DISC Test

In today's fast-paced and competitive business world it is becoming more and more important to be able accurately to understand your own skills, strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of your colleagues. A DiSC Personality Test is now recognised all over the world as an effective management tool. The cost of getting this wrong and putting poorly matched people in an inappropriate working environment can be very damaging for a company, causing wasted effort, loss of performance and probably requiring additional and frequent management interventions when things and people go wrong.

DiSC personality testing is a scientifically validated and important tool for business managers and owners to make effective decisions about their employees, and in particular, where those staff members would best perform and fit-in to the organization. A DiSC profile test will ensure managers are able to place new employees or reassign existing roles, in the most productive way possible. DiSC profiling enables a company to put together efficient, happy and successful teams who work well together because of the correct assignation of skills and abilities: there is no point in making a highly qualified and knowledgeable staff member a leader if they have no effective leadership skills.

Tests using the DiSC system add extra knowledge and insights into an employee's working character and personality; it offers statistically proven and accurately calculated guidance about how a person will respond in different working environments. It is not a replacement for a company's existing recruitment procedures, but it is a powerful and accurately informative enhancement. When building teams to achieve specific objectives, DiSC test results will give an excellent indication of what tasks should be assigned to which team members, as well as offering accurate guidance for appointing leadership positions.

Each team member who has taken an online DiSC profile test is therefore aware of the strengths, skills and weaknesses of each other team member and this knowledge promotes good communication and understanding between those team members.

A carefully constructed team built using the DiSC system will help and enhance the performance of all team members:

• Increase their self-understanding: how they react in conflict situations, what motivates them and drives them and how they deal with stress and problems.
• Increase their understanding of the communications needs and styles of all the team members.
• Reduce conflict among the team and enable a smooth progression to better and more productive teamwork.
• Develop an accurate understanding of different customer's styles and thereby improve the team member's own sales skills.
• Improve team management through understanding in detail each team member's strengths, weakness, and behaviours.
• Develop more engaging, knowledgeable, responsive and effective leaders.

Dominance: the "D" Style - Responses to problems and Challenges.

Adventurous  Competitive  Daring   Decisive
Direct   Innovative  Persistent  Problem Solver
Results-Orientated

Influence: the "I" Style - How a person influences other People.

Charming  Confident  Convincing  Enthusiastic
Inspiring  Optimistic  Persuasive  Popular
Sociable

Steadiness: the "S" Style - Responses to the Pace of the environment.

Amiable  Friendly   Good Listener  Patient
Self-starter  Relaxed   Sincere   Stable
Steady   Team Player

Compliance: the "C" Style - Responses to rules and Policies set by others.

Accurate  Analytical  Conscientious  Diplomatic
Patient   Fact-Finder  High Standards  Mature
Trusting  Precise Understanding

• All DiSC evaluated qualities are equally valuable and we are all a combination of all four styles in different degrees.
• Other factors such as life experiences, education and maturity affect and influence our work, management and leadership styles.
• Having a more accurate and defined understanding of ourselves is a powerful tool to help improve our weaknesses and enhance our strengths.
• Having a detailed knowledge of the different DiSC style test results of other people with whom we live or work will help us to understand what others consider important and how they differ from us in their responses and behaviours.
• The quality of any situation, work, home or anywhere, can be improved when using DiSC analyses to assign tasks, leaderships and duties.

The tests usually take about 10 minutes each and are done online. The results can be immediately sent to you and your organisation's stakeholders in a DiSC personality test pdf file. Individuals answer a range of 24 questions. The questionnaire forces an individual to choose between two descriptions from a selection of phrases. Individuals choose ONE phrase that is "most" like them and another phrase from the same group of phrases that is "least" like them.

For example:

I am usually well disciplined   Most like me
Other people think I am generous  -
I am constantly active    Least like me
I keep trying until I get what I want  -

By the way, here at Talent Tools we realise that some questions may be difficult for people who do not speak English as their first language. In order to improve the accuracy of our tests we therefore offer our tests in over seventy different languages. This ensures more accurate and valid results because respondents can take the test in their strongest, native language.

The specially crafted DiSC questions are designed to reveal the individual's personal mix of behavioural types: each of us is a combination of styles with our own mix of strengths and weaknesses.

Understanding the mix of personal qualities in our colleagues enables everyone to communicate more effectively and allows tasks to be assigned to those people most able to complete them successfully.

Understanding our own particular mix of qualities enables us as individuals to promote and effectively use our strengths, as well as develop strategies to improve our areas of concern.

A team that has been DiSC tested can therefore be constructed around the strengths of team members and tasks and leaderships can be assigned more effectively.

The different character styles defined in DiSC are present in all of us to a higher or lower degree and it is this mix of abilities, attitudes and behaviours that define team members. In the test respondents are asked both what qualities are MOST like them as well as which qualities are LEAST like them: it is just as important to understand what people think are their strengths, as it is to understand what are their perceived weaknesses.

