How to Relate to Team Members

Have you ever wondered why you really connect with some individuals on your team, but others you don't? It's such a struggle and you get stressed out and frustrated when your communication seems to fall flat and you just can't get certain individuals to respond to you. Well, trust me, you are not alone. Your workplace, including your immediate team, is filled with a variety of personalities and styles that don't always mesh.. But as a leader, you need to figure out how to get them all communicating, how to get them all collaborating, engaging, and connecting like a well-oiled machine. So that's what I want to talk with you today. I want to go through and discuss the various styles that most likely make up your team and the dos and don'ts of communicating with each other. Lastly, what you can do to better understand all of them and help them to better understand you. So ultimately, as a powerhouse leader, you are going to help drive your team to success, drive your business to success, and ultimately you to success. So stay with us. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Shedding the Corporate Bitch, the podcast that transforms female corporate executives into powerhouse leaders by showing them how to shed the challenges and overwhelm along with any fear, insecurity, self-doubt and negativity holding them back. I'm your host, Bernadette Boas of Ball of Fire Coaching, bringing you powerhouse discussions each week to share tips, advice, and sometimes tough love so you create the riches in your work and life you deserve. This subject of team building is one of my favorite because it really helps individuals to understand what it really takes for a bunch of personalities of various degrees to come together and figure out and fine-tune what it's going to take for them all to be successful. And I found a quote quite a while back, and it's not attributed to anyone in particular, but it basically states that building a team is a process, one that requires remarkable levels of discipline, Courage and persistence. And then I just added to it by each of the team members. So keep that in mind, leaders, when you're really struggling and you're really frustrated and you're beating yourself up that maybe you can't understand why you just can't get your team to gel together or you can't get certain people on your team to respond to you. Give yourself a break. Take a deep breath. And just recognize that like any other environment at home, in your community, with your friends, there are a variety of personalities and a variety of communication styles that work with you. Or it's not as if they work against you. It's just that you need to figure out how that different style or that different personality that might be difficult for your style. You just need to figure out how to make it work. Now, it's so critically important for leaders to really spend time and focus on this because Joe Paterno, he's a long ago famous football coach for Penn State University, my home state. And, you know, I just have always loved his definition of what it really means to take a bunch of individuals, work with them, guide them, coach them, mentor them, motivate them, discipline them, hold them accountable, and then all of a sudden get them to the point where they are a high-functioning team. So he says, "When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality." Let's break that down real quick. When a team outgrows individual performance. So when all of a sudden you have all these individuals that have their own agenda, they have their own goals and aspirations, and you get them to not only have them, but also then be really laser-focused on ensuring that the entire team is functioning at a high level, communicating really well, engaging, collaborating, having healthy conflict, and working toward having a confidence as a team to handle just about anything. And that leads them to excellence. So I absolutely love that because there's a lot of challenges that teams, the meshing of teams have, and you as a leader need to just recognize them. And here's just a few quick statistics offered by the Wiley and Sons Group, who who basically handle, if you're familiar with the DiSC assessments, if you're familiar with the Five Behaviors. So they have studied and have recognized that 59% of people say their team members don't take personal responsibility to improve team performance moving forward. Now, 59%, that's huge. That means take your team, take 59% of them, and they're not really caring whether or not everybody's coming together and working toward a common goal and therefore being successful. That is a struggle for any particular leader to have to deal with. And so you have to figure out as a leader how to do that. And then 55% of teams leave meetings without collective commitment to agreed-upon decisions. So think about your own experience when you leave maybe your bosses' or another team's meeting. And you kind of walk away going, what the heck did I just spend that 20 minutes, half hour if you're lucky, or an hour? What did we do? We didn't accomplish anything. How frustrating that is for not only you, but your people. Okay. Because we talk a lot about here in the Shedding the Corporate Bitch community, we talk a lot about the fact that all your people want is to feel valued, to be recognized, and actually ultimately just to be thanked. And so if they're kind of coming into a meeting, spending all this time away from their desk, away from the work that they should be doing, and they're leaving as if that was just such a waste of time, they don't have any action items, they don't have anybody assigned to any of those action items, they don't have due dates, they don't have any final decisions that were made after this so-called collaboration. How frustrating is that? Not only for you, but for them. All right. And then lastly, 79% of people report that their team members don't acknowledge their own weaknesses and they don't acknowledge their weaknesses to each other. Now, why is this important? Well, because all of us have our strengths and all of us have our