Get on the same page! How effective managers build teams that work
Building an effective team is a fundamental challenge for any manager.
It’s all about ensuring that as a leader you can tailor your style to meet the differing needs of the behavioural styles within your team.
One of the most effective ways to do this is with the support of DiSC® profiling.
DiSC® profiling enables everyone involved to really see and understand ‘why they do, what they do’.
It identifies how each person has varying levels of four key behaviours and these are; Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness.
Here are six tips which will help you build an effective team.
Each one includes some background about how DiSC® profiling helps you with this.
1. Be clear about the actual goal
Group leaders and managers must make sure that everyone in their team or department sees the big picture.
It’s all about getting everyone to buy into and take ownership of, the overall aim.
Everyone will however, approach this in a different way.
Having a deep understanding of each individual’s motivations will help you significantly with this, and this is something DiSC® profiling strongly supports.
2. Show how each individual contributes
You must also ensure that everyone in your team understands how their contribution helps.
Input will of course be different depending on each person’s DiSC® style.
To get started however it’s a good idea to work backwards from the overall aim of the organisation and then set clear team achievement goals.
You may outline:
A: The aim of this department is to…
B: We do this by…
C: We know we will have achieved this when….
This will then enable you to set specific goals for each person.
3. Make sure everyone has ownership
This is about ensuring people have what we might call ‘moral’ ownership.
However, depending on their DiSC® profile, ownership will mean different things to different people.
And because people require varying levels of support, the more you can understand their behavioural styles and tendencies the better.
Therefore, don’t just look at what people do and how they do it, but also take time to understand their motivations.
4. Establish ‘values’ and ways of working
As individuals, our values shape what we do and how we do it.
This is also true of teams.
It’s a good idea, for example, to clarify how team members would be expected to work (their behaviours) and the promises the team will make on delivery and timescales, etc.
This will work less well if people are simply told that they have to behave in a certain way and will be much more effective if, guided by company ways of working and their DiSC profile, team members can come up with their own implementation.
5. Delegate and direct successfully
To succeed, delegation must be efficient and effective.
To ensure the best results for both you and your team members you must delegate responsibilities and tasks to each individual in a way that works for their behavioural style.
Because direction and delegation must change accordingly, DiSC® profiling goes into significant detail in this area.
Most importantly, it shows each manager the most effective way to work with each of the four styles.
6. Stop, check and measure
It’s also important to ensure the delivery is measured.
Schedule therefore regular review measures such as performance reports, to check all is as it should be.
A mix of one to one and group discussions, which allow open and honest feedback, is a strong way to do this.
Find out more
If you’d like to know more about DiSC® profiling and how Academy of High Achievers can significantly contribute to your team success and management development, contact us.
For more information, please call me (Julie French) or email me.