A few months ago I had the won­der­ful priv­i­lege of hav­ing an exec­u­tive client come to my office for a full-day coach­ing ses­sion.  The pur­pose of the extended ses­sion was to help her sharpen the skills required for her to advance as a leader in her com­pany.  My client is incred­i­bly smart, a very hard worker, well respected and pas­sion­ate about her long­stand­ing role in this inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tion.  She is also the high­est rank­ing female leader in her male dom­i­nated firm. 

We planned to spend the day work­ing on her soft skills so that she could improve how she inter­acts with the var­i­ous behav­ioral styles within her com­pany and exec­u­tive team.  One of the more pow­er­ful exer­cises we worked on was to dive deep into the DISC language. 

If you are not famil­iar with DISC, I pro­vided an overview in last week’s blog, Under­stand­ing DISC.

The break­through hap­pened with my client when we looked at her assess­ment in com­par­i­son with the assess­ments of a few of her key team mem­bers, includ­ing her boss.  The find­ings showed that she and her boss are wired very sim­i­larly (both high D’s) which helped her to under­stand why they have a ten­dency to butt heads.  What sur­prised her was that he is a high I as well.  This means he is more rela­tional than she had thought.

Just by see­ing this in writ­ing, she began to rec­og­nize that maybe the cause for some of their past argu­ments wasn’t that he did not like or respect her, but that he wanted her to make time to bet­ter con­nect with him and other mem­bers of their team.  He saw her cre­at­ing great rela­tion­ships with those out­side of the man­age­ment team, and he wanted her to bring that same warmth within. 

I had din­ner with her boss a cou­ple of months later.  He told me that he has seen huge improve­ments in my client.  He said her progress has been “quite remark­able”.  I love hear­ing this!  She later let me know that she is enjoy­ing her job much more since our day of coach­ing ear­lier this summer.

Some of you may be think­ing, “Come on Harkavy, this is the touchy feely soft stuff.”  And yes, it is.  Remem­ber though, that lead­er­ship is influ­ence, and we influ­ence peo­ple.  Often what takes us from good to great as lead­ers is sim­ply under­stand­ing how oth­ers pre­fer to com­mu­ni­cate, and then mas­ter­ing the abil­ity to con­nect with each of those we serve.

Here is your Action Plan:  Apply the DISC lan­guage within your team.  You may want to sched­ule a full day of train­ing to help your team under­stand how DISC can be applied to improve inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion and rela­tion­ships with your customers.

Click here to find out how the Build­ing Cham­pi­ons team can set you up with DISC pro­files and help you to make the most of this resource.

And now for my con­fes­sion:  I am a high D and high I as well, and I need to read this and work on it daily in order to bet­ter lead those I serve.

Con­nect and lead well!

Related posts:

1. Under­stand­ing DISC
2. Sorry is Not Good Enough

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plu­gin.

Tags: Coaching, Communication, DISC, Leadership, Teamwork

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