Glossary
Management terms, explained without detours
Management and coaching vocabulary is full of words that sound precise and are used loosely. These are the definitions we work from.
- DISCDISC assessment · DISC profile
DISC is a behavioural model describing four preferences (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness) used to understand how someone tends to communicate and decide at work.
DISC describes behaviour rather than personality, and describes it in a working context specifically. It is deliberately simple: four preferences, observable in a meeting, usable within minutes of meeting someone.
Its value is practical rather than diagnostic. Knowing that a counterpart prefers conclusions before detail changes how you open a conversation. It does not tell you what they are like as a person, and treating a profile as a verdict is the most common way DISC is misused.
In Seychelles it is most often brought in for a mixed team: Seychellois staff working with managers recruited abroad, where a direct manner gets read as rudeness and a reserved one as disengagement. DISC separates style from nationality, which is a distinction worth having in a workplace that mixes both by default.
- EnneagramEnneagram of personality
The Enneagram is a model of nine personality patterns, each defined by a core motivation and a core fear. It describes why someone acts, where a behavioural model describes how.
Two people can behave almost identically for opposite reasons: one avoiding failure, the other pursuing recognition. The Enneagram addresses that layer, which is why it is used alongside DISC rather than instead of it.
It is not a psychometric instrument and has not been validated as one. We use it as a structured way to think about motivation and to have a more useful conversation, and we say so in the room rather than overclaiming.
The motivation layer matters more where a manager cannot reshuffle the team. On a small island the same eight to fifteen people are in the room next year too, so understanding why a colleague reacts as they do is usually more practical than waiting for the composition to change.
- Peer coaching circleCodevelopment · Co-development
A peer coaching circle is a small group of managers who meet regularly and work on one member’s real problem per session, under a structure that forbids premature advice.
The structure is what makes it work. Left alone, a group of managers given a colleague’s problem will offer solutions within ninety seconds, usually to a problem they have misunderstood. The format forces a phase of clarifying questions first, and the reformulation that follows frequently changes what the problem was.
Circles can eventually run without a facilitator, which is the point of them.
The format suits a market where managers are isolated in their role. A head of department in a single-property hotel has no peer in the same job to compare notes with, and a circle drawn from several employers gives them one, provided the group is chosen so that no two members are direct competitors.
- Proximity bias
Proximity bias is the tendency to favour colleagues who are physically present (in visibility, in opportunities and in performance assessment) over equally performing colleagues who are remote.
It operates without intent, which is what makes it persistent. Work gets assigned to whoever is in the corridor; informal information circulates among whoever is in the room; and assessment quietly rewards observed effort over delivered output.
The correction is procedural rather than attitudinal. Deciding in advance how work is allocated and how performance is evidenced removes most of the effect, where resolving to be fairer removes almost none of it.
Here the distance is usually a boat rather than a home office. A team split between Mahe and Praslin produces the effect in its strongest form: the manager sees one half daily and the other monthly, and opportunities follow visibility unless the allocation rule is written down first.
- Situational leadership
Situational leadership is the practice of varying how much direction and how much support you give according to a person’s readiness for a specific task, rather than managing everyone the same way.
Readiness is task-specific, not person-specific: the same experienced colleague may need close direction on something unfamiliar and none at all on their core work. Managers who treat readiness as a fixed property of the person get this consistently wrong in both directions.
Competence and confidence are also separate. Someone can be fully capable and still need support, and the response to that is not more instruction.
Seasonality complicates the reading. The same person may be fully autonomous in low season and need close direction through a peak with unfamiliar volumes and new temporary staff around them. Readiness is task-specific, and in a tourism economy the task changes twice a year.
- Team coaching
Team coaching is facilitated work with an intact team over several months, aimed at changing how the group operates rather than resolving one question or teaching one method.
It differs from training, which teaches a method, and from a seminar, which settles a question in one or two days. Team coaching targets habits: how the group decides, disagrees, and escalates.
Because habits change slowly, the format requires spacing. Sessions sit four to six weeks apart, and the work between them matters more than the sessions themselves.
Scheduling is the practical constraint in Seychelles. Sessions spaced four to six weeks apart run into the peak season, where they get cancelled one by one, so engagements are normally started so that the sequence finishes before the operation fills up.