Understanding your team allows you to help them be their best and move the entire team together toward the goal.
Communication is essential for having solid teams, and learning to understand your team is a discipline we can all get better at. As the owner of your company, you should be looking for ways to engage, motivate and challenge your employees to get the best results possible.
Not everyone is the same and the needs of our team make it harder to know how to effectively communicate and empower them. One tool we use at REF Dallas is a needs-based assessment called DISC.
Any assessment can be useful if you can understand it and apply it long-term. I have found that my group members and their employees can quickly understand and apply the DISC principles to improve communications and team engagement.
This 15 minute assessment gives us great insights into what we need as human beings and what strengths we bring to the team. A DISC report shows how we behave based on our needs and motivations. This allows us to have more self-awareness and to understand the needs of others.
I often take teams through this process as part of our Leadership Development Session. This helps them become self-aware (EQ), learn to control themselves, and learn to understand others where they are. The real value of these assessments is to learn to live with others in an understanding way in order to create high-performance teams.
Adjusting In Times Of Stress
When we face challenges at work or play, we adjust to get things done. Many times people will see their assessment and say “thats not me” but if we ask others on the team they will say “yes it is!” Over time we have morphed into the people we are today and sometimes we don’t understand how this affects others.
You natural behavioral style changes in times of stress. This shift can be a great value to the group but we need to understand why this is happening and be willing to adjust (“flex”) to work with this.
Learn To FLEX
Because we all have different needs, it is important to understand each other and flex to meet them half way.
I might be the kind of person that just wants to get it done right now, and you might be the more cautious analytical person who needs all the facts before we move ahead. We can argue that our perspective is best or we can learn to flex and find a way to get the value of both our needs in the situation. Of course we can only flex for so long so its important to realize the strengths of others and let them do what they do best so you can focus on your strengths.
Once we understand the needs of other people, we know how to treat them so they feel understood and appreciated enough to respond the same way so our team learns to operate more effectively. Walls come down, we move out of silos, and we learn to engage again. We feel empowered to bring our A-game to the situation and we get more done!
Our team members will become more engaged when there is a safe environment to be themselves, and where they feel they are appreciate for who they are. Don’t we all want this?
The DISC assessment can be used to help you lead with excellence so let me know when you want to get started. Contact me to learn other resources that are designed to help you remove the obstacles that keep you from reaching your goals.
Robert Hunt
@REFDallas #CEOpeerGroups #LeadershipDevelopment #Mentoring