If we're to be honest with ourselves, people issues impede our team's success. Miscommunication arises from differences in leadership and communication styles, and simply put, our preferred ways of doing things.
Smoothly running teams will often predict organizational success; while, dysfunctional teams are likely to highlight the barriers. Poor team performance leads to lost productivity, falling short of team goals, low employee morale, and higher turnover.
Identification of miscommunication and conflict, in itself, does not better the situation. The problem is knowing where to begin the fix.
You now have critical data to identify your team's style; your team's strengths, challenges, and overall dynamics. At the same time, you're able to identify individual team member's style and how each prefers to interact.
The information is grounded; it's based on each team member's self-assessment. You are telling each other how you prefer to interact, identifying your strengths and challenges, and what motivates and demotivates you.
In teams, DISC becomes a dialoguing tool; providing simultaneous feedback to all team members. It provides a non-judgmental language to discuss next steps; specifically, ways to recognize and utilize differences and how to make effective adjustments to improve your interactions.
All teams have their own strengths, challenges, and unique dynamics. It's important, as a leader, to understand how you prefer to lead; how you motivate your team and how to tap into your team's strengths and develop areas that may be a challenge.
Leaders can use the DISC results to recognize the unique preferences of their employees and make better decisions on on how to best lead them. For example, are you assigning responsibilities and tasks effectively? What if you know which of your employees prefer to work independently and which ones are a better fit for handling the details and making sure mistakes are minimized?
Understanding what motivates, as well as demotivates, your employees creates a better work environment.
DISC helps your team members identify each other more effectively. It reminds you, as an I-style, your C-style colleague likely prefers a detailed email over you rushing into their office to excitedly share your abundance of new ideas. If you're a D-style, you need to remember to slow it down and offer benefits to a solution with your S-style.
Remember, It's not about changing who you are, but making key and temporary adjustments to best fit the interaction. Your fellow colleagues will be more likely to respond positively, and in the end, you'll get what you need out of the interaction.
Time will not be wasted. Managing people problems enables your team to be more productive and focused on accomplishing goals.