The key to revolutionising your leadership

Leading a team can be a rewarding experience but it can also bring difficulties that can be hard to overcome.

Unfortunately, at some point, most employers experience the tougher side of people management. While this can take its toll on you personally it can also negatively impact your business:

• low productivity, performance or motivation • poor communication • high absenteeism or staff turnover • unhappy customers The blame for this woeful list of problems is often squarely attributed to the employee or to having made a bad hiring decision. Most business leaders don’t reflect on how their own leadership style might indirectly contribute to the challenges within their business.

The key to revolutionising your leadership lies in gaining a greater understanding of not just your leadership style but in better understanding the behavioural style of your employees – and how the two might work together for the good of your people, your business and your bottom line.

The best way to gain such understanding is through the use of assessment tools.

I highly recommend Extended DISC, an assessment tool that doesn’t qualify people as good or bad or give a pass or fail, but that reveals a person’s natural behavioural style.

Extended DISC has one overriding objective: To make every employee more valuable and more productive and to create an effective and efficient team environment.

The Extended DISC behavioural styles These highly scientific assessments, based off a short series of online multiple-choice questions, shows a respondent’s natural behavioural style under four categories: D-Style, I-Style, S-Style and C-Style.

People are rarely just one style but often have one style that is stronger than the others.

As an example, leaders whose natural behavioural style is a D tend to make fast decisions, be results driven, look on their people as another resource, set demanding goals and expect others to listen and follow. On the other hand, an S-Style leader will put a higher emphasis on maintaining routines, trust and loyalty, will value experience and knowledge and will lead through a gradual evolution of goals. A D-Style leader will often find the S-Style employee infuriating because of their preference for stability over change, their more reserved behavioural style and their strong sense of fairness and justice – and this employee may find working for a D-Style leader difficult.

A person required to work outside their natural behavioural style will expend more energy to do so – something that takes its toll over time.

Your employee, who appears to you to lack motivation and be giving a poor performance, may in fact have become demotivated by having to work to your way of leading without any reciprocal understanding of what they might need to give their best.

Using Extended DISC for people management Individuals who are better understood can be better motivated and managed towards an improved job performance. This in turn strengthens organisational culture and results in less staff turnover and absenteeism. Furthermore, rather than just improving communication, the understanding of an employee’s natural behavioural style can also help you utilise your employees on tasks to which they are naturally best suited.

Want to get the most out of your workforce? If you would like to understand your own behavioural style, the behavioural styles of your employees and start the journey towards making every employee more valuable, more productive – and create an effective and efficient team – please get in touch.

I am passionate to help you evolve and become a more successful leader.

To get a sample Peak Performance Leadership and Management report go to https://online.excc.co.nz/step/peak-performanceleadership-and-management-report To book a meeting directly with me go to

https://excc.co.nz/bookings/

Jason Dinan –Jason is the Founder and Principal of Executive Coaching and Consulting and has 27 years of leadership experience developing high performing teams in 23 countries. He has guided various leading home builders in NZ and Australia to double and some to triple sales in under 12 months.