• Create and manage truly productive and effective teams.
• Accurately understand the behaviour, responses and motivations of team members.
• Inspire good working and personal relationships by understanding and recognizing all team member's communication needs and styles.
• Distribute skills more productively thus ensuring smooth teamwork and minimising conflict.
• Discover, develop and assign more effective managers, supervisors and leaders.
• Produce well-rounded, capable leaders with accurate self-knowledge and an accurate knowledge of their team member's skills.
• Increase team members' personal understanding of their abilities and confidence.
• Understand what motivates team members; what will cause them stress and how problems can most easily be resolved, if not avoided altogether.
• Understand and resolve conflict situations.
• Effectively and smoothly manage change.
• Ensure successful recruitment, placement, promotion and outsourcing of new and existing staff members.
• Develop and manage a more successful sales force: a more responsive and skilled sales force who are more understanding and responsive to different customers' styles and who will therefore improve customer service and sales.

Behavioural:

Instead of measuring distinct personality characteristics, behavioural tests give an insight into an individual's responses in defined situations, revealing certain kinds of behaviour and defined types of interactions with colleagues.

Behaviour is regarded as more changeable than personality, since we can adapt our behaviour depending on what is required of us in a given situation, role or environment.

Behaviour is also observable. This means that it is constantly responding to and affecting those around us. Behavioural tests will deliver very useful and constructive information which can accurately reveal the way an individual behaves in their workplace and with their colleagues.

Personality is generally held to be unlikely to change. In order, therefore, to get teams and their individual members working more successfully managers need to understand the primary dynamic: behaviour.

Managers, owners and team leaders do not necessarily need to know the details of who the person really is, their personality. They do, however, require an understanding of how their colleagues will respond in particular situations. DiSC assessments explain how and why you can assign different individuals to roles that are most suited to their abilities, in order to have the most suitable person for the job or tasks in hand.

DiSC profiling is therefore a behaviour test that attempts to accurately determine how an individual will respond in certain situations, and it is this prediction which is of most utility to managers and an organisation's leaders. In the case of the DiSC assessment tool, it describes how the respondent might react in the dimensions of "Challenges", "People", "Pace", and "Policies".

Personality/Psychometric Tests:

Personality tests attempt to define "who" a person "really is" and to give some indication of that individual's basic character traits. There are five factors that are generally measured during personality tests:

Extroversion  Independence  Conscientiousness Stability Openness

In a DiSC personality test these character traits are tested and measured and are considered relatively fixed when compared to behavioural activity.

William Moulton Marston's life story is filled with peculiar accomplishments that appear totally unrelated to each other: working successfully as a lawyer and also as a psychologist, he invented the first working lie-detection (polygraph) system. He went on to create the now internationally respected and used DiSC model and wrote several "self-help" books. Amazingly, he also was the creator of the "Wonder Woman" character.

Marston had the benefit of a Classical education and studied the Greek and Roman classics. He was also actively and personally involved during the early days of the struggle for women's rights, addressing issues such as votes for women, birth control, and career equality. Given this altruistic background it is still a surprise to find that one of William Moulton Marston's strangest achievements was the creation of Wonder Woman, the comic book heroine. Wonder Woman's dauntless behaviour that enables her to accomplish her missions so well, are an interesting reflection of the primary DISC characteristics: dominance, influence, submission, and compliance.

Marston was a physiological psychologist with a Ph.D from Harvard University and began his research on what would become the DiSC system early in the twentieth century. In 1928 he published Emotions of Normal People which defined his theory that normal people's behavioural characteristics could be broadly categorised into four main types: Dominance, Inducement, Submission, and Compliance (these classifications have subsequently been "fine-tuned" and now are shown as: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance)

The Polygraph: Marston, during his studies, noticed fluctuations in blood-pressure when test subjects were lying. In response to this he conceived a device to measure these changes and therefore give an idea of the veracity of the subject's responses and in 1917 he published his initial "lie-detector" or polygraph findings.

He was a very active lecturer the 1920s and 30s and often consulted with government representatives. Marston's emphasis, unlike many of his fellow psychologists at the time, was on the behaviour of the "general population" ("normal people") whereas most of his peers were more interested in "abnormal psychology". Publishing his findings widely and bringing his methodology to the attention of the court system, he soon gained a reputation for effective analysis and was even involved with the Lindbergh kidnapping case, offering his knowledge to the Lindbergh family.

Marston's research into finding ways to measure the energies involved with behaviour and conscienceless directly led to the development of the DiSC system. Marston himself did not develop assessment tests himself, other colleagues went on to develop the tests that are the forerunners of today's modern DiSC tests.

Ever the pragmatist, he used his knowledge and applied it in the world of cinema, working in 1930 with Universal Studios to help them make the move from the overly melodramatic silent-movies to the new "talkies" which now not only used sound, but required the actors to use more natural gestures, movements and facial expressions.

Marston kept writing new episodes for Wonder Woman until his death in 1947. In 2006 he was enrolled into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame.