5 Signs It’s Time to use a DISC Assessment
If your organisation doesn’t currently enjoy the benefits of psychometric testing, you might be wondering why, how, and when to use them. Here are five tell-tale signs that it’s time to use a DISC assessment in your organisation.
What is the DISC Assessment?
DISC is a psychometric assessment that measures the behavioural style of individuals. The original DISC self-assessment was created by industrial psychologist William Clarke in 1956, inspired by the DISC theory laid out by psychologist William Moulton Marston in 1928.
In the DISC assessment, which is overseen by someone who has completed a disc certification course, individuals take a questionnaire that asks them to select the statements that are most relevant to them as well as indicating the ones least relevant to them. The results consist of one or more of the four behavioral styles, Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Compliance. Each behavioral style has unique characteristics, strengths, and limitations in the workplace. Understanding these styles can be incredibly valuable for individuals and organizations alike.
The different DISC styles
Individuals with the Dominance style are decisive, risk-taking, and assertive. This is a relatively rare personality style and people with this profile are often ambitious big-picture thinkers. A limitation of this style is that these people may sometimes be impatient with others who do not share their goals and work styles.
Influence style individuals are energetic, enthusiastic, and people-focused. They can often be found bonding with other team members and motivating their team to meet goals. Their positivity and people skills make them an asset to any team. Unfortunately, this also means that they lack an eye for fine details and may struggle to complete tasks that bore them.
Steadiness is the most common style around the world. These individuals are patient, and reliable, good team players who may take some time to open up but are great listeners. Steadiness style people work best with consistency and structure. However, they struggle with change and don’t like risk-taking.
Finally, people with the Compliance (sometimes referred to as Conscientiousness) style are detail and task-oriented, bringing a practical, meticulous, and often creative approach to tasks. They like to work independently and gather all the information about a project. However, this means that they can sometimes be too perfectionistic or struggle to work in a team.
So, how can you tell when it’s time to use a DISC assessment in your organisation? Here are the 5 tell-tale signs.
1. The hiring process is taking up too much time and money
It’s taking forever to fill roles. Your HR and in-house recruitment specialists are overwhelmed with CVs and interviews, identifying lots of amazing candidates but struggling to pick the right ones for the job. Even worse, sometimes you hire a new employee who looks incredible on paper but then has an unsuccessful onboarding or doesn’t gel with the team. They end up quitting a few months later. This leaves you right back where you started, pouring endless time and resources into hiring. Does it have to be this complicated?
No, it doesn’t have to be this complicated. If this situation sounds familiar, it’s probably time to try using a psychometric assessment like DISC in your hiring process. Personality tests provide crucial insights about candidates – finding out their behavioural style gives you useful clues into the kind of onboarding they will respond best to and how they will fit into the team. When multiple of your applicants are equally qualified and have the right experience, a DISC assessment can help you figure out which one will be the best hire. No more time-consuming rounds of interviews and endless deliberations necessary!
2. You’re reorganising or creating a new team
DISC assessments are not limited to being useful in the recruitment process; they’re also ideal for organisations who are reshuffling or creating new teams of people who haven’t worked together before. Normally, it can be hard to predict how a new team will perform together: will the employees bounce off each others’ ideas and enjoy their collaboration or will they end up frustrated with each other? Will they bond immediately, take some time to get to know each other, or clash from the start?
Using DISC profiles to explore and discuss the personality types within the team can be a productive and illuminating way to start off a successful new team. Initially, this is useful when selecting people for the new team. You probably don’t want a team entirely made up of I types – they’ll be enthusiastic and motivated, but they might struggle to get tasks finished on time. Likewise, a team with mostly C types and D types, two of the most independent personality styles, may struggle to work cohesively together. In the early stages of team creation or reorganising, an understanding of the personality makeup of the group is essential.
