Advancing an Award-Winning Culture: A Conversation with Crystal Vanderkolb of IMI

I connected with our brilliant Emergenetics® Associate Crystal Vanderkolb, Director of Leadership and Culture Development at IMI, a company that recently won the top prize in the Big Company category in the St. Louis Business Journal’s Best Places to Work awards.

To learn about how they bring their culture to life and how they’ve used Emergenetics to support their workforce, read on!

Jenn Denfield (Jenn): Can you tell me a little about IMI and your role at the company?

Crystal Vanderkolb (Crystal): IMI Inc. is a 100% employee-owned holding company uniting industry-leading business units including icon Mechanical, iENG Design, eagle Controls and iSuite under one corporate umbrella. We are headquartered in Granite City, IL, and have branches in Nashville, TN, Charlotte, NC and St. Louis, MO. Constantly evolving, we also plan to open locations in Raleigh, NC and Atlanta, GA this year.

We’re in a hyper-growth mode. It’s a really fun energy to be around! With our people as our biggest asset, I’m proud to say we have a very forward-thinking group of individuals at the top of our organization.

Our flagship company, icon Mechanical has been in business for more than 32 years. Six years ago, our co-founders, Mike and Tim, sold the company to an ESOP making us completely employee-owned. We just had our first round of fully vested employees last fall.

I was hired about 17 months ago to train the leaders and ensure that the culture that was established decades ago stays with the new generations coming into the workforce. Our Co-founder Mike said to me when I got here, “We did the first 30 years, Crystal, but you’re responsible for the rest!” It’s a big responsibility!

Jenn: How would you describe your culture?

Crystal: An entrepreneurial spirit defines our culture, and people love that. They feel very empowered.

Our Co-founders breathe the idea that you can do anything you want to do – as well as the fact that the impossible is possible! That entrepreneurial spirit is embedded in our people, and we attract those individuals as a result.

If you come in through one role and want to try something different, we’re open to that. We want you to find what fits your gifts and skill set so you can be the best version of yourself.

Emergenetics is a great fit with this environment. A lot of the reasoning behind why I picked Emergenetics was that it highlights the strengths of people, and that’s what we talk about.

It aligns so well with our culture, our mission and who we are.

Jenn: IMI was recently named the best place to work in the big company category by the St. Louis Business Journal. What do you feel really makes IMI’s culture stand apart?

Crystal: Based upon the customized report we received, people just kept saying that “it’s the most fun place to work,” and I think it comes from the environment we create.

We’re very accepting of what people have going on in their lives. We’re very laid back. While our company started off small, we found ourselves transforming into a large company within a few short years – luckily, those founding values stayed intact. We are very lucky that our people naturally live out those core values each day.

I also think people like the autonomy they have. Our employee owners feel empowered by our entrepreneurial spirit. They like feeling valued in their work, and they like being able to do things on their own.

Jenn: How do you integrate Emergenetics programming into IMI, and how does Emergenetics contribute to your award-winning culture?

Crystal: Our use of Emergenetics brings out the culture that we’ve had from day one – that culture of 30 people working together on one project – to the hundreds of projects and nearly 600 people (and growing) we have working on them.

Utilizing our Emergenetics results allows us to talk about things we may not have otherwise when we bring together very tenured people and very new people. It gives our employees the comfort to be who they are, talk about how they feel and share their preferences.

Everyone who joins IMI is highly encouraged to attend our IMI Foundational Leadership workshop—where we introduce Emergenetics.

We do a Meeting of the Minds workshop that’s a little more personalized to our culture. We’ve enhanced it with our core values, some mindfulness practices and hands-on practice with style flexing.

We also have a team-building workshop that I do interdepartmentally. I go to project sites and get the project team together. Many participants haven’t done that foundational workshop yet because we’re hiring so quickly, so we begin with an Emergenetics intro. Then, we add team-building aspects. We look at the team’s Emergenetics Group Report and see if we have gaps we need to fill in. We also take the time to share people’s strengths and their challenges.

I do a lot of one-on-ones with managers if two colleagues aren’t getting along. I’ll meet with the two employees and just listen without judgment. Eventually, I pull up their Emergenetics Profiles on a slide side-by-side.

