Roy Latka

Former President and CEO of KMD Architects

• As a firm, we work with multiple personalities and cultures and Trimergence offered the skills we needed to develop. The Trimergence claim to be trainers of Olympic athlete level execuives also made sense to me. Trimergence does not work at the basic skill level of development, Trimergence works to polish and help leaders be more sophisticated and broad reaching in their overall influence.
• Most consultants start from the outside in which can only lead so much information and value. Trimergence works from the inside out and that means Trimergence becomes embedded in the firm, spending time with the CEO, the senior leadership of the firm, the next level of leadership. That message really rang a bell for me.
• The Trimergence tools are all excellent, we learned things about ourselves that we probably were afraid to admit as we went through their process. But that’s what it is all about if you want to play at the highest level of your game.
• The large group meetings where we took our individual tests pointed out our individual character traits surprised everybody. We learned that as a team each of us had these individual traits, strengths and weaknesses; and it frightened a few of the key senior people who did not want to participate anymore. As a result, those leaders risked unsettling the firm. Ultimately, it made the firm stronger to help identify those who didn’t want to be on the team that we were building. As a result, some of them moved on and left the firm. This was better for everyone than to have a rotten apple in the barrel that was poisoning the rest of the team.
• The biggest value that Trimergence brought to us — the soft skills! Of course, we know how to use a computer, draw a diagram, build a model, and yes, we know how to lay out a bathroom. But we didn’t have those Trimergence skills that we needed.
• The challenge for us as architects is that we don’t get much preparation from our educational background in the soft skills and those are the skills you Trimergence sold us at KMD.
• Until you really open up and make yourself vulnerable, you never really get close to people, both professionally and personally, as you can be otherwise.
• At the time we started with Trimergence we were deeply involved with transition and needed to have talent to pass on the baton to the next generation. That’s why we made the investment with Trimergence—it was worth that investment. For me as the leader of the team there is nothing you can do that is more valuable than investing in professional development. When this is done with heart and others can see the value, the team gets excited about the development investment. And when this type of investment with Trimergence was done as something new, well presented, well managed, with good graphics, has empirical data behind it, the value of the Trimergence work and its models is obvious.