Jenny Cole Unveils the Power of DISC Profiles in Leadership and Teamwork

Jenny Cole: 1:02

Hi, welcome to Positively Leading. I'm Jenny Cole, and today we've got a solo episode all around the DISC profile. So in a recent episode with Morgan Shaw, we talked a lot about being an I and you might be curious about what that is about. Some of you would be familiar with DISC. Some of you might have even used DISC. It's the most underutilized assessment tool, I think, in education, and that's just me. It's the one thing that I wish I'd known about as a leader, and it's a tool that I use absolutely every day in my consultancy.

Jenny Cole: 1:44

So this is going to be a really quick rundown. Very hard to describe without being able to see the picture, but I want you to imagine a circle that's divided into four. Up the top, in the left-hand corner, we've got D, that's for dominance I'm going to talk about that soon. Top right-hand corner, I for influence. Bottom right hand corner, s, for steadiness or supportiveness, and bottom left hand corner, c, for conscientious.

Jenny Cole: 2:14

And this tool was developed by a gentleman called William Moulton Marston, who was a psychologist, in an attempt to understand what drives and what people need, and so DISC measures what it is that people need, and some of us need to work quite quickly with lots of ideas, quite fast, dynamic, bold. We like the workplace to feel energised and energetic and we think quite quickly and we're quite big picture people. And so that's the top of the circle, if you want to draw a horizontal line. At the top, action, fast-paced, dynamic and bold. Down the bottom are those people who are more slow, steady, methodical and who prefer the world in which they work to just be a little more careful and more well thought out. So there's that vertical axis of the speed at which people prefer to work and we're all on a continuum from action fast-paced, dynamic and bold all the way down to slow and steady and methodical. The horizontal axis moves from collaboration and a real people focus on the right-hand side to a very task and process focus on the left-hand side. Again, most of us are on a continuer we can both be with people and do process and some of us are on a sliding scale.

Jenny Cole: 3:42

Myself, I'm very people focused and I'm not very good with process. Myself, I'm very people focused and I'm not very good with process. Other people are very task focused and they forget to sometimes consider people. So, going back to that circle, with the four squares D for dominance, they are both fast, big picture, dynamic thinkers, and they love a challenge. They're more task focused. So you give them a task to do and they go yes, awesome. They're driven by a need for challenge, results and action. The Ds get up in the morning to get shit done. They love a to-do list and they love tick, tick, tick, tick, ticking it. Very task focused, very action oriented. They sometimes can forget about people and sometimes they can come across as being too blunt or too domineering, but these people are really good because we can trust them to get things moving and get things going.

Jenny Cole: 4:41

Top right are our eye for influence folk. These folk lead through influence. They also like to work quite quickly, are also big picture thinkers, but their focus tends to be more people focused, collaborative, relational. They're more about ideas than they are about facts. They like enthusiasm and what they need is social interaction. What they don't like is missing out. So these are these very gregarious, happy, people-focused. The reason they turn up to work every day is to find out what's happening. They're often very curious and they're very people-focused and they bring an energy and a dynamism to the workplace. So that's the top of the DISC profile, the D and the I Fast big picture thinkers, one of them very task focused and one of them very people focused. So D task focused, I very people focused At the bottom of the DISC map. So these folk prefer to work in a way that is slower and more steady and more methodical.

Jenny Cole: 5:47

Bottom right, these people share the people focus that the I's have, except the S's are driven by a need to make sure that everyone and everything is okay. They like stability, they like certainty, they like supporting the people that they work with. These folk come to work every day to make sure that everyone is okay. They're the doers. Just tell me what to do and I will methodically do it, slowly, carefully, steady, making sure that everyone is okay. What they don't like is change. They will change, but only if everyone else is changing as well, and so these are the groups of people that we often see in schools that are slow to change, not because they're bad people or they're nasty, but they're just a little resistant. They just want to make sure that everyone's okay in that process.

Jenny Cole: 6:44

Also at the bottom of the disc map is the C C for conscientious. They also like to work in a way that is slower and more methodical. They also like to work in a way that is slower and more methodical. However, their need is a need for accuracy and deep learning. They are very task-focused people and the reason that they come into work every day is to do a good, high-quality job. So, unlike our steadiness colleagues who come to work to make sure everyone is okay, a C needs to make sure that everything is okay Accuracy, deep learning, facts.

