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How Does The Manager Build Trust In Their Teams?

Recently,  we received a frantic query from a newly minted manager at a small but thriving business in the midwest. His question: how does the manager build trust in their teams? Our answer was a simple one—take a look at yourself using DiSC personality profile training as your mirror!

Our team came to the rescue and saw first hand just what an eye-opener DiSC can be particularly for ambitious executives who lack self-awareness. 

DiSC is an acronym for Dominant, Influential, Steadfast, and Conscientious. These 4 personality types are universal and apply to virtually every human being on the planet. Most of us lean more toward 1 or 2 types; but in the main, we possess a little bit of each.

Trembling on the ladder of success

We’ll call this manager Jake. He was relatively new to the job of manager and it showed. A Gen-Xer, he’s been with the company for 20 years. It had been a hard slog, but he gradually moved up the ladder; when his boss retired he landed the job of his dreams. He was a hard worker, and pretty ambitious, but his managerial skills needed to be honed. 

Jake’s was a solid “C” or Conscientious personality type. Translation: he was more comfortable working solo on projects.  He loved meeting goals, so just give him a directive and leave him alone! And his decisions were always based on objective facts instead of emotions. 

Ironically, he was more task-driven than people-driven, but he could smell insincerity from a mile away. He wasn’t exactly a killjoy, but he wasn’t the life of the party either. His demeanor was usually serious and thoughtful.

Several of his top people were Millennials many of whom were babies when he started with the company. In fact, he had a couple of kids who were older than some of his staffers.

 The previous boss, a Baby Boomer, was a high “I” on the DiSC spectrum. He had an outgoing personality and, unlike Jake, he absolutely loved working with the Millennials!

Boss, know thyself!

When it came to understanding their new boss, Jake’s subordinates had an awkward learning curve. First off they noted that he liked every “I” dotted and every “T” crossed, and the more info the better.

What they struggled with the most was how slowly and cautiously he made decisions. He was overly cautious and overly self-critical. And sadly, his perfectionism could sometimes spill over, run amuck, and frustrate the heck out of his staff. In a situation like this, how does the manager build trust in their teams?

In Jake’s case, his DiSC personality profile made him more self-aware and opened his eyes to his own work style. Because DiSC is non-judgmental, it’s also not threatening. So instead of being defensive, Jake felt safe exploring his own quirks and seemed eager to learn how to be a better person and a more successful professional.

Exposing the man behind the curtain

Jake was a wizard when it came to data management and analysis. People management and analysis was another matter. Ironically, Jake had coveted his old boss’s job, and in his mind, he’d been in training for it his whole career. 

But now he realized—and had to admit—that he liked to work alone more than on a team. Yikes! Fortunately, he was willing to learn his way out of his comfort zone and embrace the leadership skills he’d need to do the job well.

He was cordial, but to his colleagues, his social skills weren’t great. During our personality training session, we discovered that he wasn’t aloof. He was just shy.

The good thing was that like most “C” personalities, he processed other people’s ideas pretty quickly and he was now willing to help them accomplish goals as a team.

How does the manager build trust in their teams?–Find everyone’s passion!

After the DiSC training session, our facilitators conducted a charitable team building workshop where all of their new insights about personality types and quirks got put to practical use. One of our favorite charitable events is the Happy Tails Workshop. 

Pet ownership can be expensive. Our workshop helps ease some of the financial pain by donating a “starter kit” to prospective pet parents who really want to give a kitten or puppy a forever home.

During the workshop, the group divides into small teams who “compete” for leashes, food bowls, chew toys, scratching posts, blankets, and beds. The bounty is donated to a charity that happily delivers it to a local family.

Jake is an avid pet lover, so his predisposition to keep to himself was overshadowed by his genuine concern for shelter animals at risk of being euthanized. He was eager to do all he could to help to rescue as many animals as possible.

So he didn’t just come out of his shell. He literally burst free from his usual “office mode” with an enthusiasm and warmth none of his colleagues had ever seen before!

The DiSC personality profile training opened everyone’s eyes to their own strengths and weaknesses and the charity workshop showed them how to translate all of this knowledge into more effective communication, collaboration, and relationship-building. The future looks pretty bright for the newly self-aware manager and his Millennial team.

How To Build a Healthy Team Culture: DiSC

How to build a healthy team culture—know what’s unhealthy!

Paradoxically, the first step toward building a healthy team culture may be recognizing toxic team culture. Unfortunately, that’s not hard to do. The American workplace is sick and it shows. Morale is low, stress is high. Millennials, Gen-Xers, and Baby Boomers clash.

Demands for diversity and gender equality are rife. And then there’s the runaway train of technological development—all of these issues have transformed many offices into seething cauldrons of conflict and strife. 

And when the lid blows, many workers bailout.  It is estimated that as many as 100,000 workers quit their jobs every day and it costs 20 percent of their salary for the boss to find a replacement. Recruitment, training, and orientation can add up to more than 1 billion dollars a year for small businesses. 

For all of corporate America that figure balloons to as much as 550 billion bucks—every year!! The domino effect: employee turnovers delay order fulfillment, decrease productivity, drain morale, and corporations hemorrhage profits and potential.

How to build a healthy team culture—out with the silo! 

Management underpins all employee engagement—for good or ill. Often a toxic corporate culture stems from poor management. For example, many companies have developed what’s called a “silo culture.”

 In agriculture, silos store grain, coal, woodchips, sawdust, food products, even cement. In some offices, managers silo information—tools, strategies—storing it up for their use.

