Improve your bottom line with “style”!
Understanding why people do what they do is usually quite challenging. Unless of course you have some idea of what makes them tick. Behavioral or personality profiles have been around for over 40 years and can provide a huge advantage in understanding the behaviors of your people. The product I prefer is DiSC® by Inscape. I like it because it enables users to quickly identify one of 4 primary behavioral styles. This unlocks wealth of information about the individual’s strengths, motivation, communication needs and stressors. With this level of understanding it doesn’t take a lot of effort to bring about higher performance in individuals and teams.
Here is an example.
Tom is the general manager of an 18 person shop and spends a significant amount of time in an external sales role. Each of his employees has specific areas of expertise and is quite skilled. However, in this rapidly changing business environment skill isn’t enough; customers are always expecting a little something more. The Shop’s responsiveness in terms of speed, quality and price must improve. The group needs to work together more effectively to improve communication, solve problems and work through disagreements. Waiting for Tom to show up and “mediate” is no longer an option, it wastes too much time and money.
We started by having everyone in the shop, including the 3 Project Managers, complete the “new” Everything DiSC® profile. We did a little intensive training with the Project Managers (PMs) before working with the entire staff. The PMs are responsible for getting projects done, on time, on spec and on budget. All 3 were amazed at the opportunities that suddenly presented themselves now that they better understood how to interact with the different styles in the shop. As one PM put it, “it’s like having and an operating manual for how to work with these guys”.
Since then overall project time has decreased by 25%, gross margin is up 1.6% and customer satisfaction is trending upward.
Tom learned that you don’t have to be a psychologist to understand how to work effectively with people… all you need is a good tool and some understanding of how to use it.
If you are interested in learning more about using DiSC® to improve your results contact me for a free situational analysis. Alan Adyniec 616-86-5471 alan@coach2engage.com