The Well Coached Blog

As a touring musician, being on the road can be a thrilling and rewarding experience. However, it can also be a challenging one, particularly when it comes to navigating the dynamics within the band. As highly talented and creative individuals, touring musicians can be emotionally charged thinkers, which can lead to personality conflicts and misunderstandings. This is where the DISC personality assessment tool can be incredibly useful.

So let’s talk about DISC and sales. Everybody wants to go hire a successful sales person, right? So as we talked about earlier, most people hire somebody with a great track record on their resume. And that’s smart - but most importantly you must hire somebody with the right personality type to understand and get along with you and your clients. 

Most people consider conflict a dirty word. All we hear on the news is conflict, conflict, conflict: it is presented as negative. But it’s not. You need to run toward it. It is nowhere as big a deal as you think it will be. Conflict only happens when two parties care about something.

With so many clients building and restructuring their teams, I wanted to take a moment to re-address the importance of smart hiring. There’s nothing more frustrating than spending the time – and often the money – to make a great hire but then discovering it’s the wrong person for the team, and for the company: and for you.

We have talked about the idea that a person is a natural born leader. You hear the phrase all the time, on TV, in movies and in books. But, in my opinion, it is easily debunked. I don’t think there are natural born leaders. There are big charismatic personalities who can wax poetic and convince people they are “born leaders”. But leadership is a skill set that is learned.

If you’re leading people, there must be what I call accountability structure. There are so many buzzwords around accountability and how to lead and manage. The cupcakes! Discipline is not the killer of enthusiasm, being an asshole is! Do I trust you, do you trust me, do you care? You’ve probably heard many of these.

CEOs want to focus on their business. But there are four silos to success: People, Sales, Profit and SELF. This is the full picture of a healthy business. A healthy business begins with a healthy person. If I hear from a leader that they don’t “have time” to work out or take care of themselves, then I call b.s. immediately. When I hear “I’m exhausted”, it’s a huge red flag.

Leaders often think that being a good leader means solving all problems within a company. It is my belief that leaders should equip a team to solve their own problems, client problems and the team’s problems. Often an entrepreneur steps in when an employee is stuck or does something wrong. This is a time for a leader to teach and consult versus their first instinct, which is to just show the employee the right answer as quickly as possible.

This past year has been challenging for all of us in a variety of ways. Whether you side with those that believe lockdowns and restrictions are the best course for the greater good, or favor the side of less restrictions, and open economy and free will, there is no doubt that our emotional intelligence (our “EQ”) has played a part in how we have handled the past year and how we may intentionally navigate our feelings and actions going forward. Three elements of EQ include Self Awareness, Self Regulation and Social Awareness. Each is key to successful navigating this “return to normal” year.

There are so many ways to apply great communication skills to being leader. When I downsized and became a solo entrepreneur, I had to be laser focused on who I had running beside me to be effective. For my right-hand hire, I needed somebody more organized than I am. That’s obvious. I have no interest in detail work. I fight organization every day. DISC helped me understand that I don’t want to have anything to do with organization. When I understood that, I began to make logical choices that compliment my style.

Leaders know how to build companies, but there’s a lag time between the vision these leaders have and how to get everyone on the team to understand it. The journey of communication skills rests on the leader.

It is critical for leaders and entrepreneurs to understand what makes you tick and be able to say it out loud. Knowing what makes you tick is at the heart of building the correct team around you for success.

Interviewing is hard. Let’s be honest, the majority of people suck at it. This is a brief guide to helping you and your team with objective decision making. The adage “hire correctly or hire again” is true for a reason. Even if the need is urgent, hire slowly. Make careful, informed choices and don’t rush to a decision.

What a season of learning we are in. There’s nothing like a total surprise out of left field to energize your actions. Many of us now find ourselves with a workforce that has been isolated from the office. As leaders, we likely had established at least what we thought was a routine and best practice in terms of leading our teams. And for many of us, that meant “managing by walking around,” or at least being able to call people into an office or a meeting for a face-to-face exchange. Subconsciously even, most learn to “read’ the non-verbal messaging between our team members and adjust accordingly. Absent our normal safety nets of shared space, routine meetings, and managing by walking around, how are you leading your team members during this season of remoteness?

Many of us are now in the position to be on the hunt for new “cheese.” What we recently took for granted may have been turned upside down, reduced or even taken away completely. How we deal with this proverbial “writing on the wall” will inevitably create a lasting impact on our own happiness and satisfaction.

What a wild ride we have been on. Even those of us who consider ourselves calm, cool, collective, poised and prepared have experienced a shock to our operating system as we have never seen before. It has been interesting observing and participating in the range of emotions most of us are going through. We all have different personality traits and are predisposed to respond to crisis in different ways. Thankfully, there is no absolute best behavior to model.

Here is the good news. As an entrepreneur you signed up for this kind of life. You are built for this and are fully capable of getting through tough times.

Both DISC and Enneagram are tools to help understand how people communicate and behave individually. They each help us understand and empathize with those around us. Neither model is perfect, but each can play a role. DISC has a scientifically-proven, historically accurate approach that is most effective in businesses, while Enneagram is a more myth-driven process that is often popular in understanding personal relationship dynamics.

The role of a great executive assistant cannot be overlooked. So many baller CEOs I work with wait far too long to hire one, looking back to realize how much easier and productive their lives could have been with one on board earlier. In some cases, the executive assistant is THE most important person in your office. The EA spends endless hours catering to and anticipating the needs of their bosses. A good assistant keeps a business owner on time and in the know. The right person will keep you organized, ahead of the game, and – always – make you look great. The right EA will keep you in your highest productivity zone.

Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes, from a variety of backgrounds and influences. There is one class I find quite interesting: the creative class of entrepreneurs. Creative types rarely start a business in hopes of mastering spreadsheets and number crunching. In fact, making money is often at the bottom of the priority list. Interestingly, I find that freedom from a profit mindset often allows creative types to stay in their highest productivity zone: CREATING.

Smart and clear communication and joint decision-making is vital to the long-term success of a partnership. Understanding each other’s DISC and emotional intelligence is a valuable part of the equation as well, offering clearer ways to communicate, influence and work together as a sky’s-the-limit duo.

CEOs should think strategically and never allow themselves to be involved in tactical day-to-day decisions unless the ship is going down. Great leaders hire capable, motivated people and then provide vision and perspective to those people.  Then, they allow those people to work a plan that is specific and trackable. When a CEO becomes tactically involved with team members all over the org chart, that CEO is no longer acting like a CEO. That CEO is a tactical decision maker without real strategy. This management method can also be called madness.

Building your team is more than hiring people with the greatest experience. This is a common issue in hiring, and it causes roadblocks. As entrepreneurs grow it is creating the right mix of teammates is arguably the most difficult challenge they face.

Turnover is triggered by a multitude of reasons; perceived better opportunities, personal issues, culture fit issues, performance issues, etc. Voluntary or involuntary, having to take the time to replace team members is hard work. With increased job-hopping happening today, hiring managers must utilize all the tools and resources they can to hire smart and thereby reduce turnover.

Sustainable success in business requires balanced attention in more than one discipline. When I approach this topic with clients and team members, I use an analogy of a three legged bar stool. Each leg represents a key component of sustaining success; People, Sales and Profits. If these “legs” are out of balance, the bar stool will fall.