DISC Test

As we move into Individualised LeadershipTM, it is increasingly important to accurately understand your own skills, strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of your colleagues, especially your team.

A DiSC Behavioural Assessment is now recognised worldwide as an effective management tool. The cost of getting this wrong and placing poorly matched people in an inappropriate work environment can be very damaging to a company, causing wasted effort, reduced performance, and likely requiring additional and frequent management interventions when things and people go wrong.

DISC assessments are scientifically validated and an important tool for business managers and owners to make effective decisions about their employees, particularly regarding where those staff members would best perform and fit within the organisation. A DISC profile will ensure managers can place new employees or reassign existing roles in the most productive way possible.

DISC profiling enables a company to put together efficient, happy, and successful teams that work well together through the correct assignment of skills and abilities: there is no point in making a highly qualified and knowledgeable staff member a leader where there is no interest in leading others. A recognised designation of Mentor or Master may be more motivating.

Using the DiSC system provides additional insight into an employee's working character and personality; it offers statistically proven, accurately calculated guidance on how a person will respond in different working environments. It is not a replacement for a company's existing recruitment procedures, but it is a powerful and accurate enhancement.

When building teams to achieve specific objectives, DISC profiles provide an excellent indication of which tasks should be assigned to which team members and offer accurate guidance for appointing leadership positions.

When each team member has taken an online DISC questionnaire and shares their style in a Team Report, they become aware of the strengths, skills and weaknesses of each other team member, and this knowledge promotes good communication and understanding between those team members.

A carefully constructed team built using the DISC system will help and enhance the performance of all team members:

• Increase their self-understanding: how they react in conflict situations, what motivates them and drives them and how they deal with stress and problems.
• Increase their understanding of the communications needs and styles of all the team members.
• Reduce conflict among the team and enable a smooth progression to better and more productive teamwork.
• Develop an accurate understanding of different customer's styles and thereby improve the team member's own sales skills.
• Improve team management through understanding in detail each team member's strengths, weakness, and behaviours.
• Develop more engaging, knowledgeable, responsive and effective leaders.

The first thing that will happen is you will be asked to go online and complete a questionnaire. This is the most fundamental part of the DISC assessment process. You need to choose your DISC assessment carefully to ensure it can provide the information you need. A poorly designed questionnaire, or one that is very high on face validity, is prone to producing misleading results due to the quality of the data it collects.

The questionnaire is designed to reveal behavioural differences among people grouped into four basic behavioural styles listed below. Simple DISC usually provides 12 or 16 styles, recognising that most people ae a combination of styles. Extended DISC, our flagship professional tool recognises 160 styles.

Dominance: the "D" Style - Responses to problems and Challenges.

Adventurous  Competitive  Daring   Decisive
Direct   Innovative  Persistent  Problem Solver
Results-Orientated

Influence: the "I" Style - How a person influences other People.

Charming  Confident  Convincing  Enthusiastic
Inspiring  Optimistic  Persuasive  Popular
Sociable

Steadiness: the "S" Style - Responses to the Pace of the environment.

Amiable  Friendly   Good Listener  Patient
Self-starter  Relaxed   Sincere   Stable
Steady   Team Player

Compliance: the "C" Style - Responses to rules and Policies set by others.

Accurate  Analytical  Conscientious  Diplomatic
Patient   Fact-Finder  High Standards  Mature
Trusting  Precise Understanding

• All DISC evaluated qualities are equally valuable and we are all a combination of all four styles in different degrees.
• Other factors, such as life experiences, education, and maturity, also influence our work, management, and leadership styles.
• Having a more accurate and well-defined understanding of ourselves is a powerful tool for improving our weaknesses and enhancing our strengths.
• Having detailed knowledge of the range of DISC-style results of people with whom we live or work will help us understand what others consider important and how their responses and behaviours differ from ours.
• The quality of any situation, work, home or anywhere, can be improved when using DISC analyses to assign tasks, leadership, and duties.

Questionnaires usually take about 10 minutes each and are done online. The results can be sent to you and/or your organisation's stakeholders immediately in a .pdf DISC Behavioural Report. Depending on the product used, individuals answer a range of around 24 questions. The questionnaire forces an individual to choose between two descriptions from a selection of phrases. Individuals choose ONE word, word-pair, or phrase that is "most" like them and then another from the same group that is "least" like them.

