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Team Building with Personality Types

You need all personality types in your team, but how do you get them working together?

Teamwork is essential for business success. Different people contribute in different ways. To create an environment of team driven success, you are wise to explore personality types.

How well you really know your team and what motivates them both intrinsically and extrinsically will shape your success.

When we look at Team Building in our clients’ businesses, one of the tools we use most commonly is the DISC profile team assessment, as it allows us to understand each member of the team and how they fit in the role and with other members of the business.

Here is a brief overview of how the DISC profile assessment works:

D: Dominance-Person places emphasis on accomplishing results, the bottom line, confidence.
I:  Influence-Person places emphasis on influencing or persuading others, openness, relationships.
S: Steadiness-Person places emphasis on cooperation, sincerity, dependability.
C: Conscientiousness-Person places emphasis on quality and accuracy, expertise, competency.

A person can have a combination of up to 3 of the DISC 4 quadrants, but will typically have one quadrant which is most dominant. To build strong, effective, harmonious and productive teams you first need to understand each individual and what makes them tick.

Not everyone is driven or motivated by the same thing – such as money, for example. Some people are motivated by harmonious relationships around them and steer away from what they see as conflict situations.

For all employees there are intrinsic and extrinsic motivators and once you understand what these are for each of your employees, you will get much better results – guaranteed!

The biggest challenge many employers face is how to get the team to work together the way they want them to.

This is where DISC personality profiling is helpful. A star team requires all the personality types to be functioning together – the right person with the right attitude in the right job. If the world was full of one personality type there would definitely be trouble because 75% of us would be in the wrong job!

Beyond the DISC profiling is the more important task of self awareness for each team member. This helps to develop common understanding – and to avoid counter-productive communication problems due to personality or communication style.

Opposites on the quadrant can find it difficult to work together if they do not understand intrinsic motivators for others in their team. As an example, anyone working well in an analytical, detail focussed role (High C profile) will become frustrated by the lack of care and detail from a sales role (High I) – the classic accounting vs sales conflict is a perfect example of this. But, if these two personality types can learn to work together they would actually make a great team and life would be much easier!

Research shows that the dynamics of interpersonal relationships depend on individual’s personalities, not on hard skills or experience. The best way to build a great team is to recruit people on the basis of personality, soft skills and their values.

When we run DISC training sessions onsite we provide individual feedback to each of the team members as well as providing group and department specific training. When a person understands how others see them (the good and not so good), typically they will adjust the behaviours they are mindful of. My favourite saying is “You don’t know what you don’t know” and it is very true. Until you have been trained on how to adjust your approach depending on who you are dealing with, you really have no idea and may be totally oblivious that you could be offending someone. Your job as owner and manager of your business is to build this common understanding and resultant harmony across the team.

The goal of DISC training is to identify personality types present in the team, educate each person on their individual style and how it can affect others, help each person learn to identify other styles to suit their audience, and then master the art of mindfulness.

Being a High D myself, I always do tend to focus on how this style can be challenging to work with and is generally the most obvious to identify – the High D will be in a hurry, impatient, will want things to change and will be very direct in their feedback and communications, which can sometimes be mistaken for abruptness or critical behaviour.

If this sounds like something your business could benefit from, then please contact us today to find out more about how we can tailor a team development training session with one to one coaching.

Your team is your most important asset and often your single largest investment, so committing to a training programme that contributes to improved team communication is one of the best decisions you could make for your business!

Contact us to find out how we can help your business.

Contact us to find out how we can help your business.