Map & Match, a positive and genuinely original coaching tool

Nicolas d'Hueppe, CEO of Alchimie and a Map & Match client, looks back on his experience of our coaching tool and our platform, and answers our questions as his book, Votre énergie est inépuisable, comes out.

Tell us about your book, and about the idea of a gauge

The book is meant as a first-hand account. For several years, to run all my projects at once, I have used a method for managing my energy, built around the idea of a gauge. A friend encouraged me to write it down and share it in a book.

We all carry an energy gauge, and it moves with the interactions of the day — our environment, the people we see, the meetings we sit in.

Four main situations come out of it:

• Two people whose gauge is positive create synergy, and value.
• A positive person can give energy to someone running a deficit. That is a gift: unconditional, with nothing expected back.
• Conversely, a negative person can steal energy from a positive one.
• And when two people are both in deficit, you get a struggle.

Those four situations explain a great many relationships.

How do you recharge and stay positive? How do you spend less energy?

Three things I do to recharge:

• Through the day, I look at the flows. I take stock of what each thing costs or gives, and work out which phase I am in: synergy, gift, theft or struggle.
• Every day, I sit down and name the three good things of my day, the three moments that did me good.
• The seven smiles exercise: simply never sitting down at your desk before you have been given seven smiles.

How did Map & Match fit into your method?

Map & Match is a management solution — a coaching tool — built on an algorithm that reveals your talents and how best to use them within a collective. Talents are the areas of work where giving and investing yourself actually recharges you. The tool shows where you can rest, but also your areas of discomfort and aversion, because those are where energy leaks away. The debrief, with its colours and figures, is a rational support that makes conversation easy, even on difficult subjects.

What I like about it is that it does not try to categorise people or lock them into a profile. It takes in the infinite diversity of combinations, and it stays positive throughout.

When, and how often, do you use it?

The platform lets you know your team's profiles. It is a coaching tool for putting people in the right place, on the right work, so that everyone's energy is well spent.

It also sets out how people reason, which is where their strengths and weaknesses come from.

It helps us enormously in three situations, and we use it about once a week:

• in hiring, because we need people who are genuinely generous;
• in team-building sessions;
• as a way of resolving conflict.

We usually use the "personal profile" function.

We use Map & Match to map profiles and match them to the work. Being generous with your energy matters to us, and to be generous you have to be in a positive energy and doing what you enjoy. A complementary team means more synergy and more positive energy.

Why would you recommend Map & Match?

It is a coaching tool that is positive, rational and genuinely original. The algorithm invented by Chantal Gensse is built on the pleasure of doing, and draws on the way living systems organise themselves. People and their fulfilment sit at the centre of it, which is fundamental if you want to organise today's world of work.

Is there a story you can tell us about Map & Match?

When I met Chantal Gensse, I liked the way she presented the assessment. I took it. The debrief was interesting, but a little like a horoscope — we all tend to hear what suits us. I asked my HR director to take it too, because I liked the graphic output and found it original. She took it and came to the same conclusion.

Then we saw Chantal again, and taking our two profiles she gave us a list of situations and subjects likely to cause conflict between the two of us, HR director and CEO. That was the moment it clicked. She was putting her finger on things that were obvious, subjects that were impossible to raise and entirely real. The assessment opened a door onto something no other tool offers. I have never stopped using it since.

Did you use Map & Match during lockdown?

Yes, and it was very useful. Knowing the profiles of my colleagues at Alchimie, we could go and find our roles in a difficult context. The Mediator talents mattered enormously, and so did the Coach talents, which are usually called on less. The Challengers and the Creatives had far less to get their teeth into, and needed the Coaches to lift their spirits.

How are you approaching life after Covid-19?

We bring the teams in, and we try to build on that energy to make decisions together.

Right now we have numbers to hit, but the human side comes first: we will come through the crisis with everyone still on board. The biggest challenges afterwards are motivation and agility. In a company where everything is calibrated, we invest in people and we want to keep the energy.

Will that agility let us react?

People are creative, and we saw the proof of it in how many took the initiative themselves. Things are moving, and we will benefit from that afterwards. We have to build on that energy and create together.

As a business owner, I think looking honestly at what we learned is the key to restarting.