Tag Archive for: DISC

Executive Presence: Four Communication Hacks To Improve Your Leadership Impact

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executive presence and communicationLet’s argue you are already well-versed in effective communication skills as a leader. You’ve cultivated self-awareness and emotional intelligence. You listen actively. You are mindful of body language and nonverbal cues. You consider different perspectives. You ask open-ended questions to encourage dialogue and paraphrase to ensure understanding.

You begin with clear communication objectives. You know your audience and your context and hone your communications strategy. You lead with the point rather than bury it. You are clear and concise, as well as conscientious of tone. You substantiate your argument. You bring in storytelling. You anticipate questions, challenges, and counter-arguments.

You cultivate psychological safety. You set clear objectives, priorities, agendas, and roles. You steward the conversation and invite and encourage feedback through different avenues. You ensure all team members are clear on decisions, actions, responsibilities, and timing.

So far so good, right? Undoubtedly, you can witness areas where you could improve your command of these skills. And let’s go further. Because powerful communication also involves how effectively you convey leadership, including how you shape the quality of conversations happening around you.

1. Leverage the Pause

One of the quickest ways you can diminish the power of your voice or your stance is to steal the space immediately after you made a point. Because truth needs room to land.

There is leadership gravitas in the pause that can happen before, between, or after your words, but too often we are the first to steal it out of discomfort with silence. Let your words land. Holding your presence through the pause conveys being grounded in your leadership without seeking immediate validation, slipping in caveats, or rushing to move on.

If you’re opening the room for questions, a ten second pause (far longer than may feel comfortable) can even activate engagement. It shows executive composure and provides processing time for others to formulate better thoughts.

Equally, practice letting the words of others land for you. That pause before response conveys emotional intelligence and has the potential to improve decisions.

2. Cultivate the Language of Candor Around You

“As you arrive to a real senior level, you will start to understand that people are going to have a hard time disagreeing with you. They tend to give you filtered information,” advised Geline Midouin. “If you know that, you can be much more deliberate and intentional in terms of how you ask questions, to make sure that you’re getting the real story and understanding different perspectives.”

Not everyone has the guts to speak truth to power, so as you rise as a leader, try to become aware of how others edit themselves around you. Who used to challenge you and no longer does? Who no longer shares their half-baked ideas? What assumptions are not scrutinized?

Recognize that people may contort in subtle ways to stay in your favor. At this juncture in your journey, you have an opportunity to elevate communication to improve the quality of ideas, thoughts, and opinions that circulate in your presence.

In HBR’s “How the Best Leaders Shape Conversations,” authors Alison Wood Brooks and Andy Atkins iterate the importance of building an environment that invites candor: “Leaders play a critical role in creating the conditions for candid conversation. They model intellectual humility, invite disagreement, acknowledge uncertainty, and respond thoughtfully when others raise difficult issues.”

As a leader, you set the norm for asking questions that draw out unvoiced perspectives, dissenting points of view, and concerns brewing beneath the surface. Equally, how you respond to difficult and challenging perspectives matters.

Responding with curiosity sets a tone that invites people to raise and share diverse or controversial viewpoints: shutting them down or responding with defensiveness discourages the sharing that leads to fertile friction.

“The most consequential leadership failures are often not caused by bad ideas—they’re caused by important truths that never get voiced,” writes Brooks and Atkins.

Example phrases to encourage disagreement or candor may include:

  • “What viewpoints are we missing?”
  • “What would be a contrary point of view?”
  • “What evidence would change our current approach?”
  • “The risk I would see with that approach is…”
  • “Can anyone make a counter-argument against my recommendation?”
3. Become Aware of Your “Sender” and “Receiver” Tendencies

No matter how good of a speaker or listener you may perceive yourself to be, and listening skills are one place where we often overestimate ourselves, here’s a newsflash: nobody (yes, nobody) comes to communication from a neutral place.

At the very least, you are oriented to the tendencies and biases of your particular behavioral DISC profile, which may alter by context. You may be prone to decisiveness and impatient for the punchline. You may be socially expressive and driven by relationship influence. You may be inclined to avoid confrontation and seek harmony. You may be oriented to prioritizing details and analysis.

You are most likely a mix of qualities, but your prevalent tendencies have both strengths and pitfalls, both as a speaker and equally—if not more crucially as you rise up the ranks—as a recipient of incoming information. For example, perhaps you are inclined to dismiss a good idea for the way its packaged, and that’s a blindspot.

Becoming self-aware of your behavioral profile and communication style, and knowing how your inclinations intensify under stress, is critical for leaders who oversee team dynamics.

