Leadership and Life Essentials: Missing a Question, Missing a Voice - Spotting and Covering Your Team's DISC Blind Spots

When I put a team's disk map up on the screen, the first thing almost everyone does is look for their own dot.

Then they look for who landed near them.

And you can hear this in the room.

Oh, you're an S too? Oh, that makes so much sense.

And looking for common ground makes sense too, since we always like being around people like us.

I love that moment.

It's so fun.

People feel seen.

And it's exciting to finally understand why you click so easily with the person next to you.

If you're the leader, though, I just want you to pay attention to something else too.

I want you to look at the part to the map where no one's standing, where there are no dots, no shading, because that represents a blind spot.

And when I do training, we actually dig into this.

When you have all four styles on your team, you have a balanced team, a heterogeneous team, and each disc style brings strengths.

Each disc style brings a question to the table too.

And when a style is missing from your team, its question is usually absent as well.

And since our brains don't naturally look for what's missing, that perspective then just gets missed.

So what are those questions? D-styles ask what questions.

So they might ask, what's the result we're after and how quickly can we get there? I styles ask those who questions.

So they might ask, who needs to be on board? And how do we get people excited about this? Our S styles ask how questions.

So they might ask, how will this affect the people doing the work? And our C styles ask all the why questions.

So they might ask, why is this the best plan? And have we made sure that it's accurate? All four of these are good questions, and a strong decision should answer all of them.