What can you do to improve your team’s efficiency?
By Stephanie Boudehen, HR Advisor
and Roger Watson, Sales Trainer and Advisor
Have you ever experienced communication issues within your team?
Are you getting frustrated with your team “just not getting each other” or perhaps not getting you?
Have you ever wondered why people connect easily with some but not others?
If you answered Yes! to any of these questions, then read on.
Could this happen at your business?
I was at a retail store the other day and a salesperson was demanding to know when the admin person would have an answer on their customer’s account. The admin person’s reply was, “It is third on my list.” The salesperson wanted it NOW and had probably never had a “list” of priorities, so neither person was happy.
The personality type that makes a great salesperson can be different to the one that makes a great admin person. DiSC helps people “value the difference” in the behavioural styles of their workmates and of the customers they need to serve to grow your business.
DiSC – Understanding Your Own and Others’ Behavioural Styles to Improve Efficiency
DiSC is an online profiling tool used all around the world to improve team relationships and communication. DiSC is an acronym for the four primary dimensions of behaviour: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness.
This behavioural model is based on the DiSC theory of psychologist William Marston, who developed the four behaviour types in 1928.
| Style | Dominance | Influence | Conscientiousness | Steadiness |
| Who are they? | The person places an emphasis on accomplishing results, the bottom line, and is driven, confident and strong-willed. | Person places emphasis on influencing or persuading others; openness and relationships. | Person places emphasis on quality and accuracy, expertise and competency. | Person places emphasis on cooperation, sincerity, and dependability. |
| What behaviours? | – Sees the big picture – Can be blunt – Accepts challenges – Gets straight to the point |
– Shows enthusiasm – Is optimistic – Likes to collaborate – Dislikes being ignored |
– Doesn’t like to be rushed – Calm manner – Calm approach – Supportive actions – Humility |
– Enjoys independence – Objective reasoning – Wants the details – Fears being wrong |
Benefits of Understanding Your and Others’ Personality Styles
Knowing your own style gives you an insight on your natural behavioural tendencies, and helps with knowing yourself better.
When working as part of, or managing a team, DiSC profiling helps building relationships and improves communication as it describes how to adapt your behaviour with other styles to create win-win situations.
DiSC can also help to:
- Increase your self-knowledge: how you respond to conflict, what motivates you, what causes you stress and how you solve problems
- Facilitate better teamwork and minimise team conflict
- Develop stronger sales skills by identifying and responding to customers’ styles
- Manage more effectively by understanding the dispositions and priorities of employees and team members
- Develop more self-knowledgeable, well-rounded and effective leaders
- Ensure your recruitment process is a success by providing insight into how you would work with a potential employee (through comparison reports)
DiSC Workshops: Build a more efficient and effective team to improve your business’s results.
Key Business Advisors’ Accredited DiSC trainers run half-day and full-day workshops on DiSC to help your team work better together.Members of your team are asked to fill out the online assessment for one or more of the following DiSC profiles: Workplace, Sales, or Management. The DiSC Management Profile helps managers better understand their management style to create more effective relationships with their employees. DiSC for Sales helps sales professionals increase profits by teaching how to appeal to and better connect with all types of customers, while the Everything DiSC Workplace Profile helps everyone in the organisation, regardless of title or role, to build more effective relationships and improve the quality of the workplace.
After completing the online assessment, a report will then be generated, including a description of the manager, salesperson, or team member’s own personality style, how they react to other styles, and strategies to increase effectiveness with other styles.
Comparison reports between two people can also be generated from the assessment. Comparison reports provide insights on each other’s personality style and how they can work efficiently together, including practical tips on how to avoid conflict.
The workshop will help you understand:
- The 4 DiSC styles
- Your own DiSC profile
- The priorities, motivators, fears and limitations of each style
- How best to use your style with others
- How you can use DiSC to communicate better with work colleagues
- How you can use DiSC to provide better service to your customers
Companies we have worked with have found DiSC to be a great tool to help salespeople get better organised, particularly for those customers who prefer to have facts and data before making a decision. Meanwhile, admin people better understand why salespeople often wants things NOW. DiSC helps them agree on which customers really do need an answer now and which are happy to have the answer when the problem has been thoroughly researched.
What do KBA clients say about DiSC?
I’m happy to report back that the team have really embraced the DiSC training session on Saturday.
We followed up with a training session on Monday and we are taking the understanding of the profiles to the next level in how we communicate with our customers and build a stronger connection – of course to translate into better customer satisfaction and sales performance.
Another way that it has helped my business is the necessity that our technical knowledge be at a high level, i.e. when we have the C style customers come in who want to test the knowledge of the staff, we can lose sales for not knowing our products/plans at a high level.
Hence, we are advocating the DiSC facilitation from Roger and yourself on the weekend and will be recommending it to other business owners.
What do you think is your preferred personality style?
If you want to find out more, call us on 1300 4 ADVICE or email info@keyba.com.au.
