Is your team trying to just get along without fully understanding each other’s personality profile? That’s like going on a blind date, literally blindfolded!
When you pull a team together it’s important that they complement each other and are aware that not all personality traits will align without some conflict. For example:
You get an email from your team member who seems to write long messages that ask how you’re doing, then explains the reason for his email, and concludes with his upcoming weekend activities.
He’s a nice person, but you cannot stand to read his emails. You’re more of a just-the-fact person and your emails reflect that by getting right to the point and keeping it concise. Why does he communicate so verbosely while you communicate so directly? The answer lies in your individual personality profiles.
What are DISC Personality Profiles?
DiSC Personality Profiles help you understand how you show emotion according to four main behaviours:
dominance (D), influence (I), steadiness (S), and conscientiousness (C).
You’re a unique combination of all four profiles and predominantly lean towards one or two of them. All four profiles (or ‘styles’) include a list of behavioural attributes. DiSC styles are all equally valuable, none better than others.
The styles don’t indicate intelligence, abilities, success, or limitations. They indicate how we prefer to do things with strengths and areas of development. When you know this, you can use them to be more effective in the workplace
Here are the three ways you can use these profiles to your advantage:
1) Tailor your communication–in the example above, you explain to the team member that you prefer direct, succinct communication. Your key trait is Dominance. That doesn’t mean all you do is boss people around. It’s you want a level of control over your environment. You explain to your team member that this is what you prefer and that it’s not personal to him. Effective teams use DiSC to adapt and meet in the middle rather than one person continually accommodating the other.
2) Understand your team members’ communication traits— Your long-email-composer team member, trends more toward the influence side of DiSC. A warm-up, small-talk conversation before a down-to-brass-tacks man, plus a few other traits. Now that you know your communication style and his, you can empathise with your team member and dramatically improve your interactions and team’s functionality.
3) Improve your Team’s Overall Productivity— Misunderstandings, miscommunications, and personality clashes prevent teams from being effective and involve time to mitigate and resolve conflict. They create infighting and backdoor politics, distracting you and your team from your current project. They grow until they destroy the team, and people may even leave resulting in high employee turnover. The single most important thing you can do to facilitate teamwork is to facilitate understanding among the members of your team—and DiSC can help you with this. You’ll be more efficient and more productive.