Are You Leveraging Your Employees’ Potential?
The DiSC Profile® Helps You Identify and Play to Employee Strengths
Transitioning from a brick and mortar office to a remote workplace is challenging. Whether that transition is temporary or permanent, in the short term it can hamper efficiency and cause frustration, as gaps in your company’s communication and processes come to light.
Even if you’ve smoothed out your virtual systems or are starting to bring people back into the office, you’ve still got a global pandemic and a shaky economy to contend with. All of us are feeling stressed, and when we’re stressed, we revert to who we innately are. Familiar behavioral patterns resurface while “new and improved” behaviors we’re trying to adopt tend to fall by the wayside.
Under stress, we continue to thrive in areas where we’re naturally strong but stumble more often in areas where we’re weak.
As a society, we’re currently in a high-stress moment together. But as individuals, your employees experience stress and personal crises all the time. No team member is skilled on every front, and you shouldn’t expect them to be. So if you want to tap into your employees’ collective potential, you need to find ways to leverage their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.
The DiSC Profile: Understand Who Your Employees Are
It isn’t always easy to discern a person’s strengths. It can take months for an employer to really learn where and how a new employee shines. Even then, your understanding may be skewed by personal biases and past experiences. We’re not as good at understanding human behavior as we’d like to believe—we need more objective measures to help us evaluate team members’ capabilities.
Personality assessments are an obvious solution for filling in our gaps in judgment. The right tool provides valuable information about a person’s strengths, communication style, and work preferences—all crucial information to building and running a successful team. Our personal favorite assessment is the well-vetted DiSC Profile.
The DiSC Profile identifies four basic behavioral styles (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness) and evaluates the degree to which a person naturally uses each style. There is no “ideal” type—each style has its own set of unique strengths and challenges. There are, however, certain personality types that might be a better fit for specific roles within your company. Knowing your own DiSC type, and the types of your employees, can improve communication and point to untapped areas of strength in your organization.
Benefits of the DiSC Profile
The DiSC Profile offers a nonjudgmental system and language to discuss differences in behavior and approach. Its insights can help you understand why one team member thrives during group meetings while another presents their best ideas via email.
Your team members may be filling specific roles based on your EOS Accountability Chart, but they’re more than just boxes you need to check: they’re three-dimensional people, and understanding who they are allows you to give them more of what they need to be successful.
Charlie Henry of Veterinary Associates of Cape Cod has found DiSC Profiles to be revolutionary to his business:
“We use the DiSC Profile to discover strengths and weaknesses and find the best ways to communicate with each other. I don’t expect someone who is weak in one area to become strong there overnight. I try to accept people as they are. I make sure that their job focuses on their strengths.”
Of course, you can only play to your employees’ strengths if you can clearly identify what those strengths are. That’s where the DiSC comes in to provide concrete information about each team member and their unique abilities.
What About Right Person, Right Seat?
I want to be clear that the DiSC shouldn’t be a substitute for making sure you have the right team members in the right roles in your organization. While you may tailor communication and even some processes to your employees’ strengths, you shouldn’t be redefining a role just so it matches an individual’s DiSC profile. If you find yourself in that position, it may be an indicator that you don’t have the right person in the right seat, and you need to act accordingly.
Using and Analyzing DiSC Profiles
The reporting for DiSC profiles can vary widely. We partner with a DiSC provider that produces thorough and comprehensive reporting that leaders can easily use to improve communication and coordination with their teams. We also have trained consultants on staff who can review your team’s reporting to identify opportunities and potential issues.
Interested in using DiSC profiles to leverage your team’s full potential? Contact us right here for more information.
