I thought I’d had a terrible training session.
It was the first module of a management development programme with a new client. I walked away thinking I’d completely misjudged the group. They were quiet. Very quiet. Nobody was jumping in with answers. There wasn’t the usual chatter or laughter. I couldn’t see the energy I was used to seeing in my training rooms. I honestly thought I’d failed.
Not surprisingly, following a career in hospitality, I was very used to working with outgoing, collaborative, supportive, people-focused colleagues. Let’s face it, if you don’t like people, you probably don’t choose to work in hospitality, and hospitality simply doesn’t work without teamwork.
What has surprised me, particularly over the last ten years of running Surge Ahead, is how different some of the teams I now work with are from what I was used to. Many of my clients are in sectors such as technology and manufacturing, and their teams can have very different characteristics. I’ve worked with people who are highly motivated by accuracy, challenge and results. They tend to be much more task-focused than people-focused and generally more reflective than impulsive.
At first, I found this a bit of a challenge.
As a trainer, I was used to asking a question and getting a room full of responses almost instantly. I was used to training rooms full of chatter, with people desperate to share their thoughts, experiences and ideas. In fact, part of my job was often trying to control the energy in the room because, if I didn’t, we probably wouldn’t get through the content!
Then came my first training session in this very different environment. It genuinely made me doubt myself as a trainer. Despite everything I had learnt over more than 20 years of using DiSC and understanding how different we all are, this felt like new territory. I remember finishing that first session feeling that it had been like pulling teeth trying to get anyone to answer a question or speak up.
I felt like I had failed.
I had never experienced a session where people weren’t animated, smiling, positive and visibly enthusiastic. I remember looking around the room during the training and thinking, They all look so serious. They look like they don’t want to be here. There is absolutely no energy in the room.
Their body language spoke volumes. Or at least, I thought it did.
For the first time ever, I hadn’t enjoyed delivering a training session. And what made it worse was that this was the first module of my management development programme, with another five sessions still to deliver to the same client. So, naturally, I started racking my brains about how I could improve the future sessions. How could I get the level of engagement and energy I was used to seeing in my training rooms? I was genuinely concerned.
I had delivered this type of training many times before and the feedback had always been incredibly positive. So I went away and started looking for ideas about how I could make the training better. This was before AI was really part of our everyday lives, so I did what most of us did back then. I Googled!
Then the feedback came in from the client. I saw the email sitting in my inbox and, honestly, I had to make a coffee and take a deep breath before I was brave enough to open it. And you know what?
The feedback was amazing. The team had loved the training. They had found the content interesting, enjoyed the flow of the session and were looking forward to the next one. I had to read it twice. What I had seen in that room simply hadn’t translated into what the participants were actually experiencing.
And looking back, I can’t believe my mind didn’t immediately jump to my knowledge and experience of DiSC. I had been using it for years. For anyone who hasn’t come across DiSC before, it’s a behavioural profiling tool that helps us understand our own communication and behavioural preferences, as well as recognise that other people may approach situations very differently from us.
It’s not about putting people into boxes or saying that one style is better than another. It’s about understanding the differences between people and recognising that we don’t all communicate, respond or engage in the same way. And yet, despite having used DiSC for years and talked about these differences with countless managers, I had completely forgotten to apply that thinking to what was happening in front of me.
It’s funny how, when we are so involved in something ourselves, we sometimes can’t see the wood for the trees. If a friend had come to me and described exactly the same situation, I would probably have immediately explained that they were experiencing the differences between behavioural styles. I would have pointed out that people respond to training, communication and interaction in very different ways.
I also would have explained that it’s not surprising that different sectors and working environments can attract people with different interests, strengths and preferences. If you are naturally focused on tasks, detail, precision, accuracy and challenge, you may not be drawn to a career where you are interacting with customers all day.
Likewise, if you are highly enthusiastic, collaborative, supportive and empathetic, you may not necessarily want to spend your working day sitting at a computer analysing data.
Of course, people are far more complex than a DiSC profile or a job description, and there are plenty of exceptions. But quite naturally, we are often drawn towards roles and environments that make the best use of our strengths.
What I learnt
The biggest lesson for me was that engagement doesn’t always look the way we expect it to look. I had unconsciously equated engagement with energy, chatter, laughter, eye contact and people jumping in with answers. Because that was what I was used to seeing, I assumed that a quieter, more serious room meant people weren’t enjoying the session or weren’t engaged. I was wrong.
Some people are perfectly capable of being highly engaged without showing it in the way I expected. They may be listening carefully, processing information, thinking about what has been said and considering their response before speaking. And actually, that was a really valuable lesson for me as a trainer.
I needed to adapt.
Rather than expecting the room to respond in the way I was used to, I started thinking more carefully about how different people learn and participate. I became more comfortable with pauses. I gave people more time to think before answering. I used different ways of getting people involved rather than relying on spontaneous discussion.
And, importantly, I stopped judging the success of a session by how much noise there was in the room! It was a great reminder that we shouldn’t assume that everyone communicates, learns, works or shows enthusiasm in the same way we do.
That applies to trainers, but it applies even more to managers. If you manage a team of people who are all different, why would you expect them all to respond to you in the same way?
Understanding behavioural differences can help us communicate more effectively, delegate in a way that works for the individual, give feedback in a way they are more likely to respond to and create an environment where different people can contribute in their own way.
And perhaps most importantly, it reminded me of something I’ve been saying in my training for years:
Just because someone behaves differently from you doesn’t mean they are disengaged, difficult or uninterested. They may simply be showing it differently.
Sometimes we just need to stop looking at people through our own lens. It was a lesson I needed reminding of: people don’t have to behave like us to be engaged, motivated or successful.
- Sometimes the person who says the least is listening the most.
- A serious expression doesn’t mean someone isn’t enjoying themselves.
- What looks like disengagement is simply someone engaging in a different way.