Try out these receiver challenges:

  • When someone says something you disagree with, don’t formulate your response until you can state their argument in a way they’d say is fair.
  • Next time you hear what you perceive to be a bad idea, ask what value could be harvested from the thinking.
  • When you receive criticism you don’t like, ask whether there’s anything useful to glean
4. Demonstrate the Difference Between Influence And “Airtime”

The most powerful contribution in the room is not always the one that dominated the conversation or occupied the most airtime. In fact, as you rise in leadership, your success depends more on your ability to listen, to distill, to discern, to diffuse, and to direct. Steering the dialogue and drawing out necessary viewpoints from the team is an art.

While it should arguably always be so, the value of your voice in the room is not measured by how much you contributed to a discussion, but what changed as a result of your contribution. Communicative effectiveness is not about performance but impact.

How well did you set the objectives and parameters to stay on topic? How did you provoke thought? How did you elevate the quality of the conversation? How did you steer through conflict and complexity to innovative thinking and solutions?

Questions are helpful to gather information and insight, but they can also be leveraged as a leadership instrument. The ability to formulate a powerful question is invaluable to steering teams, and indeed can even become part of your leadership brand.

Examples of questions that may open and redirect:

  • What would have to be true for this idea to work?
  • What assumptions are we making here?
  • What potential outcomes are we not considering?

As you rise in leadership, your communication sets a cultural tone and model for others, not only in how they approach you, but in catalyzing how conversations unfold all around you.

By: Aimee Hansen is a writer, facilitator, and co-author of This Book Is a Retreat. She has contributed to The Glass Hammer for over a decade. 

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Five Ways Your DiSC Profile Can Make You a More Effective Leader

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5 Ways Your DiSC Profile Makes You a More Effective leaderAt a certain point in your career, honest feedback becomes surprisingly hard to come by. Not because people around you lack opinions (they may have plenty) but because hierarchy has a way of softening, managing, and redirecting those opinions before they reach you. The higher you rise, the more curated your information environment tends to become.

That means you may be making daily decisions about how to communicate, how to lead your team, and how to show up in the room with less real data about your impact than you think. Waiting for candid feedback that the culture is unlikely to deliver isn’t a strategy. Actively seeking structured ways to see yourself clearly is.

Psychometric assessments, used well and debriefed with a skilled coach, are one of the most effective tools for doing exactly that. In a recent piece Beyond the Performance Review: The Assessments That Build Self-Aware Leaders we introduced four tools our coaches at Evolved People Coaching use most often. Here, we take a closer look at one: the DiSC assessment, and what it specifically opens up for leadership effectiveness and team development.

What DiSC Actually Measures

Unlike assessments that focus on aptitude or potential, DiSC is behavioral; it describes how you tend to act, not what you are capable of. It maps four dimensions: how you respond to challenge and control (Dominance); how you engage and energize people (Influence); how you handle pace, change, and stability (Steadiness); and how you approach accuracy, detail, and process (Conscientiousness).

If you’ve read Thomas Erikson’s Surrounded by Idiots, you’ll recognise these as the Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue profiles. Erikson’s core premise is worth holding: communication happens on the listener’s terms, not the sender’s. DiSC makes that dynamic visible.

Here are five ways that translates into more effective leadership.

1. It Shows You the Gap Between How You See Yourself and How Others Experience You

Most senior leaders have a clear sense of their strengths. Fewer have an accurate read on how those strengths land when overused, in the wrong context, or with someone whose style differs sharply from their own.

Consider a leader who scores high on Steadiness — Erikson’s Green. She may pride herself on being calm and consistent. But Greens tend to internalize conflict, and under pressure can become passive and hard to read. In a moment of organizational turbulence, that composure can register not as steadiness but as disconnection and without awareness of how her style is landing, she has no way to address it.

DiSC gives you a framework for asking not just what am I doing? but what is that creating for the people around me? — which is a different, and more useful, question entirely.

2. It Helps You Communicate With People Instead of At Them

Communication failures at senior levels are rarely about clarity or intent. They’re almost always about style mismatch, delivering messages in the way that makes sense to us, without accounting for what the person across from us actually needs.

A high-Dominance leader (Erikson’s Red) who values directness and speed will experience a detailed, context-heavy briefing as burying the lead. Reds want information that is succinct and results-focused. Meanwhile, a high-Conscientiousness colleague  (Erikson’s Blue) who needs the full reasoning before committing may experience a bottom-line-first approach as dismissive. Neither is wrong. They are operating from different defaults with no shared language for naming the difference.

DiSC provides that vocabulary. Once you can identify someone’s style, even approximately, you can make targeted adjustments: leading with data for the person who needs it, creating space for dialogue with someone who processes out loud, getting to the point with someone already three steps ahead. Small shifts, but they compound significantly over time.

