By Dan Rosenberg
Typical with many corporations, their human resources departments activate programs to enhance the working relationships of their employees. Many years ago, while working for a large telecom company in the Midwest, I took part in a DISC analysis with my team.
DISC stands for Dominance, Influence, Compliance, and Steadiness. A DISC assessment is designed to give you, and others, insight into your personality. It is done by calculating your personal DISC profile based on your everyday typical behavior under normal conditions as well as under stress.
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You start by taking a survey that contains 28 groups of four statements. For each group of four descriptions, you select the one most like you and the one least like you. It should only take a few minutes, but some of the groups can be challenging. For example, you might have to choose from the following:
(A) I am very helpful towards others
(B) I don’t like tempting fate
(C) I don’t give up easily
(D) People like my company
After my team members completed the surveys, we each received a report. Based on your answers, paragraphs and sentences were extracted from a database and formed into a ten-page narrative about your working styles. You were also provided with a summary.
Over the following week, you were supposed to continue the program by discussing your summary DISC profile with each member on your team. However, I offered my direct reports an opportunity to exchange our detailed reports before we met. My five direct reports all agreed. Reading the reports ahead of our meetings was helpful.
Then there was Mike’s report. As I moved onto the second page, I noticed there were striking similarities to my own report. I then placed a copy of my report next to his. I flipped the pages. They were identical. This could only happen if Mike and I answered all 28 of the survey questions the same way. I estimate the odds of that happening at least 1 in 268 million (it is probably higher as each question had four different choices, but I’ll leave that to any of you statisticians out there).
The meetings were beneficial to my team going forward. No surprise that my relationship with Mike needed the least amount of work. He and I have remained friends since we stopped working together in 1997.
My wife’s reaction when she heard about this, “Why didn’t you guys buy a lottery ticket?”