DiSC helps adopting more effective behavior and improving workplace cultures, by supporting learners to gain personalised insights and choose for true behavior change. Achieving this supposes that you use DISC in a smart way in the workplace. While DiSC supports people understanding each other and improving interactions, it’s also possible to misuse the tool.
What can you do using DISC
Apply a model for understanding behavior
Use as a facilitation tool in conversations to understand, adapt to, and value others
DiSC can be used as an aid to build relationships and optimise each interaction. It suggests empathy for others, and brings powerful insights about yourself, which are as true and powerful for others—even if these are different from your own.
Install the habit of adopting common language in your team or organisation
DiSC equips you with common language to complex, sometimes sensitive topics. It remains simple without being simplistic and offers pragmatic ways to better connect and collaborate with others, from different horizons.
What should you avoid using DiSC
an excuse for poor behavior
Sometimes, we blame bad habits or poor behavior on the person’s DiSC preference. Doing it points to a missed opportunity. Instead of recognising counterproductive habits or behavior, working towards learning and improvement, we get stuck in a negative circle.
Categorising, labelling people or making quick judgments about individuals
The reality is that the behavior of people with their respective D, i, S, or C style is not always fully comparable. There is a lot of variation, even within one DiSC style.
That’s why it’s so important to use DiSC as a dialog tool to better understand how your DiSC style influences (or doesn’t influence) the way you work.
Believing that DiSC provides you with complete understanding of an individual
Although DiSC provides you with a lot of insight about an individuals’ tendencies and behavioral preferences, it is not a complete description. DiSC is tool that can be used as a conversation starter, giving powerful insights, but only the conversation around behavior can make people buy-in and consider a possible behavior change. It is the interaction and discussion between people that make improvement happen, once insight has been shared and agreement is made on what needs to improve and how we can make that happen, we can make progress towards shared goals. DiSC does not do this by itself, the human effort does, and DiSC is a good tool to accelerate it.
