Employee Enhancement and DISC profile
DISC is one of the most popular methods of personality testing and assessment in use today. Based on the answers to a simple questionnaire, it can describe a personality in terms of four key factors: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance.
Nonetheless, an understanding of the properties of each of the four basic factors / types is an important first step in interpreting any DISC profile. The factors help to define a person’s motivations and drives, their aversions and dislikes, and their general style of behaviour.
- Dominance (D) is the DISC factor that relates to control, power and assertiveness.
- Influence (I) relates to an individual’s approach to social situations, and their style of communication.
- Steadiness (S) is the factor of patience, persistence and thoughtfulness
- Compliance (C) describes a person’s approach to structure and organisation.
The use of DISC presents a wide range of possibilities when working with teams. In a general sense, it can help in many areas, including the initial formation of the team and ongoing assessment of its operating effectiveness. In more specific terms, it can yield invaluable information on particular aspects of the team development process.
For example, it can look into the ways that members work together, both as a group and at the level of individual working relationships.
DISC also has a useful part to play in understanding the leader’s role in a team, and helping to develop that leader’s effectiveness.
Principles
Before going on to examine specific applications of DISC in team-building, this section introduces some basic ideas and concepts.
Team Factors
The DISC concepts of Factors can be applied with little adaptation to teams rather than individuals. In this section, we see how the team-based equivalent of a DISC profile can be constructed and interpreted.
Relationships and Dynamics
Strong working relationships between members are the cornerstone of a successful team. Here, we introduce the concept of the DISC ‘Dynamic’, and see how it can be applied in real-world situations to analyse individual relationships and their place in the team.
Leadership Styles
The behaviour of a team’s leader, as defined by their DISC profile, can have a significant impact on the workings of the team. This section looks at a variety of typical leadership styles and their implications.
Leadership Needs
A team’s leader does not exist in a vacuum – each team will have different leadership needs that their leader will need to take into account to achieve peak performance. In this section, we see how DISC can help to identify these needs.
No decision affecting a person’s career should be taken solely on the basis of a behavioural assessment. There will always be other factors outside the scope of a DISC profile such as skills, training or experience that must be taken into account before reaching a final decision.
Choose a topic from the list below to find out more about specific application areas for profiling techniques:
Recruitment:
The main use of commercial personality profiling is as an aid to the selection of candidates during the recruitment process. This section examines DISC’s use throughout the recruitment cycle, from the preparation of short-lists to the interview itself.
Assessment:
Regular assessment is becoming more and more widely used in the commercial sector, helping a manager to foresee and pre-empt problems with staff, and improve motivation and morale. This section covers the practical issues involved in maintaining a regular assessment schedule
Cultural Integration:
Cultural Integration is the process of integrating a successful new candidate into an organisation’s (or new department’s) existing culture. In this section, we discuss the role of profiling in easing a candidate’s transition into a new work environment.
Redeployment:
Redeployment within an organisation is, in many ways, a similar process to recruitment. This ‘Redeployment’ section looks at the issues involved in redeploying to fill new roles within an organisation, or in transferring staff members to different positions.
Addressing Specific Problems:
From time to time, specific difficulties arise related to one individual, or an internal problem within a small group. This section shows how DISC can be helpful in isolating the causes of these problems, and developing strategies to resolve them.
Career Development:
For those seeking a new career direction, or looking for their ideal vocation, DISC can provide some useful guidelines. In this section we examine DISC’s abilities in the area of career development.