Developing High-Performing People and Teams: How Everything DiSC® and Intercultural Agility Work Together

In a world of increasingly interconnected teams, leaders and organizations are recognizing that personal, leadership, and team effectiveness must go far beyond technical skill. The most successful teams are those that understand why people think, speak, and act the way they do, and how to adapt across cultures.

That’s why combining the Everything DiSC® suite of assessments with KnowledgeWorkx’s Intercultural Agility framework creates a powerful, future-ready ecosystem for developing high-performing intercultural teams.

1. The Six Everything DiSC® Assessments: Understanding Human Behavior

The Everything DiSC® family of assessments provides six distinct lenses for exploring human behavior. Each build on the simple, powerful DiSC model (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness) to help people understand themselves and others.

• Workplace – Helps individuals build better relationships and increase collaboration across different working styles.

• Management – Equips managers to adapt their leadership approach to motivate, direct, and develop their teams more effectively.

• Work of Leaders – Focuses on how leaders create Vision, Alignment, and Execution to achieve tangible outcomes.

• Sales – Enables sales professionals to better understand customer priorities and connect authentically across styles.

• Agile EQ™ – Develops emotional intelligence and helps people flex their responses to meet the needs of any situation.

• Productive Conflict – Turns differences and disagreements into opportunities for innovation and stronger relationships.

Together, these six assessments give individuals, managers, and teams the insight and language to communicate, collaborate, and perform better. But to unlock their full potential, especially in multicultural and global contexts, they need to be integrated with Intercultural Agility.

2. The KnowledgeWorkx Intercultural Agility Framework

   
   

Everything DiSC® provides clarity about how people behave. KnowledgeWorkx’s Intercultural Agility (IA) framework adds depth to understand why they behave that way—and how to adapt effectively across cultural and contextual differences.

The IA framework focuses on three crucial skill areas:

1. Perception Management – Slowing down to see, hear, and interpret more accurately across cultural and relational boundaries.

2. Self-Management – Becoming aware of personal cultural wiring and managing the biases, triggers, and assumptions that influence behavior.

3. Relationship Management – Co-creating a “third cultural space” where people of different backgrounds can collaborate successfully and respectfully.

When DiSC insights are applied through these lenses, individuals move beyond personality awareness into contextual agility; the ability to read a situation, adapt behavior, and build trust in diverse teams and environments.

The Three Colors of Worldview: Illuminating Cultural Drivers

KnowledgeWorkx’s Three Colors of Worldview (Honor/Shame, Innocence/Guilt, and Power/Fear) provide a deeper understanding of what motivates people in different contexts.

• Honor/Shame (H/S) focuses on doing what brings honor and maintains relationships.

• Innocence/Guilt (I/G) emphasizes doing what is right and just.

• Power/Fear (P/F) centers on maintaining influence and control to ensure safety and stability.

These worldview drivers influence how people interpret behavior and respond to leadership, conflict, and communication. For example, a leader with a high “D” DiSC style (direct and results-focused) might be admired for decisiveness in an Innocence/Guilt culture—but may be perceived as disrespectful or dishonorable in a strong Honor/Shame culture.

By integrating Everything DiSC® with the Three Colors of Worldview, teams gain behavioral clarity and cultural empathy. They begin to understand both what they observe and why it matters in context.

The 12 Dimensions of Culture: Applying Insight to Action

KnowledgeWorkx’s Cultural Mapping Inventory (CMi) breaks cultural behavior into 12 observable dimensions, such as:

• Direct vs. Indirect Communication

• People vs. Time Orientation

• Community vs. Individual Accountability

• Relationship vs. Rules Decision-Making

These dimensions help teams diagnose their own “cultural DNA.” When combined with Everything DiSC®, they reveal how behavior shows up differently across cultures and guide people to flex their approach accordingly.

Imagine a team where members understand their DiSC styles and can see how their decision-making or accountability preferences are shaped by culture. Suddenly, what used to cause misunderstanding becomes a strength, because differences are seen, named, and leveraged intentionally.

Building High-Performing Intercultural Teams

KnowledgeWorkx research identifies Four Pillars of a High-Performing Intercultural Team (HPIT):

1. Building high levels of trust

2. Overcoming communication barriers

3. Establishing common purpose

4. Developing relational strength

Everything DiSC® gives people the tools to adapt behavior within these four pillars, while the KnowledgeWorkx framework ensures those adaptations are culturally intelligent and contextually resonant. The result? A team culture that is behaviorally aligned, interculturally informed, and relationally strong.

The KnowledgeWorkx white paper unpacking the High Performing Intercultural Team methodology notes:

“The foundation for a high-performing intercultural team is accurately diagnosing the human terrain; understanding the interpersonal and intercultural dynamics that shape behavior.”