More often than not, they have the same Thinking preferences. They just behave in opposite ways. I’m able to bring them together, and they come to their own conclusions about what they need to work more cohesively.

Some people use the Emergenetics+ app to connect with each other too. We have some big advocates, who walk around the office and say, “Hey, have you gotten on the app yet? You got to get on there! We’ve got to connect.”

Jenn: What was a moment that made you think Emergenetics is really working?

Crystal: I had an aha moment with one of our new offices.

We did Emergenetics with them, and our Shop Foreman came up to me and asked to look at his group’s combined Profile for a project team that was about to get started.

Everybody on the project team was in the office that day, so we got into the conference room.

I just watched them looking at the Group Profile and the dot graph, talking about how they’d work together. They were saying things like, “I really like to communicate that way. We match on that. We’ll be able to conceptualize and know the numbers, but we have a gap here in structure. Anna is going to have to fill that gap because it looks like she shows up that way.”

That was a pretty magical moment to see them use the tool in real time to decide how they were going to work together on this project team.

That alone told me that Emergenetics was a tool that could be utilized immediately. I shared that story with our leaders across the organization, and now other teams are doing Emergenetics at project kickoffs.

Emergenetics is a great way for them to get to know each other quickly because they operate in a very intimate space together in a job trailer on site, trying to literally build something with a lot of challenges.

Jenn: After seeing some of these applications come to life, what do you feel that your leaders or teams have been able to do differently or better since using Emergenetics?

Crystal: The first thing I hear is that Emergenetics helps people realize that not everyone on their team thinks or behaves like them. It is just a true light bulb moment, and that realization alone is very powerful.

Emergenetics humanizes how we operate. Historically, in this industry, we may feel the need to check feelings at the door in a work environment. This tool helps humanize that we all show up in so many ways. It’s our preferences, our DNA, our life experiences that appear every day. Emergenetics gives us a framework to reference that.

I also hear people say that Emergenetics gives them a good reason for why someone shows up the way they do. Prior to the workshop, they may have had judgment, bias and assumptions, and those assumptions led how they responded, which wasn’t always good.

The Emergenetics Profile tells our teams why their co-workers show up how they do, and just knowing the reason why, can change their response.

Jenn: What made you choose Emergenetics over other tools?

Crystal: I shopped around for a tool to give people a self-reflection point. There are a lot on the market. What I was looking for was a tool that would not only allow for self-reflection, but also bridge communication between people.

I’ve done DiSC over the years, and that was one of the tools I looked at, along with others. Emergenetics was just the perfect landing spot for a quick, easy assessment. After 15 minutes, we have this incredible framework for our people.

Foundationally, it supports self-reflection. Then, we take it a step further by exploring how to better communicate with co-workers at any level.

Through our Emergenetics workshops, we create an environment where people feel safe and comfortable to talk about their feelings and their preferences. Then, we bring in a common language, so instead of saying, “Oh, that person is so nitpicky about the numbers!” we can now say, “That person is highly Analytical, and they bring a lot of value with their logic and reason. What else do we need to couple this idea with?”

That common language is key.

Jenn: If you were speaking to another company that was considering using Emergenetics, what would you, what would you say to them?

Crystal: Emergenetics is a foundational tool that needs to be used regularly. It has to become part of the language and the culture to get the most out of it.

It could be fun as a quick workshop, sure. People love doing that stuff.

If you really want to get the most out of what I believe to be probably the best tool on the market, you have to set it as the foundation of everything else you’re going to build for employee development and communication purposes.

In every aspect of what you do in training, leadership and development, Emergenetics can be the base.

Jenn: What’s next for IMI and Emergenetics?

Crystal: We’re building a mentorship program this year and will use Emergenetics as the foundation of how we bring our mentors and mentees together.

We also do a feedback survey after each workshop, and I hear that people want more application activities and real-world scenarios to apply it after the workshops.

I’m working with Marty Lassen at Complete Edge because they have a lot of those activities that I haven’t introduced yet. There’s definitely a third workshop coming. We’re building it as we go!

 

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