Photo by Tim Johnson on Unsplash
Expand Your Circle: Leverage Your Everything DiSC Profile Back at Work
When I first joined FlashPoint, I was nervous. I was a new, remote team member and I had to come up to speed quickly and learn how to work with, and manage, remote team members who I’d never met, as well as leverage their strengths and personalities when we collaborated on content, and learn how they wanted me to work with them.
Fortunately, I had a game plan, and a secret super-power – I knew my DiSC® style and I knew theirs so I already had a head start on knowing how to direct my questions or attention to complement their preferences.
This helped immeasurably when I had to onboard a new team member as well as ask them to create something for me – like a blog or a report – to help me understand how they did their work.
Here are a few tips I learned, that I think anyone who has a little bit of experience with DiSC® can use to leverage their new-found knowledge.
- Ask about your colleagues’ communication preferences. You may be in a situation where someone you manage, or maybe your manager, has not taken the DiSC® assessment but you may be able to infer a little bit about their style by asking and/or observing. Even reading your own report about how your DiSC® style complements the other styles helps give you a strategy for communicating with others and applying it to the work you do.
- Review your “priorities” and those of your co-workers. Your priorities on Everything DiSC® are where you focus your energy. The simple step of having a conversation about your colleagues’ priorities – their preferences – helps fill in those gaps and tells you how you can work with them more effectively.
- Have an honest conversation about what you and your co-workers find stressful. Showing vulnerability at work can be extremely challenging. You may not even be able to put into words what your struggles are or what saps your energy, but DiSC® helps do that for you. It also helps with blind spots and challenges. For example, I tend to gravitate to “new” projects, but struggle with systematic, repetitive ones. It is important to realize that no one is perfect – but knowing my own challenges helps me look out for pitfalls, and it helps my manager know where I need support.
- Leverage online resources when you are back on the job. When you take Everything DiSC® on Catalyst™, you have access to interactive online portal where you can create comparison reports between you and your coworkers. This is what I did to prepare to meet my new team members and my own managers. It also helped to learn more about the research behind the DiSC® assessment. It was such a great tool to also learn more about my own style with on-demand content.
- Create development plans with DiSC® styles in mind. Your DiSC® style is tailored to fit and help you improve and develop in your current and future roles. The challenges, motivators, stressors, and preferences that DiSC® highlights give you a ready-to-use tool to seek out challenging stretch goals, as well as understand where you will naturally excel. Use this to your advantage, but also use it as a manger to help guide your direct reports and create their own development plans.
To learn more about how other organizations have used DiSC®, you might want to review our multi-client case study or take a deeper dive into the other potential uses for DiSC®.
