As a DISC team coach, you aim to develop the team to the next stage of maturity. A key goal in the development of a team is often to increase self-organising ability and achieve more self-direction by the team. The question is to what extent it is possible to get the team fully self-managing. In our view, more independence and more self-organisation with limited direction from a manager is a more realistic goal. As a team coach, you fulfil an important role as a facilitator in this process, without being or becoming the owner of team responsibility. This is, of course, a great aspiration but not always an easy process.
Team coaching is truly a profession, for which you need solid education, training and flight hours. In practice, you also often face a lot of competition from trainers who call themselves team coaches. As a team coach, how can you stand out from the rest? The tools of DISC Boulevard can contribute to this and support you in your work.
Team development
How do you ensure that a team functions optimally? Much has been said and written about the benefits of self-directed teams. Team members are expected to shape the work together and achieve the goals together. In practice, this still turns out to be quite difficult. Especially if a team is insufficiently facilitated or guided in this. Characteristics of a team that does not function well include: team members focusing too much on their own work, people not daring to call each other to account for attitudes and behaviour, a lack of mutual trust and, above all, lack of team ownership. The question is whether a completely self-managing team is feasible. In practice, we see that a team functions better if, in addition to a self-organising team, there is still a final responsible person who sets the framework and is accountable.
A team that is left completely free often shows insufficient leadership. While a team that is tightly managed usually shows a lot of reactive behaviour. An important task for the team coach is to determine or assess the maturity stage the team is in. From there, you can get started with targeted interventions.
5 tips for DISC team coaches
Every team coach is unique and brings his or her own expertise and working methods. Without going into different methodologies, here are a few tips that might be of value in your work as a team coach.
Set a team goal
Make sure the shared team goal is clear. This is not just about the often beautifully described vision of the organisation, but what goal they are pursuing as a team. In practice, we see a lot of teams that do not have a concrete and clear team goal together. Pursuing € x turnover is not really an inspiring team goal. What is our higher goal? What are we all going for? And especially “why do we want this”? If the “why” is not clear, it often comes at the expense of motivation. Try to make it as concrete as possible and let the team itself describe the path towards it.
Put together a DISC team analysis
Using a DISC analysis, you will identify the conscious and unconscious behaviour of each team member. This allows you to compile a DISC team profile. In this way, you gain insight into how the various team members relate to each other and what behaviour is visible in everyone.
Strengths and weaknesses of the team
Make a SWOT analysis with the team. Based on the DISC team profile, look at the team’s strengths and weaknesses. Let the team members look at this themselves, draw conclusions and formulate actions. A team’s response style indicates the behaviour they see from each other at work. In achieving team goals, it is especially interesting to look at the basic styles of team members. This is the behaviour that is naturally present. The basic style is leading to properly determine which team member can best contribute to the team goal from which behaviour. When the behaviour requested from the team goal closely matches the basic behaviour of the team member in question, it takes little energy and things happen more naturally.
Mapping team patterns
Often, teams are only partially aware of the patterns at play within the team. Using a number of practical team exercises, you will gain more insight into obstructive and effective team patterns. As a team coach, it is important to observe well during the exercise and not to influence or even disrupt the process. Afterwards, you share your observations with the team and make the team aware of what went on in the interaction with each other. After 3 different team exercises spread over a day or several days in which you do this again, things become visible that keep recurring. These are the patterns present in this team. Some of these are definitely helpful or effective. Other patterns are obstructive and get in the way of team effectiveness. By getting the team patterns in focus, you can let the team decide which patterns they want to work on and what help they need in doing so.
Make agreements and build in monitoring moments.
Let the team itself formulate the development goals and actions identified from the team patterns. Make concrete time agreements on these, but leave the process to the team. As a team coach, don’t ask where their input goes if it takes too long. Not even if you go into the next team session with the team and nothing has been delivered. It is the team’s development process. This reactivity, the failure to honour agreements made, says a lot about the team. And you can mirror (or confront, whatever you want to call it) the team on that in turn. In practice, it usually turns out to be difficult to maintain focus as a team on the team goal, which ultimately results in limited progress. It can be useful to have the team set weekly or monthly goals and build in interim measuring moments. By discussing progress with each other weekly, you keep the scope short as a team and more or less create a stick. With small steps towards a bigger goal, a team often achieves more than with rigorous and overly ambitious goals where people drop out in between. After all, small steps forward is still progress.
With these tips, we do not want to guarantee that you will be 100% successful. There is obviously more to it than just following advice. In addition to training in the field of team coaching, it is also important to gain flying hours and practical experience. Using DISC analysis can be a very useful tool in team coaching. It ensures that team members gain insight into conscious and unconscious behaviour, of both themselves and each other. It creates awareness and often understanding. And that is a fine starting point when developing a team to from M1 or M2 to M3 or M4 level.
Getting started as a DISC team coach
Do you want to get started with DISC analyses and are already certified elsewhere? Then you can buy the DISC analyses at a reduced rate. Because you can perform the analyses independently, we can keep our prices low. If you purchase several analyses at once, you can count on an interesting discount. Create an account with no obligation, look around in the system and take a look at our volume discounts.