The Oprah Quadrant

You oversee all things legal at GoDaddy. That’s from mergers and acquisitions to litigation to global policy, you name it. And that means dealing with a lot of people with very different modes of operating. So how do you effectively interact with them to overcome and perhaps even leverage those differences?

Are you familiar with the DiSC Model? I can’t remember.

A little bit, yes.

Yeah. Okay, so it’s a model where you kind of plot people into four quadrants, and then there is a famous person in each quadrant. And, of course, part of the lesson is that you have leaders of all different personality types.
I am in the whatever the quadrant is where Oprah is the famous person. And when I did the DiSC exercise with my team, almost everybody was in the Oprah quadrant.

Oh, that's interesting.

I haven’t done it with my current team yet, but with my old team, the team that I hired.

Yes.

But I realized, oh, my gosh, that’s my unconscious bias in hiring. And so when you ask that question, I thought, I don’t think I’m very good, actually, at building teams and different communication styles.

That’s a really honest answer, and I appreciate that because I think a lot of us do that. We hire people that we’re most comfortable with.

Right. So that’s why I struggled a little bit with that answer, because I thought, oh, I share that.

I think that reflects great self-awareness, Michele. So then what do you do to intentionally change that and so that you do build a more diverse team going forward?