Mike Depatie

Former CEO, Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants
Current Managing General Partner at KHP Capital Partners

• I would say investing in our culture and Trimergence wasn’t an expense for us, it was an investment for us. We made a huge investment over time building our culture, and Trimergence was a huge part of that investment.
• I want to let you know we have entered into an agreement to sell the co today. We got an incredible price that I am sure was only possible because of the amazing work you and your group have done over the years to build our unique and very special culture. Thank you!
  (Excerpt of an email to Ward Ashman, 2014)
• We really wanted the employees to connect with our customers, but to do that they had to connect with themselves. The Trimergence Self-Insight Program helped them do that. Through the Self-Insight Program, each person became a better version of themselves. This investment represented the core Kimpton belief that came from Bill Kimpton: When you grow the people, you grow the enterprise.
• Our mission was to really care for the customer, but this required more empathy, which required us caring for our employees. The Trimergence investment was really about us caring for our employees to be better employees and also better people. This transferred directly into how they cared for our customers. And it led to us being on the Fortune 100 Best Places to Work For list for many years, and we’re still on that list! This was all based on the culture we created through our culture, which quite frankly, was based on the work we did with Trimergence. Even more, JD Power in 2014 and 2015 basically named us number 1 in customer satisfaction in the world. That was a huge honor and it was based on our culture of care.
• We knew we were distinctive because we had this highly differentiated culture. I could tell other CEOs and companies anything about our culture and they would never get it, even though it was a type of trade secret.
• We had been working with Trimergence for 20 years. quite a long time. So, this was a rather significant investment we made to the well-being of our workforce which translated directly into the kind of culture that we built. This then translated directly to the service model of our team caring about others because they knew we were caring for them. Moreover, our employees knew more about their own patterns of behavior and why they reacted the way they did. This built their empathy for others to better understand how they act.
• Our work with Trimergence helped build trust at a level that was truly unprecedented. People would openly share what they learned about themselves in their Trimergence work, which was a short cut to help everyone understand how and why people show up and act in particular ways.
• Trust is the ultimate lubricant for any organization, and we found a way to create trust with Trimergence that took us far beyond the norm for any typical organization.
• As the CEO I did a lot of work with the Trimergence team myself. I found it really useful to understand myself and my patterns, and then I could model this for the rest of the organization. This helped me bring in the Trimergence work with my senior team. We learned very quickly how we could best work together. This helped us become very aware of how we could function at a much more productive level. Disclosing what we learned in our work with Trimergence connected us at a much more personal and deeper level than would be possible in any work setting. The Trimergence work gave us a language to talk with each other that was very productive.
• The work I have personally done with Trimergence and the work Trimergence has done in our organization has been some of the most meaningful work I have done in my entire career. It has substantially helped me to understand my own patterns of behavior and helped me be a much better leader of people. I am much more intuitive and empathetic in understanding how people behave and the motivations to why they behave as they do. This has allowed me to not take things personally and not project a defensive interpretation to how people act in various situations. This has been very valuable for me in leading a large organization. And it has been a joy to see this work in action and to hear it called out by people that the culture is one of the key reasons for our success. It is a great joy to see our work in action.