weaknesses. Now consider you bring everybody together and you have this project or this initiative or overall goal that you're supposed to be working on. What better if your team came together and they all kind of went around the table and you discussed kind of where are your strengths and how can we best leverage and utilize those strengths? Where are your weaknesses? Where should we need, you know, go and try to find a different person, fill the gap, do whatever. We're not going to kind of beat you up because of that weakness, but we need to understand it. So then we need to know where we need to fill in the blanks. Right? I mean, how more effective and productive would your team be if you were doing that? And so holding on and being insecure or, you know, being prideful of acknowledging your strengths and/or your weaknesses— some people think it's boasting if I talk about my strengths. Some people think it's, you know, kind of beating yourself up and seen as very insecure if you recognize your weaknesses. BS to all of it. BS to all of it. You all need to understand both of those things about each other so you can get the team, the collective team, as I always call it, kind of leveraging what really is— what the team is really made up of. Good, bad, and the ugly, so to speak. All right. But that's a big number, 79%. So first, want to talk about, before we get into the various styles that make up your team, is if you want to, as a leader, if you really want to kind of sit down and go, okay, what are the 5 key things I need to ensure that I, as the leader, am embedding into this group of people, embedding into this collective, embedding into what it is we're trying to accomplish, and we're all working our little tails off, but what are those 5 things? And now, of course, you're probably sitting there going, well, I probably wouldn't have said 5. I probably would have said 1 to 3. And you know what? I'm going to give you 5. And I do this all the time as a coach with my clients. I'll say, pick 1 to 3 of them to start working on, to start even paying attention. Going back to that, you know, people aren't aware or they don't acknowledge their weaknesses or their strengths. Even if you were to just say, first off, you know, what is the number 1 thing of these 5 that we really do fall a little flat on and we need to improve? You know, just that self-awareness and just that acknowledgment and then that action planning around that, that'll have you looking at a, at a team that looks very different in 3 to 6 months. All right. So 5 functions that you need to focus on if you want to gain confidence in your team, which drives to excellence. All right. The first one in the foundation is trust. You absolutely must have trust in your team. And we'll talk a little bit more about that on another episode. But trust from that— if you have trust, think about it. If you trust the people around the table that you're not going to get retaliated on, you're not going to get beat up on, you're going to be as transparent, open, and honest as possible, you're going to be able to have healthy conflict. So that's number 2, trust and healthy conflict. And then after that, if you have healthy conflict and there's some disagreements, some agreements, some like, well, I'm on the fence, I'm not going either way, you're not looking for necessarily a democracy, a consensus, everybody has to agree. You're looking for just that even if they don't agree, they're going to support it. So you're looking for commitment to whatever it is that you're laying out, to the decisions that are being made, to the plan that's being created, to the goal that's being established and passed down, whatever the case might be. And once you're able to get those group of people to really commit based on that conflict that they had with that trust, then you're going to be making sure that everyone is able to hold each other accountable to whether or not they're pulling their weight, whether or not they're kind of leveraging those skills we talked about, those strengths, whether or not they're looking for those things to fill in their gaps of the weaknesses. They're reminding each other, which is what accountability is. They're reminding each other of exactly what they signed up for and committed to. And that makes a team that is solely focused on results. They're going down the same path because they trust each other. They already discussed all the pros and cons and the good, bad, they pointed out all the risks, so forth and so on. They didn't necessarily, you know, have to agree 100%, but they at least decided to advocate and support any decision being made or commitment being made. And therefore they all get on board, which makes sure that everyone is then saying, okay, well, we all agree that this is what we're doing. So they can all remind each other, which then leads to them all being focused on results, being very results-oriented. So the 5— and assess your team, put them on a scale of 1 to 10. How highly functioning are they around trust, around healthy conflict, around commitment, around accountability, around being focused on results? And again, identify 1 to 3 of them that you want to begin to work on should you find any holes in all of that. All right. What is it going to take then? What do you need to have or to put into place in order for you to leverage all of that now knowing and kind of begin to work on this with your team? Well, you have to get it— gain an understanding of the team that you have in front of you. But before you can do that, you need to also gain self-awareness within yourself as far as where are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, what is your communication style, how do you want to be managed, how do you not want to be managed. Make sure that you're communicating that to other people so they understand it. You first need to understand yourself. And then, because again, remember we talked about transparency and acknowledging and accountability. So you need to be honest with yourself and then you need to turn it on them and then figure out how to get all the team members to get