Offseason Talks, Volume 2 – Developing Healthier Teams and Relationships

Phil: [00:00:00] Welcome back to How Soccer Explains Leadership. Thank you so much for making it possible for us to do this show. Thank you for your download. Thank you for engaging the conversation that we get to have. I am Phil Darke, your host, and on behalf of my co-host Paul Jobson, we just, again, want to thank you for making it possible to do what we love.

To be able to do on this podcast, which is to help you to learn, help you, to grow as leaders, help you to understand how soccer does explain life and leadership. And we usually do that. By having some interviews, having amazing guests get on the show or for little conversations that Paul and I have in the halftime shows and the post-match shows, but we decided to do something a little different this summer.

Not only are all of the global teams, not all, but most of the global teams taking breaks right now. But you know, it's Euro 2020. In 2021, which is kind of weird, but everything's kind of weird during COVID, but we wanted to do [00:01:00] off season talks. It's offseason for most. So we thought we would just take a little break from the ordinary, try something a little new hope.

You'll like it. We're just going to take some, some things that are important to us, and we're going to share them with you because we have no doubt that these things will help you. Even if you know about them already. Just listen and hopefully you'll learn something new. If you've never heard of these things.

Take a minute to learn more. Whether by sending me an email and we can hop on a call and talk about some of these things. Email is phil@howsoccerexplainsleadership.com. You can join the Facebook group that we have, how soccer explains leadership, Facebook group. You can ask questions there. But at the end of the day, just, just hopefully you will, if you don't know.

Take the minute to understand these things a little bit better. We're going to do our best to help you understand these things, but there's no way we can do these topics justice in 10 minutes or so, which is what we're going to do in these off season talks. These are just really teasers kind of sampler platters, if you will, of [00:02:00] these amazingly important, incredibly important topics that we know you need to be understanding. If you're going to be the best leader you can be. And the first thing, you know, Or the first thing we did last week, we talked about understanding your why, and really starting with the end in mind, go back and listen to that.

If you haven't done so already, that was our off season talk, number one, this is number two this week, and really this one revolves around the pap. The fact that people have been asking me regularly, why I talk about DISC so much? Why I've decided to commit a lot of my time and energy to training club and university and pro teams  to understand and implement DISC in their soccer programs and other sports programs as well.

So I thought I'd take a little bit of time to discuss why I believe DISC is so important in all of our teams and every other area of our lives. You know, this, this week really won't be the, what DISC is. It won't necessarily be how you can implement it into your particular team. It's really [00:03:00] helping you understand why I think it's so important. And some of the anecdotes really in my life that have shown me the power of this tool, that is a very simple tool, but it's got some incredible applications that we can use. And so really at the really DISC helps us with communication. It helps us to communicate better. It's a tool that helps us to connect with others because it helps us to understand ourselves first.

It really helps us to become fluent in ourselves. So we understand how we come across to others. It helps us understand how we're perceived. It also understands how we're wired, how we act when we're stressed, it helps us to become self-aware of our blind spots that most people around us, especially those that we're leading, they already know our blind spots.

It helps us to become more aware of them, which helps us to gain more respect from others because we understand these things and we can work on the things. As I say, a lot [00:04:00] of people say weaknesses, I like to call them are not strengths because they're things that can, we can become stronger in. They'll never be the things we're wired to do in our default.

Ways or in a fault manner that we live, but we can work on them to be better. So that's the one reason why I know this thing is so important and it helps us in communication. And the reality is communication is a key tar leadership communication is a key to any team that we want to coach any team that we want to lead.

Sir, Alex Ferguson, one of the best managers, I think that's pretty much a done deal. As far as people know in that, in all of soccer history, sir, Oxford has had Manchester United manager in as well as a few other teams. He was teaching at Harvard. And he said at Harvard, one of the students asked me a question.

What would you have liked to have known 30 years ago? No. Now he said it was definitely communication. The importance of communication it's critical, [00:05:00] essential. You can't be successful without it read our back. Famous basketball coach said the most important thing in coaching is communication. It's not what you say as much as what they absorb.

And the reality is without a tool like DISC on average, two people have about a 40% chance of communicating well and connecting with another person. The reason for that is DISC is like a it's like a language. I mean, our, I mean, our personalities are like languages that we speak. If you go to Russia and you try to speak English, you may get lucky and you may connect with people.

But the reality is most people in Russia speak Russian. The same way. If we just go around trying to connect with people, by speaking our personality language, we may get lucky and we may connect with someone who's fluent. Usually those are the people we quote, click with, and we just love them from the beginning, as people who think like us and are wired like us, because when we speak our language, [00:06:00] when I speak high, I personality and it's loud and it's boisterous and it's intense.

Some people get scared away by that. The other, I personalities, you know, if we're on the same page and we're going, doing something together, they usually like it. We usually click the other people may be like, whoa, why are you so excited? Why are you yelling at me? Why are you talking so loud? So I need to understand that.

And I need to understand the other person, which is the other part of disk. That's so critical is it helps us to understand others when we understand. All the different personalities. It only starts with understanding self. If we truly want to communicate well, we need to understand others. We need to seek to get fluent in those other languages.

It's it's more work for us. Yes. It'll probably exhaust us to do it. If we did it all the time and we were living in our other personality or other personalities and those styles all the time, we would get exhausted, but to be able to communicate well with others, it's really our job to understand them well.

Just try to [00:07:00] speak their personality. And we, we can, there's a lot of ways we're not going to have time to get into today, but there's ways to understand people pretty easily, even if they've never taken an assessment. So hopefully we can. Take down that or increase that 40% chance of communicating well and connecting with another person.

It's never going to be a hundred percent perfect, but we can get it up to pretty close to a hundred percent. If we truly understand DISC, we take the time to understand the others. We truly understand ourselves, whether we're healthy, we're self-aware we know our blind spot massively important. So that's something reason why I absolutely believe that this DISC.

