Misreading Styles

By Michael Wilkinson, CMF
Managing Director, Leadership Strategies, Inc.

It’s always humbling, isn’t it, when you make a mistake that you teach others not to make and it costs you dearly?  I would like to relate a recent experience in hopes that you might avoid similar situations.  Let’s start with the lesson.

The Lesson

At Leadership Strategies, we use the DISC model (Drive, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance) as a tool for understanding and adapting to communication styles.  While many behavior-type courses focus on gaining insights into your own behavior, we use communication styles for a different purpose.  Our intent is to teach business professionals how they can be more effective by learning to read and adapt to the styles of others.  We also teach the importance of being able to diagnose when you are NOT adapting appropriately.

The table below provides an extract of what we teach on the typical behaviors a style exhibits when you are miscommunicating with that style.

We teach the importance of being on the lookout for the reactions that indicate you are miscommunicating with the person.

The Set-up

A very large technology company requested that we bid on providing consulting training to their 2000+ system engineers located around the globe.  After the first call with the chief recommender, we concluded that his communication style appeared to be a high-S/high-C.  After doing our work to define the need and identify competitors, we concluded that our key differentiators were the following:

Our Differentiators

• Our course content (The Effective Consultant) is designed to help their system engineers position themselves as trusted advisors with their customers as opposed to technical contractors.
• Our instructional methodology would keep the class practical, dynamic, and highly interactive.  (We call this our PDI difference.)

Given the style of the chief recommender, our plan for the presentation was to demonstrate the depth of our content and the interactive presentation style.

The Experience

For a number of reasons the two-hour presentation of our proposal to the potential client had to be done as a webinar.  We were not present in the room.

In starting the session, we used our interactive process of gathering their critical questions and matching their questions to our proposed presentation agenda.  The chief recommender appeared a bit impatient during this, so I hurried it along.  But I didn’t pick up this first clue about his style.

During the session the chief recommender seemed to want to push the presentation in the direction of how we were going to make sure we learned about their environment.  While I responded to his questions, I didn’t recognize this clue either.

When we gave a demonstration of one of our modules, he cut it short, and while his colleague indicated value in the content and the methods, he indicated that it was too slow and not at the right level for veteran system engineers.  We agreed with him that too slow or the incorrect level would not be good.  And so therefore our approach included bringing together a team of their subject matter experts to help in a full needs assessment to ensure we delivered the right information, at the right pace, to address their needs.

(I thought we would score big points with that comment. But the chief recommender felt this meant our lack of knowledge of their culture would require more time from them in order for us to be successful.)

The Feedback

After the completion of the presentation, our team debriefed and agreed on an approach.  The client relationship manager sent an email that acknowledged the chief recommender’s concern about our knowledge of their organization, highlighted our approach to address the concern, reminded of the key value we brought to the table and requested feedback.

The chief recommender explained in his reply that he felt our training was not practical, not interactive, not engaging and not dynamic.  We were, of course, amazed!  We pride ourselves in PDI – and he had gotten the complete opposite impression.

As head of our organization, I wrote him an email asking the question, “What would your chief technology officer do if he learned that a potential client had concluded your technology was not integrated, not scalable and not adaptable – just the opposite of what hundreds of your clients would say?”  I then described what I thought the chief technology officer would do and then said we are in the same situation.  The email was about a page in length.

The “Aha”

The chief recommender wrote back, “I appreciate the spirit of this response, but to be successful with our organization you need to net out the bottom line. The scenarios were too long and I don’t have time to try to figure out what points you are trying to make…Other presenters did a better job of communicating their value and proposed solution.  For this particular review, we were not connecting.”

It was only then that I realized that during this entire interaction, I had been communicating with him as if he were a high-S/high-C, and not adapting to the signs of a high-D communication style!  Of course not having the visual cues didn’t help. But clearly, even the verbal signs were well apparent.

How did I miss it?  Why didn’t I see the need to adapt?  I don’t know for sure.  However, I suspect his position and role in the company, and our initial interaction, may have prevented me from seeing what was, upon reflection, more than obvious.

If I had responded appropriately might we have had a different outcome?  I can’t say for sure.  But I can say that NOT doing it certainly nailed shut the opportunity for success.

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We teach DISC communication styles in several of our courses including, DISC Online, The Communication Styles Workshop, The Facilitative Consultant, and The Advanced Facilitator’s Workshop.

Michael Wilkinson is the Managing Director of Leadership Strategies – The Facilitation Company and author of The Facilitative Consultant training course.Prior to Leadership Strategies, he spent eight years with Ernst & Young’s Management Consulting Group. 

www.leadstrat.com/