Reflecting on Leadership Using Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™
- Fern Beauchamp
- Jan 18
- 8 min read
Updated: Jan 19
Leadership styles are not fixed; they evolve with you.
Every day, there are tough decisions to make and difficult conversations to have, and the way you showed up yesterday won’t necessarily work tomorrow.
Leaders who thrive aren’t the ones clinging to the same old script, but the ones who keep asking...
How is my behaviour shaping the workplace and team culture around me?
Tools like Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™ give you a practical way to explore this question, helping you see not just what you do, but the emotional and relational patterns that sit underneath your decisions and reactions.
The clearer your view of your habits, emotional patterns, and relational preferences, the more deliberately you can choose how to respond.
This article dives into reflecting on leadership using Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™, understanding the mindsets it reveals, and how you can use it to lead with greater emotional agility and impact.
Contents
What Is the DiSC® model?
Used by over a million people annually, DiSC® is a research-validated online behavioural assessment tool that classifies personality into four main quadrants. Each DiSC style holds equal value, and every individual is a combination of all four styles.
Its goal is to improve workplace culture, collaboration, and workplace relationships.
Dominance (D): Results-oriented, direct, and competitive. Characterised as proactive and inquisitive.
Influence (i): Enthusiastic, outgoing, and convincing. Generally active and open.
Steadiness (S): Reliable, patient, and cooperative. Generally considerate and open-minded.
Conscientiousness (C): Analytical, meticulous, and methodical. Typically reflective and inquisitive.
What Is Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™?
Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™ uses the same core DiSC assessment to identify your personality style (D, i, S, or C) and is a specialised application of DiSC designed to develop emotional intelligence (EQ).
DiSC theory describes behavioural preferences – how you tend to approach tasks, make decisions, and interact with others. Traditional DiSC focuses on patterns of behaviour – what people can notice in your actions.
Emotional intelligence (EQ) focuses on how you recognise, understand, and manage emotions – both your own and those of others. Agile EQ™ adds a layer of emotional insight, showing how you move between different mindsets depending on your level of comfort, energy, and context.
When combined, they create something more powerful.
The assessment provides a view of your emotional agility (Agile EQ) – your ability to read emotional and social cues and flex your response accordingly.
The model helps you identify:
Your comfort zones – the emotional mindsets that feel natural.
Your growth zones – the mindsets that require conscious effort.
How you can apply emotional flexibility to lead with greater intention.
It’s not about fixing who you are; it’s about expanding your range.
What Are the 8 Agile EQ™ Mindsets?
Emotional intelligence is a learnable soft skill.
Agile EQ™ identifies eight distinct mindsets that sit around the classic DiSC model (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness) and associated behavioural tendencies. These mindsets are not personality types but approaches to employee engagement.
Each mindset represents a different emotional stance or way of interacting with people and tasks.
None are better or worse; each has value depending on context.
Here’s a quick tour:
Resolute: Strong-willed, clear, and persistent. Stays true to priorities and pushes through challenges.
Self-Assured: Confident, composed, and steady under pressure. Projects calm authority.
Dynamic: Energetic, bold, and ready to act. Injects momentum and enthusiasm into teams.
Outgoing: Warm, friendly, and expressive. Builds energy and connection through relationships.
Empathising: Compassionate, supportive, and emotionally attuned to others. Creates psychological safety.
Receptive: Thoughtful, curious, and open to diverse perspectives. Pauses to reflect and gather insight.
Composed: Steady and grounded. Balances change with consistency, creating calm in uncertain environments.
Objective: Rational and analytic. Cuts through emotion to focus on data, logic, and evidence.
Most of us have one or two mindsets that feel like “home”. These are the spaces where we operate with ease and confidence.
Some mindsets require more effort and may feel tiring or unnatural – not because they’re unattainable, but because they draw on different emotional muscles. These are stretch zones.
Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™ invites you to explore both your natural and stretch mindsets so that your leadership becomes more conscious rather than reactive and habitual.
For example, a leader who defaults to a Dynamic mindset – acting quickly and driving progress – might need to stretch into Receptive behaviour during times of conflict or uncertainty. Likewise, a primarily Empathising leader may benefit from learning how to tap the Resolute mindset when decisive direction is required.
Agile EQ™ helps you name those patterns and expand your repertoire. It’s less about transformation and more about reflection, awareness of self and others, and responding to people or situations with more intention.
Why Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™ Is Useful
Leadership depends on agility and emotional intelligence as much as on strategy.
Results matter, but how you show up in moments of tension, uncertainty, or opportunity often has the greatest impact on the outcome.
A 2023 study analysed 104 studies on emotional intelligence (EI), leadership, and teams conducted between 1998 and 2022. It found that leaders with high emotional intelligence enhance behaviours, business outcomes, team performance, and team members' attitudes.
Leaders move between competing demands: decisiveness and empathy, speed and reflection, confidence and curiosity. Those who can mentally and emotionally shift gears navigate complexity better than those locked into one habitual mode.
Using Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™ can be useful because it helps leaders:
Increase self-awareness. You begin to see your automatic patterns – how you respond under pressure, what drains you, and where you shine. That self-management is the foundation of emotional intelligence and better decision-making.
Build emotional flexibility. You can consciously shift gears – from decisive to reflective, from directive to empathetic – depending on what the moment needs.
