By Patrick Lee, President of Chesapeake Think Tank and CEO of Spark Business Institute
There’s a fundamental difference between two approaches to organizational development that most people don’t recognize—and understanding this difference can transform how you approach solving problems in your company.
Let’s say you have somebody who really knows DiSC assessment. They’re going to train a company on DISC, and they can walk into that company never having been there before, knowing nothing about the company, but being told “we need to all become more aware of our temperaments, our communication styles, and how that all works.”
They’ll go in as an expert and train people on that. Within that training, things will come out about the company or personal relationships, but these will be examples that happen within an expert-based training facilitation. It’s essentially a one-size-fits-all approach where you get the expertise delivered, and then you figure out how to apply it.
The other way is completely different. There are specific outcomes you’re trying to achieve. Those outcomes are: “we have issues in this company around this, this, this and this.” As you’re looking at those issues, understanding them, and identifying who’s involved, it comes to light that part of what you want to show people is how their communication styles and conflict styles actually impact those specific things going on in the company.
This facilitation is less about just the expertise of DiSC (though it’s helpful if that knowledge is there), but much more about facilitating results-based alignment. These two approaches may look similar during a training session, but they have very different depth in what one can achieve versus what the other cannot.
Here’s a real example from a recent networking event. Someone shared that they’d just had trainers come in around DiSC, and everyone found it really interesting. They were all sitting
there thinking about how important communication styles are, how somebody likes to receive information, what type of information they need—and that was fascinating when they started looking at the people around them.
What this person was doing was taking knowledge and applying it to his business. He was thinking, “Wow, that was interesting. I can see how that applies here, here, and here.” Someone came in, gave him expertise he didn’t have, trained him on it, and now he’s trying to fit that training to his business.
That’s different from somebody sitting in his business with him, looking at the actual problems, and saying, “I think we need DiSC training, and here’s specifically why we need it. I think we need people to understand that they’re not necessarily adversarial, that they’re not in total disagreement with each other—that it’s not a people problem as much as it’s a communication and understanding problem. And I want to use DiSC to help you come up with ways to solve the problems that we know are there. Here’s a tool that would work for your specific situation.”
I think I’m a really good facilitator, and I’d put my facilitation of DiSC up against anybody’s. But I’m fully aware there are people who are equally adept at DiSC—mabye some who are more adept than I am—and many of them are really good presenters too.
If I’m simply saying “I’m a great DiSC presenter, pick between me and other great DiSC presenters,” then clients can make that choice easily enough.
But what I think is actually my true, unique superpower is my ability to take all the various parts and bring them together cohesively in alignment. I can see how using this tool or that training affects everything else, how to explain something to somebody by using a specific approach so they go “oh!” and get it. I can get all of that to actually align, where it’s all working in tandem and making sense—not simply providing a piece of expertise in an engaging way and then allowing them to figure out how it’s relevant or what to do with it.
Think about those generic training days where you’d sit there and get a bunch of information. It was one-size-fits-all. You’d try to figure out what was useful to bring back. Some people would get excited because they had that day and a bunch of ideas, but they’d complain that three weeks later they hadn’t implemented anything and couldn’t remember what it was. Basically, you were just being given a bunch of ingredients and told “here’s a bunch of ingredients—if you can make something with them, that’ll be great.”
Compare that to when you have someone come in who asks all the questions beforehand: What’s going on? What should we focus on? What does this look like? Even though there’s still
an outline of expertise being delivered, they’re fitting it specifically to your company’s needs. It’s personalized training that addresses your actual challenges.
That’s the approach I take with my clients—I come in and see things they don’t see about why specific tools would work for their situation. I can turn their thinking around in ways that create those “aha” moments where everything suddenly connects and makes sense.
The question isn’t whether you need training or development—it’s whether you need expert knowledge delivered to you, or whether you need someone to help you solve your specific problems using the right tools in the right way at the right time.
That difference …… makes all the difference.
