Coaching a client through a style clash on their team
This is for you if a client keeps grating with one colleague and has decided the problem is who they are. "She's controlling." "He doesn't care." You want to show them it's two working styles colliding, not a flaw in either.
When character feels fixed, pinning a clash on it keeps everyone stuck. Read it as two working styles meeting, and the friction becomes a difference to plan around. That reframe is the whole session. You need a read on both styles first.
- Name the clash concretely. The recurring moment: the meeting that goes sideways, the handoff that lands wrong. Then the story your client tells: "he's careless," "she controls everything."
- Open both working styles. In your client's Understanding Styles, name their style: Accelerator, Analyst, Harmonizer, or Pragmatist. Then the other person's, from their results or what you both see. That section, "Working with the other styles," shows how each one builds trust, decides, and handles conflict.
- Read the clash through both styles. An Accelerator moving fast looks reckless to an Analyst who needs to be sure. The Analyst's questions look like foot-dragging back. Same moment, two wirings, no villain.
- Draw the reframe out. Ask, don't tell. "If this were about how they're wired, not who they are, what would you see?" The shift from character to style has to be theirs.
- Land on one translated move. One thing the client will do differently, in the other person's style. With an Analyst: "Before I push for a decision, I'll walk you through my reasoning." Cue it to the moment from step one.
The client leaves with a two-style map and one move for next time. If the real block is what the client can't see about their part, that's a different move: overlay both results and work that blind spot.
Coaching questions
This isn't a worksheet to run in order. Once your client sees two styles instead of a verdict, pull whatever fits.
Seeing the difference
- What have you read as a character flaw that might just be how they're wired?
- When you're fully in your own style, how might it land on someone wired the opposite way?
- Where does their way of working cover something yours tends to miss?
Working the pairing
- What does this person need to trust a decision, that you tend to skip past?
- Where do you both want the same thing and just get there differently?
- What would meeting them halfway on pace, but not on substance, look like?
Moving to a plan
- What could you say in their style the next time it gets tense?
- How would you know you two were starting to click?
- Who else grates on you like this, and is it the same style meeting yours?
