#3: Everything DISC Assessments
In this episode, Deanna provides an overview of the DISC assessment including its origins, the different profile types, and applications to the workplace.
Episode Highlights:
- Learn where the DISC assessment originated from
- Learn what factors influence our behavioral patterns
- Understand the characteristics of each DISC profile type (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Compliance)
- Learn how the DISC can be utilized to increase team communication and organizational leadership
Links & Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Maxwell Leadership Team
- Take the What’s Your Leadership Genius Quiz HERE
- Join the Leading by Type Facebook Community HERE
- Connect with Deanna on Instagram HERE
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Episode 3 Transcript
DEANNA PECINA: The DISC can also be used to solve conflicts and challenges because if you are in a conflict with someone who has a different DISC profile than you do, you have to be able to understand what that person’s fears are, why that person might feel triggered, why that person might feel taken advantage of.
Because when you understand that, then you can look at things from their point of view, and you can communicate your message in a way that they’re going to understand it.
INTRO: Welcome to the Leading by Type podcast. I’m Deanna Pastina, former school administrator, turned Enneagram practitioner and DISC consultant, and I’m obsessed with all things leadership and learning.
I hope you’ll join me each week as we have conversations about communication, team building, and embracing your leadership genius.
DEANNA: Well, hey there, friend. Welcome to episode three of the Leading By Type podcast. If you haven’t listened to the first two episodes, just quickly wanted to introduce myself. My name is Deanna Pecina, and I’m an organizational leadership coach who uses the DISC in the Enneagram to help entrepreneurs and CEOs build teams that allow them to work in their leadership.
If you haven’t listened to the first two episodes, I would encourage you to go back and listen to those. The first episode gives you a little bit of information about myself and a story that really helps shape how I view leadership. And then in episode two, I explain the difference between the DISC and the Enneagram and because these are the two tools that I use regularly.
I wanted to do a series here at the beginning of the podcast that just explains the difference between the two of them. So today’s episode focuses specifically on the DISC profile, and I’m also going to be doing another episode and releasing that one today as well on the Enneagram. And so each of these next two episodes, three and four, are going to take a deep dive into the DISC profile and then a deep dive into the Enneagram.
So today we’re going to focus specifically on the DISC profile. I’ll be talking with you a little bit about where it came from. What the different profile types are and how we can use the DISC assessment to grow as leaders. In terms of the origins of the DISC, it’s important to understand that the DISC is not something that’s new.
It has its roots in ancient history as far back as 4 44 BC. Empodocles recognized that people seem to act in four distinctly different ways, and they were termed fire,earth, air and water, but it was believed that this was attributed to external factors, so we were impacted by things around us and that affected how we behaved.
It’s really interesting to me when you consider the fact that as human beings, we have been trying to figure one another out since, you know, the beginning of time basically , and here we still are today.
In 400 bc. Hippocrates redefined these quadrants, naming them the four. There was a shift from being impacted by environmental factors to a focus on internal factors, and these were termed caloric, sanguine, phlegmatic, and melancholic.
In 1921, Carl Jung recognized that people could be divided into four main styles in his book called Psychological Types, and he termed those four types – thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. If you’re familiar at all with Meyers Briggs, personality testing, those words are probably familiar to you. Then in 1928 it was William Milton Marsten, who built upon Young’s work and named the four Main behavioral styles that we have today, the DIS, and C in his book, Emotions of Normal People.
And as an aside, I think that that title is hysterical because is there such a thing as a normal person ? So Emotions of Normal People was the name of his book. The four types that he identified were dominance, influence, steadiness and compliance. The first DISC assessment, however, was not created until 1956, and it was created by Walter Clark with the intention of using it in business to choose qualified employees.
So I think it’s important to understand the history of the DISC, where it originated from and what its intended use is. It’s also important to note that nobody owns the DISC. It’s not trademarked, which means that there are several companies who have created their own version of the DISC assessment. So if you’re choosing to use a DISC assessment to understand yourself or to understand the people on your team, you’re going to want to make sure that you choose one that has been validated by companies like Wiley, Everything DiSC, or People Keys.
I actually use an assessment that was developed for the Maxwell Leadership team in partnership with People Keys. Regardless of the tool that you use, just be careful with these free online versions because you want to make sure that you’re using a report that’s been validated with the intended use for the DISC assessment.
When we talk about the DISC profile, it’s important to note that the DISC is a behavioral analysis tool. It’s not a personality test. Personality is who we are. It’s fixed while our behavior is what we do. The expression of personality in context, This is significant because on DISC profiles it shows you someone’s natural style and someone’s adapted style.
So natural style is how you’re going to act in a stressful situation where adapted style can show how you’ve learned to behave when you think you’re being observed. And if there’s a disconnect between natural and adaptive, that can tell you a lot about a person and whether or not. In the right role, or it can also reveal why they might show stress the way that they do.
So our behaviors are influenced by heredity, and this is only one of the contributing factors. It’s also influenced by role models up until the age of 12. So think about parents, aunts, uncles, coaches, teachers, all of those really important people that are in our lives up until we reach adolescence.
It’s also influenced by the experiences that we have after the age of eight. So if you get your DISC profile and you look at it and you’re trying to wonder or figure out why your profile is the way that is. Looking at things like heredity, the role models that you had up until the age of 12, and the experiences that you’ve had that have shaped you, it can provide insight into why your profile is the way that it is.
If we go back to the iceberg model that I mentioned in the previous episode, the DISC is the top of the iceberg. It’s all of the things that we can see and that we can observe about a person. The Enneagram is all of the things that are lurking there beneath the water. It’s our motivations, our anxiety and our fear.