Furthermore, a DISC assessment can be a great way to promote team building and communication once the team is together. For example, you may ask everyone on the team to do a DISC assessment and then discuss their findings with each other, getting to know their coworkers’ DISC types and communication styles. This can be highly beneficial to the communication within a team; individuals can learn that Compliance types work best when provided with a lot of information and detail, whereas Influence types and Dominance types prefer looking at the project’s big picture. They might understand that a manager with the Steadiness type prefers consistency and patient communication, whereas a Dominance type prefers brief communication where the key points are summed up but details left for later. Overall, using DISC in a new team helps everyone understand their coworkers’ work styles and learn to work better together.
3. There’s too much conflict within a team
Office politics, passive-aggression, and negativity. Unfortunately, most people have worked in a team like this at some point in their lives. Teams like this are not only unproductive and low performing, but they also damage the engagement and motivation of the employees within them. Teams with a lot of unhealthy conflict need to be avoided at all costs.
How can you reduce unhealthy conflict within a team? DISC can help. By embedding DISC in your team’s culture and training individuals to understand the different and unique ways their personalities work, you can increase understanding and empathy within a team.
For example, conflict might be caused by the fact that some individuals always share their ideas and dominate discussions, while other employees seldom speak up. This can lead to resentment on both sides – the former employees feel like they are doing all the work and the latter employees feel that they are not being given an opportunity to contribute.
However, by using DISC, the employees might realise that the loud employees have the Dominance style while the quiet ones have the Steadiness style. Understanding their own and other peoples’ types can allow individuals to better empathise with each other. For example, Dominance types can understand that their coworkers are quiet because they are good at going with the consensus, not because they are lazy, and Steadiness types can recognise that their coworkers are loud because they are good at decision-making and thinking about the big picture, not because they don’t care about other peoples’ perspectives. Both personality types can use DISC to understand their own limitations and work to overcome them to build a more open and communicative workplace.
4. Your employee turnover rate is high
Another sign that it’s time to use DISC in your organisation is a high rate of employee turnover. Although turnover varies naturally between different industries and regions, if your organisation has an unusually high level of turnover compared to your competitors and benchmarks it might be a problem. High levels of turnover suggest that your employees are not engaged in their work or that the wrong people have been hired in the first place.
High levels of turnover can be a result of many reasons, so it can be useful to try employing DISC in different stages of the employee lifecycle. For example, you might use DISC during hiring to ensure that people with personalities that will mesh well with and complement their team are being hired. Or, you might incorporate DISC into your onboarding strategy to ensure that the onboarding is suited to the individuals – a successful onboarding has a huge impact on retention rates. Moreover, you might run DISC workshops for current employees to make sure that their responsibilities and duties are suited to their personality types, allowing them to thrive and excel in their roles.
5. You’re struggling to decide who to promote
Perhaps you’ve got an employee you want to promote but you’re not sure how they will perform in their new position. Will they thrive or will they be less suited to the new role? A good way to predict whether they will thrive in the new position is using DISC. For example, you might use a DISC leadership report to analyse the individual’s strengths and limitations in a leadership context. Covering leadership approach, communication style, motivators and stressors, and areas for development, a DISC assessment with a focus on leadership is a great way to understand and unlock the potential of employees.
An understanding of the DISC styles and associated strengths and weaknesses can be invaluable for anyone in or aspiring to a leadership role. While personality types tend not to change over time, individual traits are not set in stone. By understanding their traits and behaviours, individuals are able to grow and adapt to be better leaders. For example, a person with the Compliance style may learn from DISC that they need to be cautious not to be overly critical of their subordinates, while a person with the Influence style might learn that they need to have a more realistic and careful approach to detail in a leadership position.
Overall, if you’re considering promotions or thinking about your leadership pipeline, DISC is a powerful tool to better understand your people and enhance their capabilities.
Conclusion
If any of these signs are familiar to you, it might be beneficial to try using DISC in your organisation. From helping you hire and promote the right people to improving communication and reducing conflict within teams, using the DISC model can be a powerful way to enhance your business.
Interested in trying out a DISC assessment? DISC Group brings powerful and easy-to-use psychometric testing to organisations, providing actionable insights for individuals and teams. Their DISC profile reports allow organisations to unlock their employees’ potential and their DISC trainer course helps companies embed the principles of DISC in their operations. Contact DISC Group to find out your next steps today.
