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The Team Building Experience

The Session Ends. The Tools Don't.

A half-day DISC and Values experience that gives a team a shared language for how they work — and a set of live guides they're still using in November. Most team building is a good day. This is a good day your team can keep.

Book a Conversation Open the Actual Tools
Half-day · 4 hours $3,990 in person, up to 10 $2,500 virtual 30-day follow-up included

See the Session

What a Room Looks Like
When It Finally Clicks

Three minutes inside a live DISC team building session — the exercises, the conversations, and the moment a team stops taking their differences personally.

 

95%

of what a team learns in a workshop is gone unless they do something with it.

It isn't a memory problem. It's a design problem — and it's the reason most team building has a shelf life of about three weeks.

You've Done This Before.
Nothing Changed.

Almost every team we meet has already done a personality assessment. Someone took it, got a beautiful PDF, had a few genuine aha moments — and then the PDF went in a drawer. Eight years later they can tell you they're "probably an I," and that's about it.

The insight was never the problem. The problem is that the insight had nowhere to live. There was no tool to open on the Tuesday you had to give someone hard feedback, no place to look up why the person who should be your closest ally is the one you keep colliding with.

So we built the day around what happens after it. Your team leaves with working guides — for the group, and for every relationship inside it — plus a session 30 days later to make sure they're actually being used. Awareness is where this starts. It isn't where it ends.

The Experience

Three Phases,
One Continuous Arc

The half day in the room is the centerpiece — but the work starts two weeks before it and continues for a month after. Every session is tailored to your team; this is the shape it takes.

Phase One

Before the Room

~2 weeks out · 10 minutes per person

  • Two assessments, ten minutes. Everyone completes the DISC Index and the Values Index back to back. We send you a ready-to-forward email with the link and instructions.
  • The Self-Guided Debrief lands immediately. The moment someone finishes, they get a guided video walkthrough of their own results — natural style, adaptive style, top values, growth edges, and an action plan.
  • Reports printed and shipped. A 54-page full-color profile for every participant, plus full-color name tents, delivered to your venue before you arrive.
  • You meet your facilitator. A prep call with you or the session sponsor to walk the team's dynamics and layer in anything happening behind the scenes.
Phase Two

In the Room

Half day · about 4 hours · on site or virtual

  • Everyone's style becomes visible. Name tents carry each person's style into the room, so the conversation starts from something the whole team can see.
  • Interactive, on your feet. We line the team up highest to lowest on a dimension and let them look down the row. Predictable friction stops being an accusation and becomes a pattern.
  • DISC first, Values underneath. Behavior explains how people show up. Values explain why they care — and why two capable people keep having the same argument.
  • Applied, not theoretical. Real conversations your team is actually facing, worked live using the Three Golden Questions™.
Phase Three

After the Room

Day one onward · 30-day session included

  • The Team Guide goes live. Your team's map, compatibility scores, tension pairs, meeting design, and per-member guidance — available the next morning and every morning after.
  • 1:1 Communication Guides for every pairing. Anyone on the team can open a guide for any relationship on the team, in either direction.
  • A 50-minute session 30 days later. Included in the price. What's working, what's being used, what changed — and it's how anyone who missed the live session gets folded in.
  • An AI coach that knows the team. Built into the guides, so "how do I deliver this news to Dawn" gets an answer, not a framework.

What Your Team Keeps

Don't Take Our Word
For It. Open Them.

These are the actual tools, running on a real sample team. Every link below opens the live product — not a screenshot, not a brochure. Click into Mary's team and look around.

Meet Mary Cross. Mary leads a six-person team with a deliberately wide spread of styles — she's a fast-moving, highly extroverted D/I leader, and two of her direct reports are close to her opposite. It's the pattern we see most often, and it makes the guidance easy to follow. Every link below is loaded with Mary's own results, and each opens in a new tab.

The Team Guide

Included with every session

The only view that treats the team as the unit of analysis. Composition, average compatibility, the pairs most likely to misread each other, and how to design a meeting for the people actually in the room.

  • DISC field of play — the whole team on one map
  • Compatibility scores and flagged tension pairs
  • Leader mode — the team read against the leader's profile
  • Duo Mode — compare any two people side by side
  • Meeting facilitation by type: decision, brainstorm, status
Open Mary's team When you lead the room

1:1 Communication Guides

Included with every session

The tool managers reach for most, because it answers the question they actually have: what do I say to this person, about this thing, right now. Generated for a specific pairing and a specific direction.

  • Both profiles side by side, with the largest gap named
  • Conversation, conflict, delegation, feedback, recognition
  • Leader, Peer, or Direct Report — the guidance changes
  • Reverse the relationship to see it from their side
  • Its own shareable link for the pair to work from
Open Mary → David When you have one person to reach

Self-Guided Debrief

Every participant, immediately

Nobody waits for the session to understand their own results. Minutes after finishing the assessment, each person gets a guided video walkthrough of their own profile, section by section.

