Seity Insight

“If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.”- Jim Rohn, an American entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker.

The quote profoundly relates to Deborah Peck’s life.

Amid the constant work pressure and tight deadlines of the corporate sector, Deborah always delivered impressive results as a data network engineer. Bringing vast business, technology, and leadership experience, Deborah has worked with numerous organizations, large and small alike. Critical thinking and creative problem-solving are synonymous with Deborah as she has always been ambitious about her work, which has given her opportunities to hold management positions in numerous organizations throughout her career. A leader of large engineering teams, Deborah’s task at her previous organizations included finding quality technology solutions to business requirements. After working with various team members for years, she realized her latent interest in people management and workplace behavior. “My heart was more in line with what motivated people,” she expresses.

It was time to break the monotony.

At the peak of her career, Deborah took the bold step of switching from a corporate job to pursue a doctorate in industrial/organizational psychology to begin a new chapter in her life. To materialize her vision of enhancing people management, Deborah laid the foundation of Seity, focusing on organizational effectiveness and workplace behavior. “Seity, meaning uniqueness of an individual or an organization, is the perfect name for our company as it clearly reflects what we do,” explains Deborah, founder and principal consultant at Seity Insight.

Deborah is certified in several assessments and applies people management models that enable leaders and businesses to use new methods that address the issues they face today. Her company works with clients to deal with complex change, manage chaos, and develop a strategy for the workplace and tie that into their business operations and financial results. By working with people throughout the organization, Seity increases effectiveness, builds trust, and improves results.

Seity can balance the client’s qualitative and quantitative requirements by leveraging Deborah’s expertise in technology, coupled with her experience in consulting, and knowledge of industrial/organizational psychology. She jocularly expresses, “I am using both sides of my brain: the left side for a quantitative analytical approach whereas the right side for a qualitative one to cope with soft skills.” Deborah uses this combined background and education to create business results and improve productivity in organizations with a focus on workplace behavior and the effectiveness of the underlying people resources.

ONA: A Breakthrough in People Management

One essential trait that attracted Deborah toward the management consulting business is her natural tendency to listen to clients. During the first meeting with a potential client, Deborah ensures that she objectively listens to them and understands their painpoints. “Seity Insight does not have a preconceived notion of just selling products.

We go in with an open mind to listen to people’s stories, business needs, and their long-standing issues,” says Deborah. After an in-depth conversation, Seity creates a proposal that includes the tools and services based on clients’ needs.

Seity has developed a diagnostic based on Organization Network Analysis (ONA), which is a method for studying information flow, communication and socio-technical networks within a formal organization. Seity’s KĒS Network Analysis process assesses Knowledge, Experience, and Skills as well as the social capital components of the organization. Social capital turbo charges the human capital to create a complete understanding of the organization and the key people impacting an organization. The diagnostic unlocks the levers and identifies challenges for a ‘view’ of the organization through graphical maps that tell the story of how the work is really done in the organization. This process ‘Turns Intuition into Science’ to understand the DNA of the organization.

We take pride in the fact that we don’t have any off the shelf product and we don’t represent a specific way of doing things

Deborah explains that employees and leaders have intuitions about their organizations. However, these intuitions are not repeatable; they are one’s empirical, subjective reality. Seity’s process validates those intuitions from everyone and asks specific questions about their work relationships, the interdependencies that everyone must have to be successful in their job. This data develops into maps that are tangible, quantifiable entities that create patterns and connections that can be analyzed to explain what is really happening in the workplace. The company enables clients to act in response to the existing intuitions that now has associated objective data, and create processes that are repeatable, identify challenges and leverage points to take action that sticks to the organizational objectives and improves productivity.

This gives an overview of the culture and can identify trust, information flow, and collaboration to quantify soft skills and tacit knowledge in the organization for accurate decision making and problem solving backed by data and statistics. In a nutshell, it is the white space in the organizational chart. This system helps clients significantly boost their profits. For instance, organizations can set a budget on training and choose only ten leaders for leadership training. While the manager may prepare a list of the top leaders on the basis of subjectivity or purely knowledge, experience, and skills (KĒS) ignoring the social capital side, ONA enables managers to quantify both KĒSs as well as social influences. This helps them create a list of top leaders that can actually drive productivity in the organization.

Similarly, in case two organizations merge, the analysis can predict which organization’s culture will dominate in the combined group. ONA analyzes the two cultures, can identify where there are challenges for integration. It can be used to create a tactical plan to prioritize the integration steps, know who to involve or who will block the progress, and measure the changes over time. Within that, the analysis can gauge the existing networks based on the questions that reflect the key influencers and important relationships already created along with the dynamics of each culture.

It provides a macro view of the organization while identifying the micro elements, the key people, influencing the organization and the impact they have.

Ensuring People Engagement and Success

Deborah calls Seity’s ONA a diagnostic model, like an X-ray of the organization, because it provides insights into the entire organization based on questions specially designed to address the objectives and challenges identified by the clients, instead of offering commercial off-the-shelf products. “We take pride in the fact that we don’t have any off the shelf product and we don’t represent a specific way of doing things. After in-depth conversations, careful evaluations, and critical thinking, we look at the client’s needs from every angle to provide customized solutions,” adds Deborah. Here, she brings to the table her certifications and qualifications with a multitude of instruments such as Hogan, MHS, CPP including Myers Briggs, DISC, and more that further helps organizations with people management, selection and development.

“Seity, meaning uniqueness of an individual or an organization, is the perfect name for our company as it clearly reflects what we do”

Deborah illustrates the efficacy of Seity’s ONA by citing the success story of a Fortune 50 client. Seity was onboarded during a change management process in the organization. After the successful completion of the project, Seity managed the client’s people management processes. Soon, the CTO approached Deborah to create a team building workshop for two teams in his IT department to strengthen communication. Understanding the budget restraints, Deborah suggested ONA. Post the analysis, she realized that the root cause of the miscommunication was a lack of trust among the managers. The CTO had results from the corporate-wide employee engagement survey that was independently available and indicated the same issues identified by ONA. Seity worked with the CTO to identify the challenges. Within two years, the company was able to sort out various kinds of miscommunication and increased employee engagement by 35 percent. The client also decreased employee turnover from 17 percent to less than 2 percent. The client saved millions of dollars in those two years with minimal investment using ONA. “This proves that ONA helps identify the cause of problems and assists to define the right action plans to mitigate issues and increase productivity,” adds Deborah.

By partnering with I/O psychologists and HR professionals, Deborah believes in building relationships with them as she practices the same for her clients. As ONA gains more traction, Seity will continue to help and guide clients in multiple areas of people management. One important area that most organizations are focusing on is building close relationships between managers and their subordinates. Seity is well prepared to assist organizations on this front by leveraging the results of a powerful ONA. Based on the concepts, Deborah is also authoring a book, “Turning Workplace Intuition Into Science: Managing The Workplace Differently” that will focus on the balance of hierarchy and power networks, which is becoming very prominent to organizations aiming to be agile. The book will also talk about how having the right leadership models can create a happy and satisfying workplace. Deborah sums it up, “The bottom line is that the success of any organization depends on the engagement and happiness of people—and that is exactly what we do!”