to know each other. All right. So that would be the first thing. Assess yourself and then assess each other. And there's one methodology, it's called DiSC, and it's basically a self-assessment. Well, more so style, communication behaviors, motivators, stressors that then look at and place into 4 core different styles, what each of your team members and who each of your team members are and what kind of characteristics they reflect. And once you get an understanding of that, you can then each— and you're discussing and sharing with each other what those styles and characteristics and behaviors are. You can then get a much better idea of how that individual operates, how that individual wants to be communicated to, motivated, Provided feedback, supported, tasked, because you're getting more and more kind of under their skin, under the covers around what it is they really need and want to be successful. All right. So again, the DISC, D-I-S-C, all capital letters if you wanted to Google it, and it breaks it down after you take a self-assessment of which you would do for yourself and your team members. And you— it characterizes you or places you into a primary style, either one of those four, which we'll discuss. And then, of course, there's, there's a combination of all of them. But putting that aside, putting aside the actual methodology of using DiSC, and if you ever need to, you could just reach out to me and set up a call so we can have a conversation about what exactly is that I'm interested for my team, and then we can go into the process and all that. But right now I just want to share and discuss with you the different styles so you can start kind of paying attention to them for yourself and then for your team members. All right. And these 4 styles, getting down a little bit to the methodology just for this one purpose, these 4 styles, there's no good or bad. There's no better or worse. There's no stronger or weaker. All of them are equally important. All of them are equally valuable to a team. You don't necessarily want a team made up of one style. You want all the different characteristics, qualities, traits, behaviors, motivators of each of the styles. And yet what the goal is that you should have is just making sure you understand what that makeup is. What that, what I call mapping of all of those styles on your team are. So people easily talk about 8 personalities, and this gets to something similar to that. But here you're actually looking at 4 different styles that actually exist. And then there's a blending of some of those styles in an individual that then create hundreds of different combinations. Of personalities and styles that you have on your team. So the 4, spelling out DiSC, D-I-S-C, is dominant for D, influential for I, steadiness or steadfast, some people call it, for S, and compliance or conscientious, some people will call, for C. So think about those things. Someone who's dominant, influential, steady and compliant, what that primary style might look like. Well, for a D, dominance is those individuals that are extremely driven. They're extremely results-oriented. They're extremely action-driven. They're very decisive. They're very strong-willed. They have a lot of ego and power and position and authority is very important to them. So if you have one of those styles on your team, there's a certain way you're going to want to communicate with them. All right. And so thinking about how those Ds are driven, you know, you then know, need to know that they probably want to be communicated to in bullets, short and sweet facts. Get down to the, the end goal, get down to the decision or the request of a decision, get down to the nitty-gritty because not the detail. They don't want detail. They're up here at like 150,000 feet. You want to just make sure that you get to your point very quickly with them. Okay. And then your I's are influence. Influence is an interesting word for me because for some people, influence would look like power and position. And actually influence is more the individual loves to engage and collaborate, storytell. They're the social butterflies. Of a team. They're the ones who are at 150,000 feet as well. But it's more creative. It's more drawing on a canvas when it comes to— or storytelling when it comes to working to get their point across or to communicate or to engage other people. They want to bring everybody together and give them a big hug. That's your eyes. And as a result of that, Is don't want you to be driven and forceful and in their face, and they're not going to be bulleted. They're going to expect that you're going to spend time with them to have an actual conversation and get creative or get personal and just kind of really paint a canvas when talking with them. They're not going to be that bullet facts, short and sweet, you know, get to the point. They're going to be your talkers. All right. I have some D and I in me. I needed to point that out as I continue to talk. So those are your I's. And then the S's are those steadiness or steadfast individuals. They're the ones who are calm, cool, and collected. They're the ones you want in a storm. They're the ones that will bring everybody together and allow them to feel protected and taken care of. They're very deliberate. They're extremely loyal. They're extremely loyal. And in a lot of cases, especially those that have a blend of other styles, in a lot of cases, they're those warm, cuddly individuals that you can always depend on and that you know what you're going to get from them because they're very predictable. So you know what you're going to get from them. And as a result of that, they want to cooperate. They want to look for opportunities to inject themselves and for— and to also inject other people into what they're doing. They want to work in a team and they want to help each other be the best that they can be. So when you're communicating with them, obviously it's all about what can we do for each other, not what can I do for you or, you know, what do I need? It's more like let's make this a win-win for everybody. So your communication is not going to