3. It Shows You How Your Style Plays Out Across the Real Work of Leadership

One of the most useful sections of the DiSC report we offer at Evolved People Coaching covers management: how you direct and delegate, motivate, develop talent, manage up and how your tendencies shift under stress.

That last piece matters more than most leaders realize. Erikson is instructive here: under pressure, default behavior doesn’t soften, it amplifies. Reds become more demanding. Yellows become more chaotic. Greens become passive-aggressive. Blues become hypercritical. Knowing which version of yourself shows up when the stakes are high and how that lands on your team is some of the most valuable self-knowledge a leader can have. The report makes these tendencies specific and situated, which is what makes them actionable.

4. It Turns Team Friction Into Useful Data

Style differences shape team dynamics in ways that slow progress, create tension and impact team effectiveness, especially when there’s no shared framework for naming what’s actually happening.

Erikson is direct about which combinations create the most friction: Red and Green are opposites: one fast, task-focused, and blunt while the other is slower, relationship-oriented, and conflict-averse. Yellow and Blue create a different kind of tension: one shoots from the hip, the other wants precision and finds the energy exhausting. These aren’t personality flaws. They’re predictable collisions between people operating from different defaults.

When DiSC is used at a team level, those dynamics get named. The team member who seems resistant to change may simply be a high-Steadiness profile that needs more context and transition time. The colleague who dominates every meeting may have a high-Influence style that generates real energy but needs structure to channel it. Both become navigable the moment they’re visible. Our team development workshops use DiSC as a starting point for exactly this, helping to move teams from recurring frustration toward a common framework for understanding where the friction is coming from.

5. It Expands Your Range Without Requiring You to Perform Inauthenticity

DiSC is not asking you to become someone you’re not. Erikson makes this point firmly: you cannot and should not try to change someone’s fundamental behavioral profile. A Red will not become a Green. Attempting to force that creates frustration on both sides.

What DiSC offers is awareness of the difference between your core behavior, how you act when nothing external is shaping you, and the adapted version you bring to professional contexts. Most leaders have more range than they use, particularly under pressure, when the instinct is to narrow and fall back on what has always worked.

A leader who defaults to independence can learn to build in deliberate moments of consultation. One who defaults to collaboration can practice holding a position when the room pushes back. Over time, that adaptation stops feeling like effort and starts feeling like genuine range.

A Closer Look Is Worth It

DiSC is not a clinical instrument and its advocates wouldn’t claim otherwise. What it is, particularly when debriefed well, is a practical window into the behavioral patterns that shape how you lead, communicate, and show up under pressure. For leaders who want concrete insight into their impact, it is consistently one of the most actionable starting points available.

If you’re ready to close the gap between the leader you are and the leader you intend to be, we’d welcome a conversation. Visit evolvedpeoplecoaching.com to explore our coaching programs and team development workshops, or reach out directly to discuss whether DiSC is the right place for you to begin.

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Beyond the Performance Review: The Assessments That Build Self-Aware Leaders

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assessments build self-aware leadersMost senior women we speak to have done the work. The MBA, the stretch assignments, the careful navigation of rooms where they were the only woman at the table. They have developed sharp strategic instincts, learned to read organizational dynamics, and built reputations on delivering results.

But even with all that experience, there can be a moment where a promotion goes sideways, a team isn’t performing, or a stakeholder relationship never quite clicks. Where the question stops being what do I need to know and becomes what do I need to understand about myself?

That is where coaches who are skilled and qualified in psychometric assessments can be particularly useful as there is value in triangulating this data as a third piece to add to “you, according to you” and formal or informal feedback from others.

Why Self-Awareness Is a Strategic Necessity, Not a Soft Skill

Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, whose research involved studies with nearly 5,000 participants, found that while 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only about 10 to 15% actually meet the criteria when objectively assessed. In leadership, that gap has direct consequences for the people you lead and the outcomes you are responsible for.

For women in senior roles, the stakes are compounded. Catalyst’s well-documented research on the double bind describes a dynamic many readers will recognize: behaviors that read as confident and decisive in a male colleague are routinely perceived as aggressive or abrasive in a woman, while collaborative and approachable behaviors can be coded as lacking authority. The margin for misreading your own impact and for having your intentions misread by others is narrower.

Self-awareness, in this context, is political and strategic intelligence and creates an opening for situational awareness. Understanding how your behavioral tendencies are landing, and to learn to watch if there is a gap between “your intent and your impact” is the growth work in coaching. What you default to under pressure is integral to separating leaders who plateau from those who keep growing.