  • Natural style versus adaptive style, and what the gap costs
  • Top values drivers explained in their own terms
  • Growth edges and a personal action plan
  • A share link — including a free assessment for a partner or colleague
Open Mary's debrief Before the session even starts

Understanding Values

The motivation layer

DISC explains how someone shows up. Values explain why they care. All seven Spranger drivers — what each person is looking for, what stresses them, and the language that actually lands.

  • All seven drivers, with a personalized view of your own
  • What they're looking for and what drains them
  • Words That Work — the fastest usable output in the toolkit
  • Prints clean as a live-session handout
Open Mary's drivers When behavior isn't the problem

DISC Leader

Reading the room live

Most of the people your team needs to reach have never taken an assessment. This is how you read a style from tone, pace, and what someone asks for in the first two minutes — then adapt on the spot.

  • Field cards for all four styles — tone, pace, body language
  • Leader handouts: start from your style, adapt to theirs
  • Connect → Engage → Succeed on every handout
  • Print view for client calls, interviews, and negotiations
Open Mary's handout When you have no data on them

Engagement Prep Worksheet

For the conversation that matters

The Three Golden Questions™ as a fillable worksheet — the one tool you complete yourself. Set both styles and the Style Bridge generates automatically, then you write the actual plan and take the PDF into the room.

  • Who am I · Who am I connecting with · How do I engage
  • Auto-generated Style Bridge for that specific pairing
  • Words That Work and Words That Don't
  • Download as PDF and review it afterward against what happened

To follow along as Mary, select D and I as your own style.

Open the worksheet When you can't afford to improvise
Built into the guides

An AI Coach That Already Knows Your Team

It has the profiles loaded — every style, every values driver, every flagged tension pair. You don't describe your team to it. You describe your situation, and it answers through both people's wiring, with words you could actually say out loud. Names are replaced with aliases before anything is processed and restored in the response.

See 20 ways teams use it

"I have to tell Dawn her work is slipping and I've been avoiding it for three weeks. How do I open it?"

It answers knowing that you move fast and lead with the headline, that Dawn needs the context before the correction, and that a cushioned opener will read to her as evasion rather than kindness. Then it gives you the first two sentences.

Beyond DISC

Behavior Is Only
Half the Story

Everyone knows DISC. Fewer teams know that DISC only describes what's observable — and that the conflicts that never resolve are almost always sitting underneath it.

D

Decisive

Drives for results, moves fast, cuts through ambiguity. Can steamroll under pressure.

I

Interactive

Energizes the room, builds buy-in, thinks out loud. Can skip the detail and the hard conversation.

S

Stabilizing

Patient, loyal, steady. Creates safety — and may absorb far too much without ever saying so.

C

Cautious

Analytical, precise, high standards. Catches what others miss, and slows when certainty is out of reach.

Why We Always Pair It With Values

DISC is observable. You can watch someone's pace and read their style across a table. The Values Index measures something you can't see at all — the seven Spranger drivers underneath the behavior, and what each person is actually optimizing for.

It matters because two people can adapt their pace inside a single meeting. They cannot adapt what they fundamentally care about. When a conflict keeps resurfacing between two capable people, it is almost never a behavior gap. It's a values collision being argued as a process disagreement.

Here's the example we see constantly in people and culture teams. Two drivers predict high performance in an HR role — and the team almost always has one of each.

Altruistic

The drive to help and serve

The reason a lot of people are in HR at all. They're optimizing for the human on the other side of the decision, and they'll spend themselves down to do it.

Regulatory

The drive to create structure and order

Builds the systems that make an organization work. Their stressor is specific and easy to trip: opposition to their beliefs.

So when someone challenges the system directly, they push back — and the only person who can genuinely unwind that belief is them. Which means you don't argue. You ask a question and let them rebuild it, because building the new system is exactly what they're good at.

Two people who should be natural allies, locked in the same argument for years. Neither of them is difficult. Nobody has ever named the mechanism out loud. That's the conversation this session makes possible — and DISC alone will never get you there.

The Framework

Retire the Golden Rule

Ask a room how they were taught to communicate and you'll get one of two answers: treat people the way you want to be treated, or respect. Both have the same flaw — you can only define them through your own lens. The Three Golden Questions™ replace that with something you can actually act on.

QUESTION 01 · CONNECT

Who am I?

My style, my drivers, what I default to under pressure — and where that default costs me. The only person in this interaction I control.

QUESTION 02 · ENGAGE

Who am I trying to connect with?

Their style, their drivers, what they need to hear before they can hear anything else. Read the receiver, not the sender.

QUESTION 03 · SUCCEED

How can I engage to succeed?

The move. Knowing what I know about both of us, what is the one adjustment I'm going to make — and did it work?

How We Facilitate

There's No Right.
There's No Wrong.
We're Just Different.

We say that at the start of every session and we come back to it all day, because DISC is genuinely easy to misuse — and when it's badly facilitated, someone walks out of the room feeling like the odd one out. We've met people who were quietly ashamed of their own results for years afterward.

