Being an “ID” DISC personality style (also known as a “Persuader”) I love learning about myself, and the DISC behavioral assessment is another valuable tool for understanding how I interact with others. What you may notice in a DISC report is that while it’s helpful, it may sound too general. For example, one of the lines from my report states, “Michael tends to make decisions quickly and is comfortable making high-risk determinations.” This helps me reflect upon previous interactions and predict how I might react in the future, but doesn’t necessarily apply to my specific job role.
This made me realize the fact that DISC alone may not be enough. The DISC Personality System is a fantastic first step but is only the beginning of the journey into the behavioral analysis and personality dimensions. The biggest question is, “How do I use this in my specific role at work?”
The more comprehensive PeopleKeys 4D Report adds your values, preferred team role, and behavioral attitudes along with the DISC assessment. Knowing your core values (Loyalty, Equality, Personal Freedom, or Justice) helps you match your internal beliefs or principles to the job which you are doing. For example, if you value personal freedom but take a job which requires you to run everything by your supervisor first, it’s a pretty sure bet you will quickly grow tired of that job and move on.
Your preferred TEAMS role (Theorist, Executor, Analyzer, Manager, or Strategist) describes the best fit for you as part of a team based on how you think. If you are put in charge of a team, yet you are a high Analyzer, you may focus too much on the details and the team will become frustrated with the lack of progress. Using team roles as part of team building, especially with newly formed teams, is excellent for team members to understand the role they each play. This helps make difficult conversations easier, and team members learn to not take them so personally.
The final key piece of the 4D Report is the Behavioral Attitudes Index (or passions indicator), which looks at unconscious thoughts and feelings. These attitudes are Inner Awareness/Spiritual, Social/Humanitarian, Power/Political, Economic/Tangible, Artistic/Innovative, and Knowledge/Proficiency. Our attitudes work in the background internally as we make decisions. They tell us the likelihood of how much energy we will invest in any undertaking. For example, if you have a job that is full of standard routines but you have a high Artistic/Innovative attitude, you will be quite unhappy unless you have a way to express this attitude in a positive way either inside or outside of work.
You can begin to see how knowing all these facets of who you are connects you to a better fit within your work environment. PeopleKeys also has some key assessments based on DISC specifically to help in areas of sales, leadership, and even fitness! Sure, if you are a fitness coach, sales coach, behavioral coach, or leadership coach, you could spend time connecting the basic DISC results to success in each of these areas. However, much of that work has been done with assessment reports for sales solutions, fitness plans, leadership strategies, and targeted behavioral applications.
Combining targeted DISC reports with Teams, Values and BAI, you can use the results to coach someone to improve on a skill they might not have known they had. Most companies want to develop their talent, and sometimes this includes learning certain areas of the business in which the employee is not familiar. For example, you place someone new in a sales role. You may think it takes a specific personality style to excel. However, anyone can be a successful salesperson if they are self-aware of the their personality strengths and limitations and use this knowledge to adapt how they apply their strengths and work with their limitations. The 4D report and the targeted applications described above combine to create 1,440 possible combinations of total personality and behavior descriptions to help people understand themselves on an even deeper level.