The good news is that this is not guesswork. At Evolved People Coaching, the four tools we use most often each answer a different question and we work with you to identify which one is the right fit for where you are right now.

Four Questions Every Leader Needs to Answer:

1. How do I naturally behave — and how is that landing in different situations with different people?

Tool: DISC Assessment

DISC maps your behavioral tendencies across four dimensions: Dominance (how you respond to challenges), Influence (how you engage with people), Steadiness (how you respond to pace and change), and Conscientiousness (how you approach detail and process). It is not a measure of intelligence or potential; it is a map of your default operating style.

What makes DISC particularly powerful is what it reveals about the distance between how you experience yourself and how others experience you. Consider a senior leader who describes herself as direct, efficient, and results-focused. Her DISC profile confirms a high Dominance pattern. Her feedback tells a different story: her team finds her unapproachable, and two high performers have quietly started looking elsewhere because they feel that their leader cannot hear their ideas and it is not worth it to bring up risks. She isn’t doing anything wrong by her own logic, but without understanding how her style lands with others and adjusting accordingly, she creates an impact she never intended.

This is the gap DISC is designed to close. Not by changing who you are, but by making your behavioral defaults visible so you can choose when to lean in and when to flex.

2. Is my team actually working — or just coexisting?

Tool: Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team

Individual self-awareness will only take you so far if the team around you isn’t functioning. The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team, based on Patrick Lencioni’s widely used model, assesses team health across five dimensions: trust, productive conflict, commitment, accountability, and results orientation.

The tool operates at two levels. For intact teams, every member completes and debriefs the assessment together. What typically surfaces is a shared picture of where the team is genuinely cohesive and where it is performing a version of cohesion that is actually conflict avoidance or surface-level commitment masking real misalignment. For leaders who have inherited a team, are navigating a restructure, or aren’t getting the performance they expect from talented people, this version provides data where there was previously only intuition.

For individuals, a separate assessment helps you understand how you personally show up as a teammate regardless of whether your whole team is participating. This is valuable for leaders stepping into a new environment, those who have received feedback about their collaborative style, or anyone who wants to be more intentional about their contribution to team dynamics. Rather than waiting for the whole team to be ready, this version puts the insight in your hands immediately.

3. How am I actually landing with the people around me?

Tool: Qualitative 360 Assessment

A qualitative 360 goes directly to the source: the colleagues, direct reports, peers, and senior leaders are all stakeholders who experience your leadership every day. Conducted through structured confidential interviews rather than numerical ratings, it surfaces the specific behaviors that are building your reputation and the ones quietly working against you — patterns that no behavioral profile can predict, because they are grounded in the specific context of your organization and your relationships. There is huge psychological safety for the feedback givers because the data collected is anonymized and themed by topic so no comments can be attributed to anyone.

Used well, a qualitative 360 is not an appraisal. It is a rare opportunity to hear, in a safe environment, what people genuinely think and what they wish they could tell you directly. Given the depth of work involved, this is an assessment we typically offer as part of organizational engagements, but for the right leader at the right moment, it is one of the most powerful development investments available.

4. How can I change the behaviors that are hindering my highest potential?

Tool: Immunity to Change Mapping

The Immunity to Change Map process is a tool to uncover any hidden constructs in your subconscious mind that might be covert to you and therefore stopping you from doing the things you need to do to achieve your goals (that are overtly set in a goal setting exercise).

Nicki Gilmour, Founder of Evolved People coaching and theglasshammer.com states,

“Truly, this map is so useful early on in any work with our clients because it skillfully surfaces any or sometimes many implicit constructs that form a type of operating system or deep structure that left untouched, would result in most people wondering why they cannot do the day to day behaviors that would easily enable them to achieve their goal. This applies to any area of change, from working out to delegating work, to speaking up at meetings and even changing careers.”

Finding the Right Starting Point

These four tools address different levels of leadership insight: your default style, your team dynamics, your hidden limiting beliefs, and your real-world impact on the people around you. For most leaders, one will be the clear priority based on where you are in your career, what feedback you have received, or what challenge is most pressing. Our role is to help you identify which one that is, and to make sure the debrief and coaching that follows translates the data into something genuinely useful.

For organizations, our team development workshops use DISC, The Five Behaviors, and even Immunity to Change at a group level for leaders to build the shared visibility and common language that turns a group of talented individuals into a genuinely high-performing team.

The leaders who invest in this work consistently tell us the same thing: they wish they had done it sooner.

If you are ready to close the gap between the leader you are and the leader you intend to be, we would love to talk. Visit evolvedpeoplecoaching.com to explore our coaching programs and team development workshops, or get in touch directly to discuss which assessment is the right starting point for you.

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