Teams » DiSC Profiles

Motivation and the DiSC profiles

Originally posted at CLASS5 Energy Insights blog.

Are you trying to motivate your employees, customers, or clients? You’ve probably already learned that what motivates you doesn’t always motivate them. You might have worked on a yearly fundraising campaign where some people always showed up for a fun group activity while others never showed up but gave generous donations anyway. How can you identify and reach different types of people?

DiSC is a personality assessment tool used to improve work productivity, teamwork, and communication. The DiSC style concepts can be helpful generating creative ways to motivate different types of people. Consider the people you want to motivate. You might not know their DiSC style and that’s OK. You simply want to be sure that your motivational campaigns address every style.

If you’re having trouble with a department or team, you might want to ask your HR department if they know the dominant DiSC style of that group or can give you insights into them. Groups can have personalities, too.

The dominant personality

The first style DiSC identifies is the D. This reflects a person who desires to be in control and to win. They want to see positive results and know that they had a hand in them. For this type of personality you might want to sponsor a competition where they can lead a team or be a judge. You might want to put an influential D on your committee. They like to be challenged and to solve problems, so don’t be shy in giving them one or two. Let them know when you observe their results.

If you don’t have a strong vision and the strategies to achieve it, this style might try to take things into their hands. You should avoid giving direct orders to a person with this style.

The influencing personality

The i-style is motivated by social recognition, group activities, and relationships. If you’re sponsoring activities to raise awareness or celebrate a success, you’ll find these people enjoying themselves. They are often a good choice to plan for such events. They will appreciate being given the authority and recognition. Let them be your cheerleaders, and be sure to cheer on their efforts. They will enjoy achieving results as part of a group effort. This style also appreciates hearing about personal experiences and stories.and can identify with a personal story.

A person with this style might want to be a spokesperson for your campaign. You might also want to let them work on something other than facts, policies and procedures. They will appreciate not being bogged down with the details.

The conscientious personality

The details will appeal to a C-style person. This personality wants to gain knowledge and become the expert. They are often cautious and don’t like change, so be sure to give them access to all the facts and information they need. Let them know what steps they need to take to be successful. They won’t need recognition as long as they can tell that they’ve reached a tangible goal.

Be aware that a person with this style might have trouble making quick decisions or delegating any tasks you give them. If you create new procedures and don’t stick to them, you may offend the C folks.

The steady personality

The S-style person really wants to help. They enjoy giving support and collaborating with others. But they don’t like change. Let this type of person know how their efforts make a difference in the world and that their actions matter to others. If their group is making changes, it’ll make it easier for them to do so, too. They can become your loyal supporters and enjoy having a formal role in any activities. Express your interest in how they are helping out.

If a person of this type is heavily focused on another task, then you might want to wait to ask them to do anything more. Take enough time to clarify any issues they bring up and be clear on what you expect from them.

Conclusion

Can you see how one person might respond well to a thank-you card, but another might toss it before reading? How one person will enjoy individual public recognition, and another just wants to know that his or her team enjoyed themselves? Some people will want to know how your top leadership is involved and some will want to know how things will change around them.

No one motivational or recognition campaign will work for everyone you want to reach. That’s why it’s important to know your audiences and run more than one campaign.

Teaming in the business world

Recently Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson talked about The End of Teams as We Know It. She states: “We’re going to have to get better at learning how to quickly relate to people we don’t know; learning how to trust them, learning how to share our knowledge, extract their knowledge, synthesize it, even though we come from very different backgrounds, different expertise areas and so forth.”

As discussed in the video, teams are evolving. The stable team working together from season to season is a thing of the past. What does this mean for your organization? For one thing, it is going to be more important than ever to be able to understand your colleagues. We will all need to relate to people and build trust quickly. We won’t have the luxury of learning about how our newest teammates work, think, and communicate as we work on project after project.

