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In a rush? Every veterinary team is made up of people who communicate differently. When nobody names those differences, small misunderstandings grow into resentment and superficial harmony. DiSC gives your team a shared language for how each person communicates, and real change happens when you keep practicing that language long after the workshop ends.

“BUt I’ve never been told that…”

If there’s one universal manager experience it is hearing one of your team members say “I’ve never been told that” knowing darn well you were the one that told them that. Don’t worry, your team isn’t intentionally trying to drive you nuts. They simply don’t remember, the memory itself doesn’t exist because hearing a message is vastly different than it resonating.

All the books said, a leader should simply be clear in their instruction. So why do we still have team members who don’t get it? Because everything we’ve given them, the directive, message or lesson, we’ve done so in our own communication language. What truly changes a conversation is understanding why a person communicates the way they do. The coworker who answers in three words may deeply respect your time. The one who asks twelve questions before saying yes may care, more than anyone in the building, about getting it right.

It doesn’t take long on this earth to figure out that everyone has a communication pattern. Underneath every pattern is a person with their own motives, worries, and picture of what a good day at work looks like. Watch people long enough, the way I do, and you start to see past the words to what each person actually cares about.

When Good Veterinary Teams Stop Talking to Each Other

Veterinary medicine is a beautiful mix of people with different personalities, motivations, and paths to the same goal. A CSR, a surgical tech, a kennel assistant, a DVM, and a practice manager all show up every day for the same patients. That’s the magic of our industry.

Those same differences turn into friction when nobody knows how to talk across them. A quick, clipped message reads as rude to someone who values warmth. A three-paragraph text feels overwhelming to someone who only wanted a yes or no. Nobody says anything, so the misunderstanding sits under the skin and snowballs until the tension comes out all at once, usually at the worst possible moment.

Repeat that enough times and you get a culture of superficial harmony. People nod in the team meeting and never follow through. People say one thing, turn around, and roll their eyes. Everyone stays polite, almost nobody is honest, and the team slowly loses sight of why they walked in the door: the patients, the clients, and each other.

Better Team Communication Starts With Knowing Yourself

The fix starts closer to home than most of us expect. How do you communicate when things are calm? What changes when you’re stressed? What do you need from other people, and what are you accidentally asking them to put up with?

I’ll go first, because I usually do. I am not a direct communicator. My messages run long, and sometimes I send two, three, or four texts before you’ve had a chance to answer the first. I’m bubbly, I’m energetic, and I’m almost always the first to volunteer. In my head, I’m taking one for the team, because if I break the ice, it gets easier for everyone else.

Over the years, I realized my ice breaking could overshadow the quieter people in the room. I thought I was helping, when sometimes I was taking up the space they needed. So I built new habits. I invite people into the conversation by name and ask for their opinion directly. Before I hit send on a long text, I ask myself what this person actually needs to know. None of that came naturally. It came from understanding my own patterns and paying attention to what others needed from me.

So, What Is DiSC?

Without talking openly about how we each prefer to communicate, we’re all just guessing. We can watch for patterns and try to decode each other, and some of us get pretty good at it. A shared language gets the whole team there faster, with a lot less guesswork.

That’s why I’m a fan of any well-studied, credible personality or communication tool, including the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The one I use in my workshops is DiSC, and I’m a DiSC Certified Practitioner.

DiSC traces back to psychologist William Moulton Marston, who described four patterns of human behavior in his 1928 book Emotions of Normal People. (Fun fact for your next team trivia night: Marston also created Wonder Woman.) Marston never built an assessment himself. Later researchers turned his theory into a questionnaire, and today the most widely used version is Everything DiSC, published by Wiley. Rather than sorting people into boxes, DiSC describes your natural tendencies, what motivates you, what stresses you, and how to adapt when you work with someone whose style differs from yours.

The Four DiSC Styles in a Veterinary Practice

DiSC describes four core communication styles. Most people are a blend, no style is better than another, and every practice needs all four to run well.

Style	What drives them	How they might show up in your practice	Meet them halfway by
D: Dominance	Results, action, challenge	The lead tech who wants the plan now and the debate later	Leading with the bottom line and keeping it brief
i: Influence	Enthusiasm, collaboration, recognition	The CSR who knows every patient by name and rallies the team	Making room for conversation and celebrating wins out loud
S: Steadiness	Stability, support, harmony	The assistant who quietly covers shifts and notices who’s struggling	Giving time to process change and asking for their input directly
C: Conscientiousness	Accuracy, quality, expertise	The doctor or inventory lead who wants the data before deciding	Bringing details, sources, and time to think

If you guessed from my story that I lean heavily toward the i style, you’re right. Knowing that helps me understand why a long, excited voice memo might land beautifully with one teammate and exhaust another.

Why One Communication Workshop Is Never Enough

In my DiSC workshops, every participant receives a full profile of their communication style, plus guidance for working with each of the other styles. People leave energized and full of aha moments. Then Monday happens.

Here’s the hard truth about communication training: most of us already know what we should say. Under pressure, we revert to what we naturally do. When a client is upset at the front desk, surgery is running long, and two people called out sick, your brain takes the fastest path available. That path is your default, because it’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s what your body knows.

The only way to change a default is practice, out loud, with another person, in a safe space where you can get it wrong without embarrassment. Very few veterinary practice managers ever get that chance. We prioritize medical CE, and we absolutely should. Our teams also need communication CE, woven into the practice through team training, activities, role play, and regular check-ins, so the skills hold up on the hardest day of the week.

Start the Conversation on Your Team This Week

These days, I’m listening for what the person in front of me needs to hear, and why it matters to them. Your team will never all communicate the same way, and that’s exactly what makes it strong. Start small. At your next team meeting, ask everyone how they prefer to receive feedback, bad news, and a quick question on a busy day. Write the answers down, and watch how different they are.

When you’re ready to go deeper, I lead DiSC communication workshops and ongoing team training for veterinary practices, in English and Spanish. Book a free consultation and let’s build a team that says what it means and follows through on what it says