Successful leadership relies on the ability to influence others' behaviour in order to accomplish an objective. The ability to influence others is greatly enhanced by training on a behavioural model. New to the DISC profile? Read an introduction here.
This article explores how you might use the DISC profile in leadership development training, which is one of the most common applications of DISC in the workplace.
DISC tends to be used as the basis of improving relationships and communication between managers and teams, and is often introduced in leadership development programs to serve as a language for understanding, identifying and adapting behavioural styles.
In more than 20 years of seeing consultants, trainers, HR, Learning and OD professionals roll-out training, we have noticed that organisations have vastly different approaches to how they structure their leadership programs; that is, no two follow the same structure.
There is no single best way to coach, train or facilitate DISC, so what follows is simply a scripted example to help illustrate one way that DISC might be introduced to a group of leaders.
Facilitator: “Welcome to [Leadership 101]. One of the cornerstones of this training is human relationships. Since leadership is all about people — inspiring and guiding others towards a common vision — we’re going to look at how the way we communicate with others on a daily basis impacts our success or failure as leaders.
This program is not about spending the next 4 hours to work on improving your eloquence or charisma, nor is it about trying to mould you into any kind of specific leadership style. This training is simply about developing a clearer picture of what your natural communication style is and how you prefer to go about your work, versus how others with different styles prefer to behave and communicate, and what steps you can take in order to interact with others more effectively.
To help us achieve these goals, we’re going to explore something called the DISC profile, which is one of the most widespread professional development tools taken by millions of people every year and used by hundreds of thousands of companies around the world, including about 75% of the Fortune 500.
The thing that I think you’ll like most about this tool is that it is simple and practical — it's not some abstract university theory, and you won't need to have any kind of background in psychology.
From this training, you’ll benefit from more than 50 years of research that has proven that there are four types of basic behavioural preferences inherit in all people on earth. DISC has emerged as the most popular model for explaining these four behaviours as it gives its users simple and effective guidelines for building trust and cooperation, and reducing the potential for conflict and misunderstandings.
In essence, DISC is a framework that has simplified decades of research on how humans prefer to work, act, behave, socialise and communicate with each other, which we’re going to take advantage of and use to help accelerate our abilities to lead and manage the people around us.”
Following this introduction, the participants would then receive an overview of the four primary DISC behaviours, including what each factor stands for and the common characteristics, strengths and tendencies associated with each. For fun, you might wish to use these famous characters as examples.
The leaders should begin to learn what conditions each of the four styles respond to best, and how to adapt their preferred leadership style in order to communicate more effectively and get the best performance from each.
At this point, it is a good idea to present the leaders with their DISC profiles (or some specific parts of them) so that they can relate the DISC principles to their own situation. It's worthwhile to have all the leaders participate in activities and discussions that highlight important differences in their styles, which works best if there are people with opposite styles in the room.
Once the leaders have a grounded understanding of the research and principles of DISC, and once they have established an awareness of their own style and that of others, we might provide them with some strategies to put the DISC language into action with their teams.
This is where the DISC framework is so invaluable. The leaders can then go back to their workplace and share the information with their teams and use the DISC framework as a common language (or set of terms) to discuss their working preferences. Managers will learn to be more adaptive to their team, and team members learn to be more adaptive to each other and their manager.