DiSC® is a personal assessment tool used to improve work productivity, teamwork, leadership, and communication.
DiSC measures your personality and behavioral style. It does not measure intelligence, aptitude, mental health or values. DiSC profiles describe human behavior in various situations, for example how you respond to challenges, how you influence others, your preferred pace, and how you respond to rules and procedures.
The DiSC model discusses four reference points:
Dominance–
direct, strong-willed, and forceful
Influence–
sociable, talkative, and lively
Steadiness–
gentle, accommodating, and soft-hearted
Conscientiousness–
private, analytical, and logical
The test instrument and the profile results are designed so that it’s easy to understand and recall your behavioral style and insights. The writing is engaging and the visuals are memorable. Facilitation resources are available to guide and reinforce learning.
People interested in DiSC often want to see DiSC profile sample reports. You’ll find that there are several versions of the DiSC assessment based on what outcomes are desired. So you’ll find reports focused on the workplace, sales, management, and leadership.
The DiSC Model of Behavior was first proposed by William Moulton Marston, a physiological psychologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard. Later, others developed assessments based upon this model. The Everything DiSC® product family, launched by Inscape Publishing in 2007, was created to make the DiSC assessment even more valuable to its users. It introduced more highly personalized reports, customizable facilitation tools, and electronic access to unlimited follow-up reports.
Leadership and management are terms that are often used interchangeably in the business world to depict someone who manages a team of people. In reality leadership vs. management have very different meanings. It’s important to understand the difference when choosing between the two products in the Everything DiSC family: Management and Work of Leaders.
In simple terms, the DiSC Management’s approach is for one-to-one relationships–manager to individual staff. But, the DiSC Work of Leaders approach is for the one-to-many relationship. If you have an employee who has just moved into a new managerial or leadership role, it can be hard to choose which profile would help that person most. Both profiles are relevant for leaders at all levels.
The focus of Work of Leaders assessment is on tangible steps directed at leading a group or organization toward a desired outcome. The three step process includes creating a vision, building alignment around the vision, and championing the execution of the vision. All four DiSC styles contribute to leadership success and most likely someone’s strengths are reflected in their DiSC style. However, leadership is also influenced by a variety of factors including someone’s character, life experiences and cognitive abilities. Work of Leaders helps develop preferred behaviors that are based on best practices. Good leadership skills can be difficult to learn because they are behavioral in nature. Everything DiSC Work of Leaders focuses on developing preferred behaviors that are based on context specific best practices to develop leadership skills.
The focus of Everything DiSC Management is a deeper understanding yourself, as this is the first step to becoming a more effective manager. The DiSC Management profile will help you understand the preferences you have as a manager, thereby helping you understand what you enjoy and what drains your energy when managing. The profile also teaches you how to observe behaviors in colleagues, employees and clients to recognize their DiSC style and how to adapt your behavior to other DiSC styles to manage more effectively. The concentration is on directing, delegating, motivating and developing the people you manage. The profile recognizes that all styles are valuable and can manage effectively.
Reviewing these sample reports for each profile will make the differences more clear.
The Everything DiSC Work of Leaders and Everything DiSC Management profiles can both be used to improve your skills in the workplace. If you’re uncertain as to which profile might work best for you current needs, the people at DiscProfile.com would be happy to help. Just call (877) 344-8612.
Curious about how a personality assessment like DiSC gets developed? We spoke with two of the developers for the new Everything DiSC Work of Leaders and asked them to explain their process. Mark Scullard, director of research (an S style) and Emma Wilhelm, senior writer and product developer (a DC style), give us some insights into their work at Inscape Publishing.
How did you decide to develop a new product like Work of Leaders?
Mark: Our president and I write a column for Training Magazine and one of the topics we tackled was: If you had any topic you could go to training on, that you’d like to see developed, what area would that be? We’ve done this several times and leadership is always the top area. It doesn’t matter if you’re an executive or if you’re a front-line manager, leadership was the one that came up again and again as the most coveted skill that people want to have.
DiSC has really for a long time been used to facilitate leadership discussions and leadership development. But in the past it has been a more generalized product. [Work of Leaders was] part of a four-year project where we were developing a 360 tool, we were developing a book on leadership [The 8 Dimensions of Leadership], and then this product is really designed for development of leaders outside that 360 context.