be as brief as a D or as blah, blah as a, as an I, like storytelling as an I, but it's going to be very engaging, very respectful, very supportive in nature, very motivating in nature, because that, that's what they want. They want stability. They want calm. They want peace. They don't want drama that can be created on a lot of teams. And then there's the C's. The C's are your conscientious or your compliant individuals. And think of the word compliant. Compliant means they're very cautious, they're very aware, they're very private. They're the individuals, whereas the I's want to be out and about with everybody, the C's kind of want to be individual contributors in a lot of cases where, you know, put them in a room, give them their assignment, You're going to know that they're going to get it done on time, on budget, very detailed, specific, very few mistakes. As a matter of fact, when it comes to communicating with Cs, don't even attempt to kind of tell them that they're wrong, especially the Ds who want to be that power authority. They want to be the right person because Cs are so conscientious and they're so compliant. They're so process rule-driven. That they've dotted every I and crossed every T. So, you know, you're not going to— you might catch them being incorrect, but in majority of the time they're accurate, they're analytical, and they know what they're doing, which gives you as a leader so much room to breathe because you can fully depend that you give them an assignment, you tell them what to do, and they're going to do it. Now, when it comes to communicating, though, You need to give them not only the specifics, because they're very down in the detail. So D's are up in the $150,000, C's are down here in the $20,000 feet. And so you need to go beyond just kind of saying, okay, we have this project, I need it done by da da da da, and you have this budget and it involves 1, 2, and 3. You need to give them more as to what it is you're expecting. Because if not, then they're going to go and do their thing, which is going to be very detailed, very analytical, very specific. And it oftentimes, if styles aren't communicating well, it's not going to meet your expectations. And that's just going to be disappointing for everybody. So if you can see these differences different styles and these different characteristics, even in this brief conversation, then you can understand and look at each of your team members around the table and kind of place them as one of those primary styles— D, I, S, or C— dominant, influence, steadfast, or compliant. And if you start to really get under the covers of all of those styles, then you'll really learn what it takes to communicate with them. So there's a funny kind of scenario analogy to kind of paint and bring together and illustrate all of these different styles. And TTI Insights is where I actually saw this. And it's just, it gets every one of my clients just giggling around it, but let's walk through it. So here are all the different styles working together. Okay. The D walks up, gets on the elevator and pushes the button to close the door. The I lets others in, says, "Room for one more?" and, "Come on in, you're going to be late. We'll wait for you." The S waits patiently in line, sometimes moving from one line to another and helping each other. And the C will get on the elevator. If it is crowded, the C will count the number of people and if the number is over the limit, will make someone get off. So go back and listen to that if you need to, because it really does paint the picture and it illustrates the— just the— even the high-level style of each of these four. But you can leverage this greatly in your business, and you can ensure that you're leveraging it in such a way that your team members have an opportunity not only to learn about each other but to learn about themselves. And you'd be shocked when I'm working with senior leadership teams and they do this assessment, they get the report, they come into the training, and all of a sudden, all the kind of the nuances of personalities and of people— I mean, because that's, you know, we're people— is just extremely enlightening. And they're often surprised of things that they're learning about themselves, let alone learning about their people and how learning about their people helps them that much more. So consider some things you could be doing and walking away with and taking care of for yourself is consider your own communication style, your own leadership style, your own form of trust, healthy conflict, commitment, accountability, and focus on results, and assess yourself. Assess how effective are you being. Because if you're falling short in any of those areas, it'll ultimately impact you and your team. Okay? And then talk with your team members and ask them about what it is that they need to communicate, to be managed, to be motivated, to be given feedback. How do they want to receive it? And really get to know your team from below or under the covers. And get down into their styles and their personalities. And then consider having you and your team assess themselves. Do a DiSC assessment and learn what these styles are and learn their own style, but the style of each of their team members. Because once they do, you'd be surprised that all of a sudden they're paying attention and they're changing their communication and they're changing the way that they approach individuals and they're changing how they're collaborating, engaging with one another. And the next thing you know, slowly but surely, they are forming and gelling and meshing as a highly functioning, excellent team. All right? And of course, if you do wanna get into any of that when it comes to doing assessments for your teams or for yourself, then reach out to me, go to coachmebernadette.com/discoverycall, and let's have a conversation about it. And let me share with you what you could be, taking and leveraging for yourself and your team. All right. I'm honored that you were here with us this week, and I'll look forward to having you for another episode of Shedding the Corporate Bitch. Take care. Bye.