Jenny Cole: 7:20

These people act entirely on facts and not on feelings, and what they're afraid of is being found out that they don't know, and they're very private people. They don't like to be shown up in public. They're very unlikely to speak out unless there's a mistake, and I often jokingly say that the love language of a C is pointing out other people's errors, because accuracy is so important to them. They think it's important to you, and so they will point out when you've done something wrong. So we've got our people focused, we've got our task focus, we've got our slightly faster and big picture versus slower and more about the details. So what I try to help people understand is the motivations of each of these groups is very different, and so, as Morgan and I talked about in our podcast and I will put the episode for that below is.

Jenny Cole: 8:23

You know, she and I, as a high, I thought that the best way to inspire and motivate people was to have high energy and high enthusiasm. Unfortunately, that energy and enthusiasm can feel a little frightening to our C colleagues, who like things to be slow and steady and considered so while I'm rushing off going, wouldn't it be awesome? They're sitting there thinking does that mean I need to change? What's the research around that? Likewise, when I'm working with someone who is a C who likes a lot of accuracy and detail and likes to know things well, when they ask me a lot of questions like what do I do about that? Where might I find that? How do we know where to put that? Is that different for that student? Do we need to alter it for the year eights? I find that really frustrating because I don't need that level of fact and detail. It's not how I operate. So hopefully you can see already how working in the way that makes most sense to you can sometimes be off-putting to other people.

Jenny Cole: 9:29

What DISC helped me understand was not only do we have our own motivators and our own fears, we have our own strengths and our own weaknesses. The way that we lead impacts how others see us. That I give is that I would often walk into a staff meeting or a school development day and get very excited about a new proposal or idea or funding opportunity. And the people like me who were big picture thinkers, who liked ideas and enthusiasm, thought that was fantastic. And those who like to work in a slightly less chaotic environment found that very, very threatening. And then there were others who just were like calm the farm, just tell me what I'm supposed to do. Enough of that waffly stuff, let's just get on with it Now. None of those people turned up that day to annoy me, but they did. And likewise I didn't get out of bed going. You know what I'm going to annoy half of my staff today? But I did because I didn't understand that the way I led and the motivations that I had and the needs that I had as a human being influenced how I led but had an impact on others.

Jenny Cole: 10:52

So DISC says and when you do DISC properly, you do an online assessment and I can facilitate this for you. If you ever want me to do it, just shoot me an email and I'll respond with the costs and so forth. But you do a very long, comprehensive assessment and you get back a report. There are two reports one that you can do if you're in a management role and one that you can do if you are just in the workforce. And the first sort of third talks all about what it means to be you and your style. The second half talks about how you can be flexible so that you can work more appropriately with people of the other styles, because it's a very good assessment. It shows that we're a blend of styles and that we can have particular elements in different places. It's not as cut and dried, as I explained right in the very beginning, but the idea is to be flexible so that we're aware of what it is that I'm doing and that I can, if I need, to work in a way that makes more sense to somebody else, because that way I get the best out of them. So, again, as Morgan and I talked about in our podcast, we discovered that our enthusiasm could be off-putting and that sometimes you just have to dial that back and learn to be a better listener, because that's what other people need. So DISC is far more complex than that.

Jenny Cole: 12:30

I run a lot of workshops, both in school and online, and have a little discourse coming up. As I said, you can order your own DISC profile through me. You could do it for you and for your team. There's all sorts of different ways of doing it, but I suppose the aha moment for me was what motivated me, what inspired me, what got me up in the morning. Was it not the same for everybody? And if I continue to work in that way that I was perhaps putting off and demotivating others on my team? So if anything in there sounds interesting to you, I'll have some links below. Just be in contact. And if there's anything on this podcast that you've loved, any questions that you have, please shoot them through to me. I would love you to rate or review this podcast so that others can see it and follow it, so that you can keep up to date with the episodes as they drop each week. It's been lovely having you here. Bye for now.

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