Where did you start? How did you begin?
Emma: Well the first thing we did was delve into all the research that already exists and to read other people’s leadership books. And I think one of the best things we did in this program is not try to re-invent the wheel. There’s already a lot of great leadership literature out there. We tried to find commonalities between them, notice trends and also how those trends linked up with DiSC.
Mark: Welooked at it from two different perspectives. One is looking at the leadership literature. For the average person, getting your head around all that is an incredibly daunting task. So we really tried to find common links among these thinkers and the idea of vision, alignment, and execution were the ones that really came out of the ringer.
Were you interviewing leaders, asking about their leadership styles and frustrations, and their successes?
Mark: As part of the book, we absolutely did do a series of interviews with a lot of people, particularly at the upper executive suite of leadership. But then with the qualitative research we got to talk with people at all different levels of leadership—we asked them questions about what’s important to them as a leader, what frustrates them, what problems they’ve had in the past, what do they see as good leadership, and so on.
Did you give all these people one of the DiSC profiles as well?
Mark: Actually they were accessed, but as part of our research process we have the opportunity to ask them, after they’ve taken the assessment, if they like to help us with some research questions. It wasn’t necessarily DiSC-based.
Emma: Part of how we do our quantitative research here—it’s the beauty of our EPIC profile platform—any person who takes an online profile goes through the EPIC system. And Mark, as the director of research, has the ability to add on research questions that they can opt into to help us collect information.
So it may be that our readers will have actually contributed to the production of this new product.
Emma: Exactly.
Why was Everything Disc 363 for Leaders completed before the Work of Leaders?
Mark: DiSC 363 was strategic in that we didn’t have a 360 product at that point. It was really in the development of that leadership tool that we realized we also needed a companion classroom training to help leaders develop.
Emma: I think the Work of Leaders needed to percolate a bit longer, too. Everything we do in product development here is very iterative. We come back to it over and over again and add new layers as we have new understanding and we get more feedback from outside the company. And this one is so much better having gone through several years of that, I think.
So you got a handle on this leadership thing and then did you just try and shape it to the DiSC profile mold?
Mark: Our process is that we develop some initial ideas and we talk to consultants and trainers and customers to get their gage on how they think. We make tweaks based on that—a number of rounds. Then we start to develop a prototype of not only a profile, but maybe some facilitation, then some ways of facilitating that. We run that by people; we get more feedback on that. Then the more painful part begins. We get a working prototype—an assessment that you can actually take and it generate results.
We make a full prototype and then we beta test that with dozens and dozens of organizations and we get feedback. I think this time there has been six rounds of that. Each time there’s hundreds of participants and we’re getting feedback from them not only through the trainers, but they also go through our web survey tools to give us feedback about what worked for them. So the products that we end up with usually look nothing like the beta.
Emma: We throw lots of things away. And that’s good because we do not settle until it’s really going to be useful to the end user. We’re not afraid to throw things away if they’re not working.
Mark: The amount of work that any of us puts in that gets throw away would be demoralizing to most. But we understand it now as part of our process.
How do you validate this work?
Mark: There’s lot of techniques for validating. You can look at it in two ways. One is validating the experience that people had. Did they have an immediate positive reaction? Did they feel it’s useful? Is it actually useful? So that’s part of the beta testing we’re getting feedback.
Then there’s also the more scientific end of that which is looking at both the reliability and validity of the tools. I tend to bore people with that information but we have a research report specifically for this profile. We look at the scales and say do they measure what they are actually supposed to measure? Are they measuring consistently? Are they measuring in a stable way? This is probably the most in-depth measurement tool we have to date.
How was working on Work of Leaders different from working on other DiSC profiles?
Emma: There is something unique with Work of Leaders that we really haven’t done before which is that it’s built on best practices. So usually when we’re teaching DiSC we’re just teaching the four main styles and how everybody is different, but in the case of the Work of Leaders we’re actually laying out a continuum, we’re actually laying out that it’s better, in this case, to be on one side than the other. So you naturally fall somewhere on this continuum of cautious to adventurous. So when you’re creating a vision as a leader, it does matter. You do need to be somewhat adventurous. You naturally may be a more cautious person, but we’re saying that when it comes to leadership and crafting a vision, you need to work to come a little more towards the adventurous side. So that’s a little bit of a departure from the rest of our DiSC products. It’s kind of exciting because it gives you more specifics about what you need to do, what behaviors you need to do to be a better leader.
Mark: As Emma mentioned, that’s how we come up with those strategies [at the end of the profile report.]Where is your effort best focused? Because I think a lot of these profiles [created by others] just give you descriptions of how you lead and that’s nice and it’s engaging, but at the end of the day you want some guidance.
I think one of our competitive advantages is all that beta testing and it is a pain in the butt. It takes a lot of work, but it’s worth it. It really does shape not only the profile, but the facilitation. The stuff that you could come up with if you just designed it in a cave is much different than what you come up with as you get ongoing feedback from actual people who have to live it.
Mark Scullard speaking about the DiSC leadership model
People often wonder just what the DiSC questionnaire or survey looks like. You can see examples below.
DiSC Classic tests
This is an example of one of the questions you (or your participants) are asked to fill in. You’ll see 28 boxes containing four words each. In each box, you’re asked to choose one that is most like you and one that is least like you. Consequently, you’ll review a total of 112 words.
Everything DiSC tests
This type of questionnaire is easier to take, especially for anyone who isn’t a native speaker of English. A total of 79 questions need to be answered, but it still takes only about 10 to 15 minutes. It uses a rating scale which is much easier for most people.
Ready to migrate from DiSC Classic Online to Everything DiSC? Try Workplace for only 5 EPIC credits with an already completed DiSC Classic. Learn more.
I spoke with an experienced trainer, Leslie Gorman, vice president of education and development at Hair Club. She has been using DiSC for over 20 years, recently moving from the paper version of DiSC Classic to the Everything DiSC suite of assessments.
Certified as a DiSC trainer in the 1980s, Gorman has updated her skills and training materials by purchasing Everything DiSC trainer kits. She uses facilitation materials included in the kits. “I didn’t have to create them from scratch. Plus I got updated on the research behind the change to the circle model. It’s nice to have a refresher every so often. I use them as a starting point and customize the materials for Hair Club.”
DiSC training is offered throughout the company, from the executive management team, to physicians, to sales consultants. Gorman spoke a lot about the consultative quality of the relationships within the company and with their clients. Everything DiSC Workplace is her choice for use during trainings with corporate and franchise staff and managers to help them work more effectively together, to relate better to each other.
Gorman also uses the profile in training Hair Club physicians. “Our challenge is that doctors are used to having health-related, rather than elective, consultations. Our doctors are still the doctor, but they also have to provide consultative services with many more choices. We help them on the consultation skills and on working better with Hair Club staff.”
She used Everything DiSC Management with the executive management team so they could learn each others’ styles and come together better. She referenced InsideOut Coaching™, another program she respects, and how “they dovetail very well together.” She uses both to teach managers how to have more effective coaching or mentoring relationships and provide better feedback to each other.
Since Hair Club sales are more consultative than transactional, Gorman uses Everything DiSC Sales extensively with sales staff. In fact, she in the process of revamping their entire sales training and will use DiSC to help their sales consultants “understand where there client is coming from and to build trust” with potential clients. As an example, “How do I as a D have a consultation with an S? How do I adapt my energy level and my language?”
Gorman also uses DiSC to her own benefit to inform how she offers training. She uses the Facilitation Report to see everyone’s primary and secondary styles. “It’s helpful for me to know what I’m going to be facing in an upcoming class.” Her sales trainings typically run around 80 percent I styles with a smattering of D styles. “My focus is keeping them on task and reining them in.” Her corporate classes are overwhelmingly S, then C styles. “For them I spend more time working on interactions.”
DiSC® is a personal assessment tool used to improve work productivity, teamwork, leadership, and communication.
Dominance–
Leadership and management are terms that are often used interchangeably in the business world to depict someone who manages a team of people. In reality leadership vs. management have very different meanings. It’s important to understand the difference when choosing between the two products in the Everything DiSC family: 
Mark: Our president and I write a column for Training Magazine and one of the topics we tackled was: If you had any topic you could go to training on, that you’d like to see developed, what area would that be? We’ve done this several times and leadership is always the top area. It doesn’t matter if you’re an executive or if you’re a front-line manager, leadership was the one that came up again and again as the most coveted skill that people want to have.
