DISC and Motivator Applications: Assessment Series Part 6
Welcome to the last part of “How Applying Behavior and Motivator Assessments Can Improve Your Life”. You’ve learned about the answers our assessments deliver and why most assessments fail miserably. You then took a crash course in DISC and Motivator Assessments and saw my personal assessment as an example.
As you’ve read through the other sections you probably thought of applications for the assessments as well. There is an unlimited amount of applications you can get from these assessments, but for today we will focus on five of the most popular ones.
1. Personal Understanding
2. Coaching
3. Optimizing Team Effectiveness
4. Family Bonding
5. Hiring the Right Person
Learning About Yourself
It’s hard to believe that we don’t know ourselves well enough on our own, but you’d be surprised by what you can still learn.
Is there a person you don’t get along with no matter how hard you try? Do you want to know how to compromise better with your spouse, managers, and team mates? How do you respond to challenges, influence others, or respond to the pace of environment, just to name a few?
There are so many eye-openers throughout the DISC assessment and they have been the incentive for many life changing events. Knowledge workers have quit their incompatible jobs to find careers that are much more satisfying.
The overly stressed have found how to manage and control it. The overworked have found where to focus their time and energy in a rewarding way.
The unbalanced have found how to live a life that gives them career, job and personal balance.
The best reward one can hope for is a better life. These DISC assessments are a great foundation to finding yours. Many are amazed at just how much better it can actually get.
Coaching
These assessments are the perfect jump start to coaching. Often, coaches have a canned set of tools and processes they go through with every client. The assessments we use allow us to customize coaching sessions specifically for the client.
Often coaching starts with understanding your goals and desires for what you want to accomplish. By using these assessments we can help create a map for accomplishing those goals in a manner that is compatible with your motivation and personality styles.
The other benefit coaching with us provides along with the assessment is that you have someone who is an expert on the assessments and can help share even deeper insight into how these tools can help you, specifically.
A coach without the assessments is virtually coaching blind.
Building Teams
Another major use of the assessments comes from building teams. Often a company or manager comes to us for these assessments because they want to know who is at risk of becoming burned out, how to best position a team member, or how to increase team effectiveness overall.
By looking at the DISC assessments across the team and mapping the behavior and motivation styles together, it is easier to see what roles each best fits, who’s more likely to get along, and how to effectively motivate each person on the team.
For example, take a look at a team wheel below.
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Each of the numbers above represents a different person from the team. A manager can look up each of their team members’ profiles to learn about their motivations and personality styles.
In addition, with a quick glance you can see if someone prefers to work with people or tasks, wants to be an implementer or an innovator. They can see how well rounded the team is, and which people are more likely to be at odds.
So for this example you see a pretty well rounded team. Each quadrant has 1-3 people, and no quadrants hold an over whelming majority or minority. You would make sure you have each person mapped to a role that fits them or find ways to add those kinds of opportunities, such as letting employee #1 have tasks that you want done accurately and under established procedures; and on the other hand, making sure employee #5 is working on new projects, has a fast paced environment and deals with people in their work.
Another teams’ chart shows how the team members are adapting. Just like the example from my personal assessment, a manager can see who’s under stress, who’s likely to look for a different job, and who fits the position the best.
The information managers can learn about a team is hard to come by anywhere else. Even if a team mate feels out of place, it’s unlikely they will share that. If you can’t afford to lose valuable members of the team this is a great way to make sure you are satisfying their needs and making the choice to leave that much harder.
Bonding With the Family
Along the same lines as team building, DISC assessments also provide great exercises and tools for families to share together.
As a spouse, it’s good to understand each other’s needs and motivations. Knowing our partner’s DISC and Motivation Style, helps you understand how to share goals, appreciation, and get the kind of support you need. As a result, you’re more likely to enjoy the journey together.
In addition, you can learn an incredible amount about your kids (12 and up, since younger ones will have a harder time understanding the questions.) You will better know how to help them learn in school, what types of careers they might find rewarding, and how their communication styles differ.
The experience alone will be rewarding for the interesting information you discover and about one another and the “ah-hah” moments you share. Just imagine if we all put as much effort into our family relationships as we did at the office.
Hiring the Best Fit
Lastly, we see our DISC assessments used often to help companies find the best fit from their job candidates. It’s no secret that turnover costs are a major expense for businesses. The American Management Association says turnover costs typically fall around 30% of the annual salary or more.
Hiring managers can learn a lot about a person from their résumé, past experience and references, but they still incur a lot of risk because those resources can be fairly easily manipulated.
With our assessments, hiring managers know quickly if an applicant will fit the profile of the job. For example, if you are looking for a sales leader who doesn’t mind deadlines, change and is results oriented, then you might want someone who scores highly in the Persuader or Conductor roles.
Most of all, you can avoid the trap many hiring managers face when they employ someone they really like, only to find out they don’t really match up to the work style the position requires. It’s easier to put the right person into the job, then to put the right job into the person.
What’s Next?
You’ve learned a great deal now about the assessments we do. If you want to learn more or to have an assessment applied for yourself, come on over to our assessment page.