Model human behaviors is very important for us as leaders to understand and implement in our organizations fact, according to the Carnegie Carnegie foundation, yes, this was in the context of business, but I think it applies just as much to sport 85% of success results from interpersonal skills, only 15% of success results from technical skills [00:08:00] and knowledge.

The reality is whatever level you're playing. Most of the people have a similar technical skill level that you. So the things that are really going to separate the teams, the good from the best are going to be the culture going to be whether they get along, whether you actually love each other and care about each other.

A lot of that comes from understanding. It's hard to love someone you don't trust. You don't know. It's hard to trust them money. You don't know. And if you don't understand them, you're really not gonna be able to get to know them. So I think that understanding this, you know, and using disk or another tool that truly understand it gives you a massive headstart, especially if you're picking up a new team coming into a new organization, it gives you a huge headstart to understanding your personnel, your team members, your people.

And with a college team or a club team, or even a pro team, you're getting a lot of new players every year. If you don't understand them, how [00:09:00] they fit into the team, if your team members don't understand each other, it's pretty much a recipe for dysfunction and issues and conflict morale being pretty low in your team.

And I can speak from experience on this because I came in to help coach a high school team. It was a pretty toxic culture. When I came in, there were cliques. People were talking behind each other's backs. I knew a lot of this. My daughter was on the team. She was telling me and I came in, I was able to, I was able to implement the disc.

I was able to build trust of the coach and, and be able to implement disc into this team. And it, again, it's not perfect, but transform the culture of this team. We understood each other better. Remember one of the girls for instance, was, was known as a, you know, kind of stuck up. They thought, you know, people thought she thought she was better than everybody else.

They called her. You know, they, they were saying things behind each other's backs. [00:10:00] The fact of matter is she was just reserved. She was a reserved girl. I knew that because I got to know her. She's a sweet girl.

But she was in high school when you're insecure in a lot of things. She didn't talk a whole lot, partly because she was reserved. She's misunderstood. When she became understood. I actually asked her during the training that I did with the team, I said, do people think that you're stuck up? And she nodded, do people think that you're.

You think you're better than them? And she, she said, yeah. And at that point she started crying because she was understood at that point. And I said to the team, I said, everybody look at her right now and understand that all of you are [00:11:00] probably misunderstood in some way. And you're probably making assumptions about others.

Like we have made assumptions and false assumptions about this girl. And it was so powerful, but fast forward a couple years, as we've implemented each year and done some vision framing and understanding how we can be healthier as a team that team's culture is so healthy last year made it to the CIF section finals out here in California, this year, eight shutouts out of eight games.

Unfortunately, it was a truncated COVID season. And I attribute a lot of that to the fact that they understand each other better, which has led to greater trust, which has led to better relationships, caring deeply about each other, which causes that those eight shutouts, there were a lot of shots. There were a lot of opportunities other teams had, but our team bound together and the, that, that defense was saying, there is no way we're going to let each [00:12:00] other, we're not going to let each other down.

There's no way we're going to let someone score on us and they didn't, it doesn't always work out that way obviously. But these are things that we can give ourselves a better chance by understanding ourselves better, understanding others, better understanding our team better. When we understand each other better on the teams, it allows us to work to better, better together as a team, more effectively, efficiently, more effectively.

And when we do that, we get better results. So the reality is every personality gets something. When we have these things that the D personalities. And again, this doesn't mean a lot to people if they don't understand necessarily the disc, but the D personality of the drivers, they get the results that they need, the eyes who are the outgoing people, people, they get the fun, it's more fun.

And that's what I's love. S's love peace and harmony. And they get that when we have these teams that are healthy. And [00:13:00] sees get quality and excellence because when we have healthy teams, we're going to pursue excellence together. That's the reality. That's why I believe in this. It's obviously way more to it, but that's the short of it.

I believe in this thing, because I've seen it work on the teams that I've coached. I don't have time to go into how I've seen it work in my family, but I've used this with my kids. Some of whom are just like me. Some of whom are totally opposite from me. My wife is the opposite personalities me as well.

It's worked in our family. It's helped us understand each other better. It's helped me be a better dad and a better husband. I've helped other marriages by going through this disc with them, help parents to understand their kids helped organizations as well. And I'd love to do the same for you. If this is something that you have a question about, you'd love to see how this might work in your organization and the team that you coach in your family.

Send me an email, fill out how soccer explains leadership.com. I would love to [00:14:00] hop on a call with you zoom call or phone call, and just really take a half hour and be able to see how we might be able to use disc in whatever you're doing to help you to understand this better, to help you to flourish, to help you to make good things better.

If he, if you listened last week, you know, that's my why's to help you and others to flourish and to make good things better. I have no doubt the disc does both of those things. And I can now, you know, if you want, I, we do, we do. I do disc training and coaching in a day. You can take a step better to a healthier, healthier team, healthier life.

Really you'll better understand yourself, your players, your staff, your employees, you'll learn how to resolve conflict. You'll learn how to reduce turnover. Get better results and really just have more fun in the process. Those are things that I would love to talk to you more about. So with that, [00:15:00] I just want to, again, thank you for being a part of this show.

Thank you for just listening to this off season. Talk on disc something. I believe in something, and I hope you'll take an opportunity to learn more about hopefully today gave you that little kick in the butt that you might need to. To check it out and to see how it can help you and the teams that you're a part of.

And with that, I do hope as always that you're using what you're learning on this show and you're, you're, you're using it to help you be a better leader, to be a better parent, to be a better spouse. And that you're also taking all that you're learning on the show and you're using it to help you understand that soccer does explain life and leadership.

Thanks a lot. Have a great week.