When teams combine DiSC behavioral insight with intercultural awareness, they don’t just work better; they think, connect, and create together more effectively.

Why KnowledgeWorkx’s Everything DiSC® Certification is Unique

The KnowledgeWorkx “Intercultural Agility Informed” Everything DiSC® Certification equips facilitators to apply DiSC in diverse, global contexts.

Participants gain:

• Mastery of DiSC facilitation tools and Catalyst technology.

• Deeper understanding of cultural frameworks that influence behavior.

• The ability to build and sustain a culture of DiSC within intercultural organizations.

This certification helps practitioners move beyond standard delivery into culturally intelligent facilitation, where every DiSC experience is contextualized to real-world, intercultural dynamics.

 When the six Everything DiSC assessments are integrated with KnowledgeWorkx’s Intercultural Agility tools, they create a holistic system for growth. Below are two examples of team journeys with an integrated approach to development.

Case study 1:

The team recognized they needed to develop their people skills to navigate high levels of ambiguity and change. They were an intercultural team and wanted to know if we could integrate cultural, EQ and behavioral style insights into a process that would take the team to the next level. We designed an 8-month journey that included several in-person workshops, selected personal coaching for some team members and virtual check-ins to ensure the development process would stay on track. This approach created a powerful and holistic development journey that took each individual and the whole team to new levels of relational and organizational performance:

Tool	Focus	Contribution
Everything DiSC®	Behavioral preferences	Builds self- and other awareness
Agile EQ™	Emotional flexibility	Develops adaptive EQ mindsets
Perception Management	Contextual awareness	Expands intercultural sensitivity
Three Colors of Worldview	Cultural Motivation Drivers	Understanding the why of cultural behavior and how to stretch interculturally
12 Dimensions of Culture (CMi)	Observable Cultural Behaviors	A neutral language to talk about and adjust to cultural behavioral preferences
HPIT Framework	Team alignment	Sustains intercultural collaboration and developed High Performance Team Culture

Together, they equip leaders and teams to thrive in the global workplace—with agility, empathy, and purpose.

Case Study 2:

Recently we started a leadership team development journey where the team recognized they needed both the intercultural and interpersonal skills to develop themselves, the culture of the leadership team and the teams reporting to them. The journey stretched over 18 months with a gradual and steady development journey that included in-person off-sites, virtual quarterly check-ins, monthly mini-accountability group meetings with three leaders and personal development objectives. The impact was profound with strong Interpersonal and intercultural skills development, growth in high-performance leadership culture, reduction in the cycle-time for resolving challenges and deploying Interculturally Agile solutions and the emergence of a clearly understood and celebrated leadership culture. The team had one of the highest scores on the employee engagement survey in their global organization. Here are the tools we used on this journey:

Tool	Focus	Contribution
Everything DiSC Work of Leaders (WOL)	Strategic Leadership Strength	Aligning leadership growth with implementation of strategic business objectives
Everything DiSC Work of Leaders Group Report	Assessing team strengths and challenges	Identify team gaps, align leadership disciplines, and build resilient leadership culture
High Performing Intercultural Team (HPIT) Framework	Structured way of building team culture	Sustains intercultural collaboration and developed High Performance Team Culture
Three Colors of Worldview & Everything DiSC Productive Conflict	How to navigate conflict	Understanding the Intercultural and interpersonal WHY of conflict & design new strategies
12 Dimensions of Culture (CMi)	Focus on dimensions that impact conflict	A neutral language to talk about and adjust to cultural behavioral preferences related to conflict
Perception Management Tools	Rewire culturally defined “Default Mode Networks” of our brain	Slow down and gather the information needed to gain perspective, enhance collaboration & decision making

Ready to Build Agility into Your Team?

The future belongs to leaders and organizations that combine behavioral agility with intercultural intelligence. Everything DiSC® and KnowledgeWorkx’s frameworks offer the tools to make that a reality.

 Two Ways to Begin:

• Bring Everything DiSC® to your team — Develop self-awareness, adaptability, and trust.

• Join our “Intercultural Agility Informed” DiSC Certification — Become a Certified DiSC Practitioner equipped to lead change across cultures.

Let’s Talk

Click this link to start a conversation with us!

Learn more about the ICI Certification here: https://www.interculturalagility.com/ia-certification

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Over the last 20 years, KnowledgeWorkx has developed solutions that are global, locally relevant, holistic, and practical. Our innovative approach delivers more accurate analysis, which results in integrated and more effective solutions. Our solutions create a progressive and natural connection between national, personal, team, and organizational culture.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.