For example:

I am usually well disciplined  -  Most like me
Other people think I am generous  
I am constantly active  -  Least like me
I keep trying until I get what I want  

By the way, here at Talent Tools, we realise that some questions may be difficult for people whose first language is not English. To improve the accuracy of our results, we offer our tests in over 70 languages. This ensures more accurate and valid results because respondents can take the test in their strongest, native language.

The specially crafted DISC questions are designed to reveal an individual's personal mix of behavioural types: each of us is a combination of styles, with our own strengths and weaknesses.

Understanding the mix of personal qualities among our colleagues enables everyone to communicate more effectively and allows tasks to be assigned to those best able to complete them successfully.

Understanding our own particular mix of qualities enables us, as individuals, to promote and effectively use our strengths and develop strategies to address our areas of concern.

Teams, with their DISC results, can therefore be structured around the strengths of team members and tasks, and leadership can be assigned more effectively.

The different character styles defined by DISC are present in all of us to varying degrees, and it is this mix of abilities, attitudes and behaviours that defines team members. Respondents are asked both which qualities are MOST like them and which are LEAST like them; it is just as important to understand what people think are their strengths as it is to understand what is least likely to inspire them to do their best work.

• Create and manage truly productive and effective teams.
• Accurately understand the behaviour, responses and motivations of team members.
• Inspire good working and personal relationships by understanding and recognising each team member's communication needs and styles.
• Distribute skills more productively, thus ensuring smooth teamwork, crossover-learning and minimising conflict.
• Discover, develop and assign more effective managers, supervisors and leaders.
• Produce well-rounded, capable leaders with accurate self-knowledge and an accurate knowledge of their team members' skills.
• Increase team members' personal understanding of their abilities and confidence.
• Understand what motivates team members; what will cause them stress and how problems can most easily be resolved, if not avoided altogether.
• Understand and resolve conflict situations.
• Effectively and smoothly manage change.
• Ensure successful recruitment, placement, promotion and outsourcing of new and existing staff members.
• Develop and manage a more successful sales force: a more responsive and skilled sales force that is more understanding and responsive to different customers' styles and who will therefore improve customer service and sales.

William Moulton Marston's life story is filled with peculiar accomplishments that appear totally unrelated to each other: working successfully as a lawyer and also as a psychologist, he invented the first working lie-detection (polygraph) system. He went on to create the now internationally respected and used DiSC model and wrote several "self-help" books. Amazingly, he also was the creator of the "Wonder Woman" character.

Marston had the benefit of a Classical education and studied the Greek and Roman classics. He was also actively and personally involved during the early days of the struggle for women's rights, addressing issues such as votes for women, birth control, and career equality. Given this altruistic background it is still a surprise to find that one of William Moulton Marston's strangest achievements was the creation of Wonder Woman, the comic book heroine. Wonder Woman's dauntless behaviour that enables her to accomplish her missions so well, are an interesting reflection of the primary DISC characteristics: dominance, influence, submission, and compliance.

Marston was a physiological psychologist with a Ph.D from Harvard University and began his research on what would become the DiSC system early in the twentieth century. In 1928 he published Emotions of Normal People which defined his theory that normal people's behavioural characteristics could be broadly categorised into four main types: Dominance, Inducement, Submission, and Compliance (these classifications have subsequently been "fine-tuned" and now are shown as: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance)

The Polygraph: Marston, during his studies, noticed fluctuations in blood-pressure when test subjects were lying. In response to this he conceived a device to measure these changes and therefore give an idea of the veracity of the subject's responses and in 1917 he published his initial "lie-detector" or polygraph findings.

He was a very active lecturer the 1920s and 30s and often consulted with government representatives. Marston's emphasis, unlike many of his fellow psychologists at the time, was on the behaviour of the "general population" ("normal people") whereas most of his peers were more interested in "abnormal psychology". Publishing his findings widely and bringing his methodology to the attention of the court system, he soon gained a reputation for effective analysis and was even involved with the Lindbergh kidnapping case, offering his knowledge to the Lindbergh family.

Marston's research into finding ways to measure the energies involved with behaviour and conscienceless directly led to the development of the DiSC system. Marston himself did not develop assessment tests himself, other colleagues went on to develop the tests that are the forerunners of today's modern DiSC tests.

Ever the pragmatist, he used his knowledge and applied it in the world of cinema, working in 1930 with Universal Studios to help them make the move from the overly melodramatic silent-movies to the new "talkies" which now not only used sound, but required the actors to use more natural gestures, movements and facial expressions.

Marston kept writing new episodes for Wonder Woman until his death in 1947. In 2006 he was enrolled into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame.