I completed DiSC (stands for Dominance, influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness) training last week and fount it interesting. DiSC confirms one thing, different strokes for different folks.
DiSC is a system to help you find out similar and unique characteristics among people. It also shows person’s behavioural preferences and helps to identify different management styles that can lead to obtain better results through interaction.
According to the DiSC model, there are four management styles – by Dominance, by influence, by Steadiness, and by Conscientiousness.
Series of questions lead to a specific DiSC profile, that tells you what is your score and what is you dominant style of management and what are your supportive styles.
D – Dominant : these people are active and questioning; these are direct and competitive in nature. These people want to ‘get it done’.
i – Influence : these people are active and accepting; motivated, enthusiastic, sociable and lively.
S – Steadiness : these people are thoughtful and accepting; patient and even tempered, accommodating.
C– Conscientiousness : these people are thoughtful and questioning; kind of private with analytical abilities and task oriented. Main objective is to ‘get it right’.
As we know everyone is unique and all have different ways of interacting. Imagine, I interact with a person who has dominant style of ‘Conscientiousness‘ (private and task oriented). I pretend to be of ‘influence‘ (sociable and enthusiastic) dominant style; my interaction with that person can not be productive as I may not be providing the specific instructions that other person needs.
Why is that? Because people with dominant ‘infulence’ style mix personal talk with business discussions, becoming informal and emotionally expressive leaving the ‘Conscientiousness’ style person unclear or confuse as Max requires specific task oriented info and does not express himself emotionally.
How it will help me? It lists what are key strengths, what things are overused, what could be the limitations and what changes should be made in management style that make one more effective.
Have you ever taken DiSC and Meyers-Briggs assessment? What are your thoughts? Did you benefit from it? Please share your thoughts. Thank you for reading.
More info –
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DISC_assessment
- One of the best books on the application of DiSC is by Keith Ayers titled “Engagement is Not Enough.”
Categories: Books, Business, Compuware, Employee, Human Resources, leader, Leadership, Management, manager, Personal, Productivity, Project Manager, Self Help, Thoughts, Training, Workplace
Leadership and Management 
I am particularly interested in issues related to man-management and team leadership, as I am bound to take charge of a research group starting next year. In this context, your post is very interesting (Google led me to this page) and I would like to ask if you recommend specific books or materials related to these matters, apart from the Wikipedia entry?
Thank you in advance.
Kulveer, I work with Sue at Compuware. You can google “DiSC online assessment” and there are various options. Our vendor is Inscape – they have multiple links. You will see that many of the assessments use a circumference model rather than the graph that we teach. We think the graph is easier to read but the results are the same, regardless of the visual model. Here is one link I found that Nuno might find useful for more history of the model, etc.
Glad you enjoyed the class!
http://www.onlinediscpersonalityprofile.com/
Added one book name “Engagement is not enough” by Keith Ayers. Thank you Sue for the reference.