DiSC Training in Denver – Integration: How to keep the DiSC Personality Styles alive over time
Step 4: Integration: How to keep the DiSC Personality Styles alive over time
This is part 4 of a blog on understanding and incorporating the DiSC Personality Style system into your workplace. In order to get the most out of this topic please refer to:
Step 1: Understand the DiSC Personality Style System:
Step 2: Understand the main strengths and challenges of each style:
Step 3: How to adapt to each others’ styles:
Step 4: Integration: How to keep the DiSC Personality Styles alive over time
This is the key to creating culture change in your organization – keeping the training alive over time. This applies to learning any new skill of course, but the DiSC lends itself to being immediately applied to the workplace with great results.
It is all too easy to participate in a training and then the next day or the next week it is back to “business as usual.” This is a waste of everyone’s time and effort. You need to develop with your leadership team and with your trainer or consultant a means to implement and integrate your new skills.
Following are 4 ways to integrate the DiSC Training in your workplace
1. Make and display a visual representation of your style
With the DiSC Training in Denver, one thing that we do during our trainings is each participant makes a mini poster that states their name, style, and at least three things that someone else needs to know when communicating with them.
For example, as a “Di” my poster might look like this:
Jeannie – Di
• Be direct
• Give me room to be creative
• Tell me how I can make a difference
The poster is then displayed at their desk or other visible place where people are reminded of their style.
2. Make 3 x 5 cards for the leadership team
One team I worked with had their employees make an additional 3 x 5 card with that same information that the manager keeps in his/her office. They can then pull out the card before having a meeting with the employee to remember how to adapt their communication to that employee. This has helped that team keep the DiSC at the forefront of their day-to-day communications.
3. Make goals and have an accountability buddy
At the end of all of our trainings I have the participants set a goal around integrating the DiSC into their everyday communication. We follow the SMART guidelines of goal setting, which helps participants create a very specific goal that can be measured. They then pick an accountability buddy and set up a time to check in with around their weekly goal. An example (from my Di perspective) would be: during our weekly team meeting I am going to make sure that I make space to be quiet and solicit the ideas of the C and S team members. I will check in with my accountability buddy after the meeting to get his perspective on how I did. Those of you who share my fast paced, talkative style know that that is a challenge!
4. Integrate the DiSC into team meetings
We all know that it takes about 30 days of concerted effort to change a habit. Often it seems to take more! Make the DiSC part of your weekly team meetings. We encourage teams to focus on what is working. As part of that process set aside 10 minutes at your meeting to ask for “success stories” from your team with how they have used the DiSC over the last week. I recently did this with a team that I do quarterly trainings with and they had some great stories to share that made others feel like the training was still alive and useful and inspired others to re-up their efforts at adapting their communication. Two people in particular who were opposite styles had had a lot of conflict in the past. They reported that they had a much better understanding of each other and had both made efforts to adapt their communication to bridge the personality gap. Good job! When team members know that this is going to be part of ongoing meetings, they will start to look for opportunities to use and report on their DiSC progress.
Conclusion:
Integrate, Practice, be Consistent. Come up with some of your own ideas for how to integrate your new tools and skills around the DiSC. Be creative – have a contest with your team to see who can come up with the “best” idea for using the DiSC on a regular basis. The DiSC is meant to be a new, common language for your team. If you wanted to become fluent in Spanish you wouldn’t take one class and then be content with ordering “una cerveza por favor”! You would find others to practice with. The DiSC is no different. Take this new skill development on as a team. Our experience is that DiSC is THE key foundational tool that will help your team work together on a whole different level. Good luck!
If you would like more information on DiSC Training in Denver give us a call at 303 653 3097.
Best,
Jeannie Gunter, MA
President, Transformative Training
303 653-3097
Jeannie works with a wide variety of clients to help them increase their team effectiveness and leadership capacity in their teams. She has worked both nationally and internationally as an organizational consultant, facilitator, speaker and wilderness guide.
With a strong background in group dynamics, over the past 20 years Jeannie has guided hundreds of teams in a wide variety of organizations to successful outcomes in team, personal and professional development.
