Knowing the different personalities is a solid start. The next step is to explore the options in real, practical contexts.
Disclaimer: I was already familiar with DISC, so I tried to internally deepen the concepts in the context of the group I took part of.
Recently I went through Dr. William Marston’s DISC personality profiles workshop. Our trainer was very enlightening, and our group got a better understanding of the reasons that underlie certain daily and also strategic behaviors from others.
Here is what I observed:
- Personality profiles are often associated with the judgment we make of people. A cognitive phenomenon that comes very naturally to us, and can be reframed so that we are aware of each person’s primary personalities and how that affects our perception.
- Profiles are circumstantial. Each person adopts one profile or another according to the situation. For example, I adopt a more or less dominant posture as a father, but not as a colleague or as a husband. There are many more cases.
- Unfortunately we have not had the privilege of addressing real-life scenarios. It would frankly be productive for us to look at what is ahead of the theory. Who knows, an episode for my podcast.
- Our trainer made a good point that high performing teams benefit from a fullness of all four profiles and a fuller awareness of their attitudes and values. This does not directly mean having at least four people in a team. Mathematically, the best teams have fewer people because they have fewer open communication channels, fewer sources of entropy, systemically more resilient, and are competently broader and more autonomous.