Your Discipline Talent: Structure Promotes Progress

On this Theme Thursday Season 3 webcast, Jim Collison, Gallup's Director of Talent Sourcing, and Maika Leibbrandt, Senior Workplace Consultant, talk about Discipline with Gallup's Physical Wellbeing Lead, Ryan Wolf.

Your world needs to be predictable. It needs to be ordered and planned. So you instinctively impose structure on your world. You set up routines. You focus on timelines and deadlines. You break long-term projects into a series of specific short-term plans, and you work through each plan diligently. You are not necessarily neat and clean, but you do need precision. Faced with the inherent messiness of life, you want to feel in control. The routines, the timelines, the structure, all of these help create this feeling of control. Lacking this theme of Discipline, others may sometimes resent your need for order, but there need not be conflict. You must understand that not everyone feels your urge for predictability; they have other ways of getting things done. Likewise, you can help them understand and even appreciate your need for structure. Your dislike of surprises, your impatience with errors, your routines and your detail orientation don't need to be misinterpreted as controlling behaviors that box people in. Rather, these behaviors can be understood as your instinctive method for maintaining your progress and your productivity in the face of life's many distractions.

If you're an individual with Discipline, you probably focus a lot on processes. If you're a leader with Discipline you should not only focus on processes but also on purpose. Leaders need to be able to give their followers purpose and to help them know where things are going. Discipline is a great muscle to flex to help people understand their goals in a detailed way. Talk about what you are measuring and what success looks like. Leaders with Discipline can be great referees for relevance. They can examine new ideas, new team members or new projects and figure out how they will fit into the plan that is already in place.

When coaching leaders with Discipline, tell them not to hesitate when they feel an urge to check-in with people. Great leaders and managers usually set the expectations and then get out of the way. But followers also need stability, hope, compassion and trust from their leaders. Leaders with Discipline can use those check-ins to provide compassion and hope. It may help to tell people beforehand that you will check-in and explain your Discipline before it explains you! You can create trust by consistently meeting expectations you set and praising others when they do, too. Help others have structure and stability by sharing your processes and timelines. Inspire hope by talking about the details of the future.

Great ways to invest in your Discipline: fine-tune your systems and routines and find a way to explain them to others. You might not realize that you have systems and routines no one else has. If you can help people understand them, it opens up the lines of communication and sets the correct expectations.

Ryan Wolf's Top 5 CliftonStrengths are Discipline, Achiever, Futuristic, Activator and Harmony.