The DISC is extremely helpful because we can observe behaviors, and through that observation we can tailor our communication. We can tailor our interactions with people, and we really don’t even have to have a DISC assessment to be able to assess what somebody’s DISC profile might be because we can observe the behaviors.
However, when someone does take a DISC assessment, it provides us with a tremendous amount of information that can help us understand that person’s behaviors. First of all, there’s a tremendous amount of data that has made the DISC accurate. As I mentioned before, research has gone into creating tests that have been validated.
And they’ve been tried and tested for many years, and they’re specifically used for evaluating people in a business environment. The DISC provides us with a consistent way to evaluate behaviors, profiles, and strengths of an individual, and I like to say that it can help us make sure that we have a really good match between a person and a position.
The DISC also gives us enough information to use for evaluation, but it’s not fundamentally confusing. Overall, the DISC is pretty easy to understand. When people take a DISC assessment, they’re given a series of questions and there are four responses. I always instruct people to take the DISC as if they were at work and to just quickly answer the questions with their gut response.
You don’t want to overthink it. Then when someone gets their results. It shows you their natural style, their adaptive style, and in the DISC report that I provide, it also shows the mirror. So it’s how you view yourself. Anything that hits above the 50% line is considered to be part of your profile. So most people are a blend of the different types.
For example, I’m actually an S I C, so for me the S is super high, almost 99%. And then my I and my C are also above the 50% line showing that those are. My D, however, is like 10%. So in looking at that, it gives you insight into a person’s blend of these different, different behavioral types and how they can show up.
Now that we’ve looked at the origins of the DISC, let’s dig into each one of the four types. The first type is our Ds. These make up 3% of the population. Now it’s important to remember, like I said, most people are a blend between one or two different types. So when I say 3% of the population, that means 3% of the population are true Ds and Ds only.
These folks are driven by authority. They try to take control of situations. They embrace change, they want to get results. They’re comfortable responding to confrontation because if responding to confrontation is going to help them achieve results, then they’re not afraid to do so. They also treasure loyalty, and they are very much multi-taskers and they’re focused on results in terms of their greatest fear, they fear being taken advantage of.
In future episodes, I’m going to go into depth into each different part and give each part its own episode. Talk about how you would communicate with a D or how you would communicate with an I. But for this podcast, I just wanted to give an overview of the four types, but just know that we will be taking a deeper dive into each one of these later on.
Next, we have our I’s. I’s are 11% of the population. I’s are people people. They are great storytellers and encouragers. They’re very relationship oriented, and they like friendly environments. They don’t deal well with rejection or loss of approval because they’re very people oriented. Now, DS and i’s are more extroverted, where SS and Cs are more introverted.
S’s make up 69% of the population. S’s are your team players. They are supportive. They are good listeners. They are compassionate and they treasure peaceful relationships and they’re easy and agreeable. They fear a loss of security and confrontation, so only imagine what it would be like if you paired a D who doesn’t mind confrontation up with an S who can’t stand confrontation.
That in and of itself gives you just a little bit of insight into how understanding the different types can help you communicate more effectively. And finally, we have our Cs. Cs make up 17% of the population. These folks are compliant and conscientious. They’re very detail oriented, perfectionists. They honor logic, and a C’S greatest fear is criticism. You don’t want to criticize a C’S work because they’re going to take it very, very personally.
Once you understand these four types and how to identify who these people are on your team, there are some really tangible applications of the DISC that can be used in any environment.
Think about the following data from a study by Apollo Technical.
60% of leaders report feeling worn out at the end of each.
63% of millennials believe that they aren’t fully being developed as leaders by their employers for management.
77% of organizations report that leadership is lacking
77%. That’s a massive gap in leadership development within organizations, and 11% of HR leaders feel that they have a strong team that can take over leadership roles as they open up, which leads to really massive gaps in leadership.
This is where the DISC comes in. When you understand your own personal DISC profile, you can understand who you are as a leader. You can use the DISC when you’re hiring to understand if you have a position person match. Too many times I’ve had conversations with people where they have a specific position and they just can’t seem to get at work, and they tell me about people who have left.
When I ask the question, what is their DISC profile? And they tell me, it’s like, ding, ding, ding, ding. There’s your answer. That’s why you’re not getting the right person into the right position. Then once you’ve hired that person, understanding their DISC profile can help in your interactions with them, in your communication with them and your ability to coach them, to team productivity and.
The DISC can also be used to solve conflicts and challenges because if you are in a conflict with someone who has a different DISC profile than you do, you have to be able to understand what that person’s fears are, why that person might feel triggered, why that person might feel taken advantage of.
Because when you understand that, then you can look at things from their point of view and you can communicate your message in a way that they’re going to understand. And most importantly, when you understand yourself and your people better, you can communicate in a way that they’re going to hear you.
This is something that you will hear me say over and over and over again, probably like a broken record on this podcast. Communication is the responsibility of the communicator. If the people around you are confused, if the people that you’re leading are currently missing their mark or are falling short on projects, you have to ask: How can you shift your communication to make it clear and make it so that it’s something that they can understand and that they can receive.
With that said, I’ll leave you today with the following quote. The Art of Communication is the language of leadership by James Humes. The more you can communicate effectively, you exponentially increase your ability to lead people around.
Well, friend, I hope you have enjoyed today’s episode about the DISC profile, learning a little bit about where it came from, the different profile types, and how you can use it and apply it in your work environment. I hope you’ll join me in the next episode where I will be doing a high level introduction to the Enneagram.
If you’d like to know more about your Leadership Genius, head on over to leadingbytype.com/quiz. I’ve created a short 12 question quiz that can help you start to identify your leadership superpowers.
Again, thank you so much for being here today. I love spending time learning with you, and I would really appreciate it if you would subscribe, rate and leave a review because I love hearing from you.
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