Week two of the LinkedIn Leadership Series is now complete. If you have been following along, thank you! The conversations that have emerged in the comments have been genuinely rich, and a few of them made me pause and think in ways I have found valuable.
If you are reading this for the first time, welcome. This post brings together the four themes I explored this week, each one through the lens of Everything DiSC® and what it means for leaders in practice.
Fail Fast or Fail Smart?
In project management, there is a phrase that gets used a lot: if you fail, fail fast. I wanted to interrogate that because I think it gets misused by leaders who confuse urgency with intention.
Action-oriented leaders are genuinely valuable. Organisations need people who will make a decision and commit to it. But when that drive operates without self-awareness, it creates a very specific kind of wreckage. Projects launched without a baseline. Change initiatives with no stakeholder alignment. Decisions made in the meeting that nobody actually understood.
In Everything DiSC®, the Action priority shows up in leaders who are energised by momentum. The most effective ones I have worked with have learned to pause long enough to ask one question before they accelerate: what are we optimising for?
That question takes ten seconds. It can save ten weeks.
As a PMP certified practitioner who has set up PMOs from the ground up, I have worked with every variety of action-oriented leaders. I have seen this distinction determine the difference between projects that deliver and ones that simply stay busy. Speed is a tool. Intention is the strategy.
Check out my video here:
Energy: Your Most Underused Strategic Asset
Your energy as a leader should not be just a personality trait. In every meeting, every conversation, every room you walk into, people take their emotional cue from you. Whether you realise it or not.
I have been podcasting for a few years now across Rashad in Conversation and Quality Impact. One thing I have noticed is that the episodes that flow most naturally are the ones where the topic itself generates genuine energy and enthusiasm in the conversation. That observation says something important about leadership more broadly.
In Everything DiSC®, Enthusiasm is a recognised priority. But I want to reframe it because in a leadership context, enthusiasm is not about being loud or extroverted. It is about arriving with intention. It is about choosing to bring something generative into the room, even when the context is difficult.
Think about the best leader you have ever worked with. I would be willing to bet that one of the things you remember about them is not their strategy. It is their energy.
The comments on this post generated brilliant exchanges. One reader made the point that a leader’s energy drain often comes from the environment they are operating in: broken processes, missed numbers, systems that do not give them the information they need. My response: the environment sets the conditions, but the internal state determines the response. A leader who is self-aware enough to recognise what is draining them is already halfway to managing it. That is exactly where Everything DiSC® becomes powerful.
You can view the video here: https://youtube.com/shorts/0BQk2s0lv3Q?si=NkQ1-bqoXVw0AsI9
Support: Servant Leadership in Its Truest Form
One of the quietest privileges of my career is mentoring. I mentor Quality practitioners through the Chartered Quality Institute and new project managers through the Project Management Institute. And the thing I notice most consistently; across all conversations, all contexts; is that the people who grow fastest are the ones who felt safe enough to admit what they did not know.
That safety does not happen by accident. It comes from the person sitting across from them creating the conditions for honesty.
In Everything DiSC®, the Support priority shows up in leaders who are approachable, who listen without judgment, and who create the kind of environment where people actually tell you the truth. That is not softness. That is operational intelligence. That is servant leadership in its truest form.
Supportive leadership is not the opposite of high performance. It is one of its foundations.
Conflict: The Governance Problem Nobody Wants to Name
In regulated environments, there is a particular type of risk that rarely makes it onto a risk register. It is not a process failure. It is not a technology gap.
It is the meeting where everyone nodded, and nobody actually agreed.
I have worked across financial services, retail/commercial banking, and health sectors helping organisations optimise regulatory compliance and build quality management standards. One of the most consistent root causes I encounter when things go wrong is not a missing control. It is a conversation that did not happen.
In Everything DiSC®, leaders who avoid conflict are not careless. They are often the most people-conscious people in the room. But in governance-sensitive environments, the cost of that avoidance can be significant. When a risk is not surfaced because someone did not feel safe saying it, that is a leadership environment failing, not a personal one.
A process can only be as strong as the Quality Culture that surrounds it. Creating a culture where difficult truths get said early is one of the most important things a leader can do for organisational resilience.
The comments on this post sparked a healthy debate as well about whether conflict avoidance is a personal trait or a symptom of a poorly designed environment. My view: it is both. And Everything DiSC® helps leaders understand which one they are dealing with — and what to do about it.
Before You Go
Each of these four traits — Fail Fast, Enthusiasm, Support and Conflict — shows up differently depending on how a leader is wired. None of them is better than the others. All of them are necessary. The question is whether the leaders in your organisation understand which ones they naturally lead with, and which ones they need to stretch into.
That is precisely what Everything DiSC® helps uncover. Not as a label, but as a starting point for a much more honest conversation about how we show up for the people we lead.
If these themes are resonating with you, I am opening a small leadership cohort this summer built entirely around the Everything DiSC® Workplace model. Ten places. Designed for senior leaders and ambitious professionals who want to understand how they are wired, and how to lead people who are not wired like them. If you would like to register your interest, get in touch directly.
Week 3 of this series is underway before the cohort opens. Subscribe below if you would like it delivered directly to your inbox.
Which of these four traits do you recognise most in your own leadership right now? Leave a comment below, I read every one.
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