For Excellence in Educational Leadership, Try DiSC®
Understanding personalities is important in business, but it’s an important component of educational leadership too.
In fact, as any leader who works in education well knows, it’s often the key to holding everything together when stress levels are at their highest.
Here’s how the DiSC® assessment plays a role in that.
Educational leadership is about making connections.
Ask any Assistant Principal, teacher, or Principal about leadership qualities they feel are essential, and they’ll all tell you that building relationships is key.
Leaders in education have several types of relationships to build:
- relationships with their students
- relationships with their teachers
- relationships with community members
- relationships with government
To make those connections, leaders have to be good at communicating.
Communication is important for any leader, but perhaps more so in education. Principals and Assistant Principals come into contact with a lot of people every day…students, teachers, administrators, and state officials.
Among teachers, one way for a leader to be perceived as “playing favorites” is to communicate well with some groups but not with other groups. Finding a way to break down barriers to communication with all your teachers, no matter what their personalities, is one pathway to leadership success.
Communicating with all the personality types is key.
DiSC® can show professionals in educational leadership roles how to communicate with every personality style. By breaking down the way personality styles work to influence behavior, the DiSC® personality training we offer shows leaders how to understand where others are coming from.
When leaders understand why team members are behaving in a certain way, and that is simply a style of communication based on a personality style, communication gets better all around.
Dealing with personality styles of teachers…
Teachers, as we all know, can have some pretty dominant styles of communication…they sort of have to! Assistant principals who understand the role of personality in how people communicate can adjust their expectations of how a conversation will proceed.
They can also modify their own communication styles when they understand others’ styles. Maybe someone needs extra verbal clarification more often than others…it’s just a style, not a challenge to authority!
Or maybe someone seems reluctant to participate in teacher meetings…that can be the result of a personality style, not necessarily a sign that he’s not engaged!
A DiSC® personality workshop teaches all these things. It starts out with an assessment, then moves on to teach participants how to use knowledge of personality styles to improve communication. For excellence in educational leadership, DiSC® can move you to the next level and beyond.