That's a facilitation failure, not an assessment failure. Every style is a strength. Every style has a cost. A team that only understands the strengths hasn't learned anything useful, and a team that only hears the costs won't come back. Nobody leaves our room as the cautionary tale.

You meet your facilitator first

A prep call before the session to walk the team's dynamics and hear anything happening in the background we should be handling carefully.

We adapt to your culture

Down to the examples we use and how we show up. If a suit and tie is the wrong signal for your team, tell us — we'd rather know than guess.

Differences get celebrated, not diagnosed

Predictable friction is exactly that — predictable. Naming the pattern out loud is what stops a team from taking it personally.

Nobody gets put in a box

DISC is a language for how people communicate, not a label for who they are. Pairing it with Values is part of how we keep it that way.

Investment

All In. No Surprises.

Travel, materials, printing, shipping, the assessments, and the 30-day follow-up are all inside the number. If we don't have a local facilitator, that's our problem — there's no variable travel line.

In Person · Recommended

$3,990

Half-day session for a team of up to 10, anywhere in the country.

All inclusive — facilitator travel, printed 54-page profiles, name tents, and materials shipped to your venue.

Virtual

$2,500

The same half-day experience, delivered live and online.

In person is the better experience — but if the team is distributed, run it fully virtual rather than hybrid.

Additional People

$197

Per person beyond the first 10, in either format.

You don't need a final headcount to start. Confirm numbers about 30 days out.

Every session includes

  • DISC Index and Values Index for every participant — about 10 minutes to complete both
  • A 54-page full-color profile per person, printed and shipped for in-person sessions
  • The Self-Guided Debrief — a guided video walkthrough the moment they finish
  • Full-color name tents so every style is visible in the room
  • A facilitator prep call with you or the session sponsor beforehand
  • The half-day facilitated session, tailored to your team and your context
  • Your Team Guide, live and available the next morning
  • 1:1 Communication Guides for every relationship on the team
  • A 50-minute follow-up session about 30 days later — included, not an add-on
  • Facilitator travel and all materials — no separate expense line

If It Works, It Spreads

Where Teams Take It Next

Neither of these is required, and neither is part of the session price. But most clients start with one team, and this is where they tend to go from there.

Questions

The Things Everyone Asks

Do you travel to us, or do we come to you?

We travel to you, and it's already in the price. Charlotte, Durham, D.C., Minneapolis, wherever the offsite lands — there's no separate travel line and no variable expense to budget for.

Will we meet our facilitator before the session?

Yes. Once assessments are complete, your facilitator gets on a call with you or whoever is sponsoring the session. We walk what we're seeing in the team's dynamics and you tell us anything happening in the background we should handle carefully. It's one of the reasons the room works.

Do I need a final headcount to get started?

No. The proposal quotes a team of up to 10 plus a per-person rate above that, so you can move forward before the number is settled. We typically confirm about 30 days out.

Is the 30-day follow-up an extra cost?

It's included. About 30 days after the session we run a 50-minute virtual session with the team — what's being used, what's shifted, what's still hard. It's optional, but it's the single biggest factor in whether any of this is still alive six months later.

What if someone can't attend the live session?

Have them take the assessment anyway. Their results still appear on the team map, their teammates still get communication guides for working with them, and we can do a short individual catch-up. The 30-day follow-up is a natural place to fold them in properly.

How long do the assessments take?

About 10 minutes for both, taken back to back. We ask people to do it when they're relaxed and not juggling five other things, and to go with their gut rather than overthinking it. We'll send you a ready-to-forward email with the link and instructions.

I took DISC years ago. Will my results have changed?

Your natural style is generally stable — if something is very high, it's usually been that way since you were seven or seventeen. It can shift if you've moved into an environment that demands something significantly different. Your adaptive style is a different matter; that reflects what your current situation is asking of you, and it moves.

In person, virtual, or hybrid?

In person is meaningfully better — the interactive exercises are physical, and the room does work that a grid of faces can't. We run virtual sessions all the time and they're good. We'd steer you away from hybrid: pick one and commit, because split rooms consistently produce a worse experience for the people who dialed in.

How big can the group be?

The half-day format is built around teams of roughly 5 to 25, which is where the interactive work lands hardest. We facilitate for much larger groups — up to 200 and beyond at conferences and all-hands events — with a format tailored accordingly. Tell us the group and we'll tell you what we'd recommend.

Can this be part of a retreat or offsite we're already planning?

That's most of what we do. A half day slots into a full-day agenda and leaves the rest of your time more productive, because the team spends the afternoon working through their real agenda with a shared language they didn't have that morning.

Tell Us About
Your Team

Size, context, timing, what's actually going on. We'll come back with a session that fits — and if we're not the right call for what you're facing, we'll tell you that too. Institute Success™ has facilitated this for teams across nearly every industry, and the first conversation costs you nothing but the half hour.

Book a Conversation Send Us a Note

$3,990 in person, up to 10 people · $2,500 virtual · $197 each additional · 30-day follow-up included