To them, information is power and they don’t want to share it. So they leave workers in the dark about certain goals, processes, tools, and the like—making it available to their allies on a need-to-know-basis only.

Those at the bottom of the food chain feel left out, alienated, vulnerable, and hopeless. This kind of management undermines the mental health of employees and the overall stability of the workforce.

How to build a healthy team culture—DiSC it!

Silos are for farms, not offices. Healthy team culture is open, inclusive, and accepting. Managing a healthy corporate environment means being more people-driven than process-driven because, at the end of the day, it’s the people that make the process work, right?

In a healthy team culture, diversity is recognized as an asset instead of being dreaded or resented as a liability. That’s because sharp managers know that variety really is the spice of life! It’s our different backgrounds and points of view that help our workplaces become more well rounded and vibrant.

But that “variety”  works best if you know how to work it, and fortunately, there’s an “app” for that. It’s called DiSC, which represents the 4 personality profiles we all exhibit. Some of us are Dominant; others Influential; Steady; Conscientious. Understanding these personality types is invaluable in understanding yourself and your employees.

Relationship building is the foundation of team building and you can only build a relationship with another person if you understand them—who they are; how they think. After all, it’s easier to humanize your workplace and create a humane corporate culture when you know how your “humans” think—what gets them motivated.

DiSC creates a safe way for you to examine another person without making them feel threatened or intimidated. And it can be a humbling process for you as well if you’re a boss, because you may learn a lot about yourself throughout the whole process. 

How to build a healthy team culture—listen up! 

You get to ask questions and learn how to “listen” to the answers and translate what you hear into an action plan that will make it easier to communicate and collaborate with that person.

Associations built around projects are temporary, hierarchical, and therefore fragile. DiSC personality profile training helps build relationships built around your common humanity. And these relationships, along with your work assignment, can be fruitful, enlightening, and lasting.

The psychological and emotional bonds of a relationship are the glue that binds groups of employees into teams and fosters loyalty to the company. DiSC is an invaluable tool in developing those psychological and emotional bonds.

How can managers build empathy on their teams?

How can managers build empathy on their teams? Well, you may not need to walk a mile in your employee’s shoes, but you should at least understand the person filling those shoes. And one of the most important things all managers need to recognize today is the level of stress workers are under and its impact on their mental health.

The silent killers

Depression, anxiety, panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder—these conditions were taboos in the post World War II workplace. The social stigma was too oppressive and the risk of unemployment too severe, so people suffered in silent agony. 

Of course, that kind of lost productivity can take a heavy toll on the economy. It did back then and it still does today. Recently Mental Health America [MHA] estimated that “workplace mental health problems result in as much as 500 billion dollars of lost productivity annually.”

Desperate times 

A recent report in Time Magazine shared the alarming news that depression is the fastest growing health condition among Millennials who were born between 1981 and 1995. And in a recent survey, 75 percent of Gen-Zers [born between 1996 and 2012] claimed mental health problems compelled them to leave their jobs.

Higher living costs, crippling student loan debts, terrorism, the states of both the national and the global economies, and the devastation caused by dramatic climate changes. These are psychological burdens Millennials and Gen-Zers struggle with at a much higher level than any other generation in America.

Desperate measures

And at work, they’re faced with multigenerational cultural clashes that compound the stress.  Because they are now the biggest demographic groups in the American workplace, employers have been forced to face these mental health issues head-on.

According to the Time article: “In the competition for valued employees, companies now see mental-health fluency as crucial. Beyond baseline coverage, global firms like Bank of America, KKR, Booz Allen Hamilton and Unilever are offering innovative solutions, from training employees to spot signs of depression in one another to fostering a less hierarchical vibe. ‘Workplace culture has really changed from the baby-boomer generation,’ says Kelly Greenwood, CEO of Mind Share Partners, which she founded after a leave of absence from a past job because of anxiety. ‘You’re supposed to be ‘on’ 24/7 and responsive to your company in a way that never existed in previous generations. The experience of being in a junior role now is much different from what it used to be.’”

An invaluable tool

How can managers build empathy on their teams? One important step is to help build relationships among team members and DiSC personality profile training can make taking that first step a lot easier.

Empathy means having the ability to understand and share another person’s feelings. It’s hard to empathize with someone when you just don’t get how they tick—which can eventually tick you off!

DiSC is an acronym for the 4 personality types we all exhibit in some measure—Dominance. Influential. Supportive or Steadiness. Conscientious.

Understanding the underpinning personality type of a colleague can make their behavior easier to understand and accept—and that’s the first step toward empathy. You may not like their behavior, but you can finally understand why they act the way they do. 

When the buck stops here

They say that it’s lonely at the top, but today’s managers can’t afford isolation. They’ve got to wear too many hats for that. Facilitator. Mentor. Profit maker. Motivator. Peacemaker. Building empathy requires building relationships with employees.

DiSC personality training is both a doorway and a bridge. It can open the door to understanding a worker better and bridge the gap in relationship building. DiSC can help managers select the leadership style and behavioral approach to fit a worker’s personality type.

Time Magazine reports some very encouraging news: “More than 200 companies—including Unilever, Starbucks and Zappos—have used Mental Health First Aid at Work, a four to eight-hour in-person course that teaches people how to talk to struggling colleagues and where to refer them.” Imagine how successful these peer-counselors would be if their efforts were undergirded by DiSC personality training.

How can managers build empathy on their teams? DiSC!

Today the stigma and shame of emotional and mental illness have been discarded. And people can reach out for help without fear of rejection or termination at work. Tools like DiSC can accelerate healing, improve production, and make the workplace culture healthy, vibrant, and profitable.