It really helps to know what motivates your individual team members, how they receive information and how they communicate.
For example, people who leap at tasks with boundless enthusiasm, who are very action-focused and determined to get stuff done ASAP, will likely clash with colleagues who are cautious and who want to analyse and ponder a bit before getting started.
Understanding our different styles
It’s helpful to understand the different personalities and styles at play when looking at how our teams collaborate. It’s understandable to prefer to work with people who are on our wavelength, but having a team member who has a different communication style to you isn’t a bad thing either.
We did a lot of work around communication styles at Social Element – it’s something I found especially important as the agency grew and the core team I started with expanded to a fantastic team that spanned continents.
My solution was to call in an amazing trainer called Rachel Boothroyd, who took us through the DiSC behaviour styles analysis. Through this, it became much easier to understand the root of the differences in our communication styles.
Sometimes we had a bit of friction between people because someone who was focused on the facts and figures was clashing with someone who wanted to know how a decision would impact other people. How would it make them feel?
Both perspectives are important, but it’s easy to see how serious misunderstandings could arise.
A changed perspective on communication
Communication coaching gave me (and my team) a fresh perspective on how we could use our different communication styles to the team’s advantage. But it also meant challenging some misconceptions.
- Conflict can spark creativity. The friction we get from conflict helps spark ideas and fuels creativity. Real innovation comes when people have different opinions and experiences.
- Embracing differences opens new paths and helps us identify risks. I prefer to understand the range of options open to us, and that’s only possible if you’re prepared to see things from different perspectives. An optimistic, action-oriented person might get frustrated by their more cautious, risk-averse coworker, but together they can identify new ways to work and spot potential issues the other wouldn’t have considered.
- We’re better leaders when we encourage and try to understand different approaches. It’s so important to me to take time to understand the individuals I’m working with, and I really notice the difference when I feel like I haven’t had a chance to get to know a person well. Quiet and reflective team members, for example, might seem like they aren’t engaged in a meeting. They aren’t talking about their ideas like their teammates. Often, what’s happening is they’re taking it all in, processing their thoughts and will share their ideas later in an email. Great leadership is understanding that we all have different communication styles and ways of processing information, and giving people space to work the way that’s most suitable for them.
Once we understood that conflicting communication styles are healthy, and even beneficial, the team felt free to express themselves and explore other perspectives. They realised that they could disagree, and no-one would think worse of them for it. They learned to embrace their individual style.
Not only has it made us more creative and innovative, but it’s also helped us identify and deal with issues, because we have the courage and the permission to share our genuine thoughts with each other.