Understanding or “reading” people will be a skill we all need in the world of “teaming.” DiSC profiles can help you and your team members to understand your each other by learning to people read. Either the Everything DiSC Workplace or Everything DiSC Sales profiles will help individuals communicate better and avoid misunderstanding what is likely to motivate or worry another. (You might not think of your team as being involved in sales, but most teams have to sell others on their recommendations or results.)

Another key element in “teaming” is building trust. In order to build trust we must be comfortable with some amount of self-disclosure. Sharing our DiSC styles and the traits that go along with that style is a great way start this sharing and build trust in the team. The basics about our styles is personal but not invasive in any way. And it gives some of the less assertive members of a team a more formal way of letting others know about their needs and preferences.

If you manage a team or consult with a manager and spot a problem between a couple of members, the DiSC Comparison Report can be a way to spot what might trigger the problem and give you a starting point for discussing it.

Working in teams might expose a generational divide. It might prove to be harder for older employees or volunteers. Recently schools have planned curriculum around teaching students how to collaborate, so many younger people entering the world of work have had more practice learning the skills necessary to be successful in a team. They are also sometimes more comfortable being evaluated as part of a group. However, they might also have had more negative experiences with cooperative activities.

Teamwork can be stressful. Anything HR or a manager can do to reduce that stress and make communication more productive will result in better team performance. One wonderful thing about using DiSC as part of team development is that it is transferable. Each member can take what she or he learned and use it with the next team. Comparison reports can be run for anyone who has taken an Everything DiSC profile so even this depth of information is available as new teams form.

Time management for teams

There’s so much advice out there about how to manage your time. Most of it is good and practical, but just reading a few hints has never really helped me. Like others, I’m really too busy to take the time to really learn how to manage my time effectively. Like most other I’ve worked with, I need help and structure if I’m going to sit down and critically evaluate how I relate time and tasks.

Teams need this period of focus, too. Who hasn’t sat through endless meetings or had to wait for other team members or been distracted by interesting tasks irrelevant to the group’s goals? Normal office activities often interfere with our own work. Salary.com found the top 5 work-related distracting activities were:

Salary.com: 2008 Wasting Time at Work Survey

Know your time management strengths

My co-workers would acknowledge that I am almost always on time and seldom procrastinate on task others need me to finish. Maybe you’re good at prioritizing or setting aside quite time to work. Teams work better when they know when and where they can rely upon a member’s strengths.

Know your time management weaknesses

Even more important is knowing where you might need help in managing your time or what your time values are. There are so many things that can cause us to misuse time. You might have trouble determining which task items you really need to tackle first. If a few people on a team have this problem, then the team leader will need to specify a hierarchy of tasks. If most members are good at this, then a quick discussion during a meeting might be more effective.

Often, I’ll read through time management advice like “do first things first” and just nod my head and go on to the next bullet. What I have trouble with is figuring out how to determine which of my tasks is a first thing. I’m not sure how to assign a value to each task.

If you were my manager or fellow team member you might not notice that I have this problem because whenever you ask me to do something special, it’s done right away. It might take you a long time to notice that my routine or long-term tasks aren’t completed. You might not spot the real problem and assume that I’m having trouble managing interruptions because you see a lot of activity around my work area. But if we all know I have this struggle, someone can check in with me about the routine details before assigning me an additional task. That will be much more successful than trying to relocate my desk.

Several of us might assume that because you have the highest ranking job title, you should lead the meetings. Only later will we realize that producing an agenda is an onerous task for you. We might elect whomever misses the first meeting to act as secretary, eventually wasting time trying decipher ponderous meeting notes, instead of finding out who can most succinctly and clearly communicate in print.

We all have areas where we easily move forward and areas where we do not. A team’s success can depend on quickly noticing areas of potential problems and responding appropriately.

Action plans

If you use a tool like Time Mastery Profile, you’ll identify your strengths and weaknesses, which you can share with others. More importantly, you’re guided towards creating action plans to improve your attitude, set goals, improve analyzing, improve meetings, better handle written communications, or whatever you discover you need to work on. There’s a reason why the Time Mastery Profile is over 30 pages; time management is a complex set of skills to learned and practiced.