Enhance communication and collaboration. Recognising others’ emotional mindsets helps you build empathy and tailor your style to strengthen trust.
Grow balanced resilience. Emotional agility prevents over-reliance on one mindset. Instead of pushing harder in your natural style, you learn to flex intelligently.
Role-model behaviours. When leaders demonstrate empathy, vulnerability and flexibility, their teams unconsciously pick up those cues. Psychological safety, workplace culture and collective performance improve.
Everything DiSC Agile EQ leadership is, in essence, a framework for managing the inner space between stimulus and response. That space – your pause point of awareness – determines the impact of your leadership.
7 Actions To Maximise Your Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™
Reflecting on Leadership Using Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™
OK, so you've done the online assessment, and you now have a 26-page report in your hands...so, what are practical ways to build emotional agility as a leader?
Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™ works best when treated as a reflective leadership development tool rather than a personality profile. Be curious, not judgemental.
🚀 Start with self-reflection
What feels true and what surprises you? You may recognise mindsets where you feel “at home” and those that make you uncomfortable. What initial action do you want to take?
😎 Use what is useful
Ignore parts of the report that don't resonate. Reflect on what's useful. Psychometric assessments are not a truth about you - they are just a reflection tool.
💥 Apply Agile EQ to everyday leadership
What situations bring out your natural mindset? When does your stretch zone show up? Awareness is built in real time – in meetings, during feedback, or under conflict.
🤔 Choose one stretch mindset to experiment with
Don’t try to be agile everywhere at once. Identify a mindset that could expand your impact. Experiment with behaviours that reflect that stance – for example, pausing before responding, or taking decisive action instead of over-analysing.
💭 Build the critical leadership skill of reflection
Reflect regularly. Change happens gradually and deliberately through increased self-awareness and repetition. After key conversations or challenges, ask: Which mindset did I lean on? Would another have served better?
🔗 Link it to leadership habits
Map the situation to the mindset that fits best. Planning meetings may require 'Objective' thinking; conflict mediation might need 'Receptive' or 'Empathising' mindsets.
💬 Reflect with colleagues
Share your reflections. Our flagship Leadership Group Coaching Programme EMPOWER creates spaces for leaders to exchange and learn from each other. You can create your own peer-coaching circles to learn together. Normalising language around mindsets helps others open up too.
By keeping these steps alive in everyday conversations and decisions, Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™ leadership becomes less of a report and more of a conscious practice in building emotional EQ muscles. Over time, your emotional agility improves – you catch your emotional triggers more often, and choose your responses more intentionally.
If you are feeling overwhelmed with the day-to-day and wondering how to make time for even reflecting on this... check out "No Time for Leadership Development?" Six Strategies To Get the Most out of It
What Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™ Is Not
Tools like Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™ are highly useful tools, but they're often misunderstood. To get real value, treat your profile as a starting point, not a verdict.
A few reminders worth keeping in mind:
🔔 See it as a snapshot, not a script.
The report or model describes your preferences at a given moment, not a fixed truth about your personality. Humans are inherently dynamic.
🔔 Avoid labelling yourself or others.
Phrases like “I’m a D” flatten complexity. Two people with the same "D" result will be completely different. Use the language to understand, not to pigeonhole people.
🔔 Don’t confuse comfort with competence.
Just because a mindset feels natural doesn’t mean it’s always the right one for the moment. Weaknesses are often overused strengths. Leadership development happens in the stretch zone.
🔔 Use insight for empathy, not advantage.
Understanding someone’s mindset gives you context for support, not control. It should build compassion, not manipulation.
🔔 Don’t stop at insight.
Awareness is only useful when it leads to action. Reflection is valuable, but application makes it a leadership practice.
By holding these cautions in mind, you preserve the spirit of Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™ leadership – as an enabling, human-centred approach, not a classification system.
Building an Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™ Culture
When emotional agility becomes a shared language within a team and organisation, team culture changes - reflected in our top workplace culture statistics. People understand each other not only through roles and projects but also as humans at work.
In an Agile EQ–aware culture:
Reflection replaces knee-jerk reactions.
Teams pause before responding in frustration. They get curious and ask better questions tuned to the emotional tone in a situation. People can name behaviours (“I noticed I was in a Resolute space there; maybe I could have been more Receptive”) without defensiveness.
Diverse thinking drive better outcomes.
Instead of tension between decisive and cautious voices, teams come to value divergent and convergent thinking, understanding that diverse thinking drives better outcomes.
Leadership pipelines strengthen.
When emotional intelligence is seen as a soft skill rather than an innate trait, new managers gain pathways for developmental growth beyond technical competence.
In an Agile EQ™ culture, emotional intelligence is the norm.
Final Thoughts
Reflecting on your leadership style through Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™ is less about defining who you are than expanding who you can be. Every mindset carries strength, and the art of emotionally intelligent leadership lies in knowing which one serves best in each moment.
And that’s where leadership becomes truly human.
➡️ Ready to develop your emotional agility?
Many of our leadership development programmes include the Everything DiSC® Agile EQ™ self-assessment. Check out our services for organisations, including leadership group coaching and 1:1 coaching for first-time managers, middle managers, women, neurodiverse leaders, and senior leaders.
