Leadership and Life Essentials: More Than Your Style - How DISC Builds Stronger, More Cohesive Teams

Speaker A: Foreign. M welcome to Leadership and Life Essentials with Jackie, where I cut through the noise and deliver concise, actionable insights on effective leadership. I'm your host, Jackie Surgeon Ergaleni from Leadership in Life by K Rec In a world overflowing with information, this show offers short, focused episodes packed with tangible advice and tools to help you lead and live better. Let's dive in.

Speaker B: Welcome to Leadership and Life Essentials. This is episode 91 more than your style how disc builds stronger, more cohesive teams Most people, when they first discover disc, use it to understand themselves. And that's great. They find out they're a D or an S or a high C and it clicks. Suddenly they understand why they hate small talk, or why they need all the details before they can make a decision, or why conflict completely drains them. That self awareness is genuinely valuable. It's the first step in emotional intelligence. But if you stop there, you're really leaving a lot on the table. Disc isn't just a tool for understanding yourself. Where the real power comes in is when you use it to recognize other people's styles and adapt to them. It's a great tool for understanding the people around you. And when teams use it to understand their individual styles as well as their team dynamics, communication and teamwork improves. You stop wondering why things feel hard and you start seeing exactly why they feel hard and that's where you can actually do something about it. A few weeks ago in episode 89, I talked about homogeneous and heterogeneous teams, which is what happens when everyone on the team is pretty similar versus when you've got a real mix of people and styles. Disc is a tool that lets you easily see which type of team you have. You can see if most of you are the same and therefore communicate easily. And Johnny out there is a completely different style and driving you all crazy. It's not that he's trying to irritate you, it's that he's a different style than the rest of you, which makes it really noticeable. When you run a team disc report, you're not just looking at a list of who's what style. You're looking at where team's collective energy goes and just as important where it doesn't. A team that's heavy in D and I styles is going to move fast, make decisions quickly, and generate a lot of energy. They're probably also going to skip a few steps. They're going to miss details and struggle to slow down long enough to follow through. A team that's heavy in S and C styles is going to be thorough, careful and consistent. They're also probably going to avoid unnecessary conflict and they're going to have a hard time making a call when the information still feels incomplete. They may never make a decision. I once worked with a sales team that was all S and I styles, which makes sense for sales. They got along well, they communicated great with clients, but they never followed processes which which got them into trouble at times. Looking at the team disk map helped make these strengths and the blind spots more obvious. And these teams aren't broken, they just have blind spots. Everyone does. But if you don't know what they are, you'll keep running into the same problems without really understanding why. I once worked with a committee that spanned all four styles. The chair was a D, so when she wrote up the report from their meeting, she focused on the recommendation, the outcome, the decision done. She knew herself well enough to recognize she probably missed some context, so she passed it to an estal on the team to review. The S added in the history, the background, the details that gave the recommendation its legs. The report landed with the executive director who replied, oh, thanks. My C style appreciates the details. This team had obviously done disc assessments and training, and they used that disc language to ask for what they needed. That team didn't happen to work together by accident, though they understood each other well enough to fill in the gaps on purpose. They were intentional and spoiler alert. That was a growth opportunity for them. They weren't like that until they'd done disc. That's what disc at the team level makes possible. And there's another layer that's worth paying attention to the person on your team who's the outlier. And I referenced that a little bit earlier. If you've got seven people and six of them share a similar style, that seventh person is going to feel like the odd one out. And the rest of the team might experience them as difficult, slow, disruptive, hard to read, depending on what style they all are and what style that person is. When you see that on a team report, you stop being frustrated by the outlier and start recognizing they're probably the person who's filling in a gap the rest of you don't see. I tell teams with outliers they need to give more weight to what that outlier says, since they're possibly the only one actually saying it. But awareness is only useful if it changes something. So once you have a picture of your team's disk composition, the question is, now what? A few things can become possible that weren't possible before. First of all, you can have an honest conversation about the team's blind spots without it being personal. It's not that Jane is always slowing things down, it's that the team tends to move fast and skip the detail work. And Jane C style is the thing that's catching what everyone else misses. That's a very different conversation than Jane's being difficult Again. You can also make intentional decisions about how you structure work. Who do you leap in early when you need to think something through? Who do you need to bring in at the end to pressure test a decision? Who do you not send a three paragraph email to when a two minute conversation would land better? As you start to see how disc connects to the bigger picture of team Cohesion, Trust Conflict Commitment Accountability Results. Those are the five behaviors of a cohesive team and DISC underpins all of them. How a D style builds trust looks different than how an S style builds trust. How a C style engages in conflict looks different than how an I style does. When your team understands those differences, they stop taking things personally and start working with each other more deliberately. And that's not a small thing that can make the difference between a team that tolerates each other and a team that actually functions together. And we've reached the part of the show where we talk about what you can do. I have blog posts and radio show episodes and I'll link them on the show page. If you've already done a disc assessment, pull out your report and look at it through a new lens. Not just what it says about you, but how your style might be landing on your team. See if you can understand and guess the disc styles of the people on your team. If your team is all done disc through me, reach out and let's pull a team report and maybe even have a discussion about it. If your team hasn't done assessments, it's a really great place to start. Individual reports give each person their own picture and then a team report shows you the whole thing at once. When I do disc training, I include both of those because I think they're really important. You can find out more about disc assessments and team reports at leadershipinlife CA Disc and I'll have all the resources related to this show on my show page at, uh, LeadershipInLife CA Show 91. And remember, disc doesn't tell you who's right or who's difficult. It tells you why you're different and that changes how you work together.

Speaker A: You've reached the end of another episode of leadership and Life Essentials. If you want to learn more about today's topics, please visit leadershipandlife ca, where you'll find episode show notes and free bonus resources. I'm Jackie Surginer Galeoni, founder of Leadership and Life by K Rec, where I strive to empower leaders with the skills

Speaker B: no one taught them to create teams who want to work together.

Speaker A: Thanks for joining me.