Re-enforcement

Part of setting up an action plan is deciding who you’ll ask to help you and what you’ll ask them to do. It’s hard to make significant changes in our lives without the support of others. Teams can support and challenge each other. This is much easier to do when there are action plans that have been shared.

Image hearing a co-worker interject this comment after hearing you talk with someone about meeting soon. “She wants to meet at 2? I thought you were setting aside this afternoon to do planning.” This would feel intrusive, right? But not if you’ve asked that person for help protecting your scheduled time or help affirming planning as a valuable step in managing your overall time.

If you’re leading an employee development session on time management, I recommend getting management support for conducting one time management review for participants within one week and another within six weeks. Managers should commit to supporting their team’s learning and ask for evaluation of their own skill development. Existing teams can do an audit of their time management priorities. Individuals can meet with their supervisors and review a few of their action plan items.

One training session isn’t enough for real behavioral change without additional support. What ways have you encouraged individuals or groups to make the investment it takes really improve their management of time?

Working with groups of teenagers

Adolescents must be aliens to most adults if you read popular literature. But while culture and habits might differ between the two groups, there are still observable behavioral similarities. Some of the same techniques for increasing teamwork and understanding among adults can also work with teens.

I-Sight is a tool written specifically for teens and for adult leaders who don’t have a lot of time to administer a personality profile like DiSC. It’s a quick, simple, easily-to-read tool that gets teens to think about how they behave and want to be treated in a group. It gives them a few strategies for getting along better with others.

Another advantage of I-Sight is that there is a paper record that the teen can choose to share with others if he or she chooses. It can be left out for a parent or friend to run across. It can be kept in a file and referred to when writing a cover letter for a job or a college admission essay. Leaders can suggest that participants keep the assessment and journal about it or just take a look at it again in five years to see if they have changed.

Group activities

If you’re lucky enough to have more time with the adolescents you’re leading, you can try one of these exercises.

Map the cafeteria

Provide a rough map of an area where your audience frequents meets or hangs out. It doesn’t need to be a cafeteria and it doesn’t need to be to scale. It needs to be large enough that it can be drawn on. Ask a few questions like these:

Do groups naturally form in your cafeteria?
What unites each of the groups you can identify?
What makes it possible for a person to move between groups?
Which groups are the most stable (have had the same members for the longest time)?
Which groups have the most status?
Do groups have personalities?
If there was a crisis (like a fire) how would each group respond?
If each group was asked to host a party for everyone, how would those parties differ?
If you wanted to sell a new soda to everyone, how would you do it differently for each group?

Self collage

This is a bit of group task cliche for teens and adults, but it still has its advantages. Everyone can produce something and no one has to disclose more about themselves than they desire. People have to share the materials and naturally start talking. This variation is good for groups where people are hesitant to share much about themselves.

Provide magazines, catalogs, manga or other visual print media along with scissors and glue. Ask participants to create a collage that represents them. One variation is called the treasure map in which each person creates a collage to represent their goals for the next year.

Another variation is to create four collages to represent each of the four DiSC styles. This is a little more abstract so you might want to create one for yourself first. You might chose to put an astronaut in the D section, a person sitting along at his desk in the i section, a relay racer handing off her baton for the S style, and an architect for the C style. Please remind participants that you’re using types as an organizing concept only and that one’s style does not determine their level of success in any job.

Personality and gender

The BBC conducted a personality test with the following findings. Have your teens discuss what they think about the findings.

… men tend to score higher for the trait of Openness than women. Intriguingly, this suggests that men tend to have a higher sensitivity for art and beauty than women, whereas women tend to be more practical.

Women scored higher on average than men in Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism. In other words, women tend to be more caring, dependable and emotional, while men tend to be more competitive, distracted and even-tempered.

The Instructor’s Guide to I-Sight^® provides more lesson plans and ideas.

The dominant personality

The influencing personality

The conscientious personality

The steady personality

Conclusion

Group activities

The C culture rewards

The C culture criticizes

Advantages of the C culture

Drawbacks of the C culture

Your thoughts?