise our clients to—meant shifting our market focus to entrepreneurs. And the internet was where the entrepreneurs were! Rather than face the need to build a new team that had the ability to support this new marketing direction, we tried to shoehorn our new business into the old marketing models we were familiar with. Before long, we realized that this approach was not going to work. Between us and our team, we were lacking some of the key skills and knowledge to be successful with internet marketing So what did we do? We focused on ‘Living the Theory.’ Using the Perceptual Styles Theory to catalog the skills we did and did not have, we pinpointed exactly where we needed help. From here, we began our search for the right support in a clear and focused way. The result is a solid support team that is a combination of employees and contract help. Five of the six Perceptual Styles--Vision, Activity, Adjustments, Methods, and Flow—are represented on our team. This creates a mix of different perspectives and priorities, which means everyone needs a basic understanding of the theory to work closely and productively, day-in and day-out. But the results have been amazing. We still have occasional missed tasks or mis communications here and there, but they are usually minor and quickly resolved. And the upshot is: our business is thriving, and our clients’ businesses are, too.