Behavioural profiling - DISCus
What is DISC?
There are many ways of evaluating an individual's skills or approach, and predicting their likely behaviour from the results.
At one end of the scale are fairly simple tests designed to evaluate specific skills and abilities, such as an examination or driving test. At the other end of the scale lie personality tests, designed to build as complete a picture of a person's style and approach, in general terms, as possible.
DISC lies somewhere between the two. While it isn't a full 'personality test' in the strict technical sense, it provides an insight into an individual style that is more than adequate to predict the likely trends of their behaviour in the future. It does this by evaluating four key factors in an individual style, rather than the sixteen or more that are often seen in full personality tests.
This confers the advantage of greater accessibility: while a full test battery will often contain literally hundreds of questions, and take hours to complete, a DISC profile questionnaire contains only twenty-four, and can be usually be performed in fifteen minutes or less.
This also provides advantages in the area of interpretation; while the interpretation of results from a full test remains in the province of experts, DISC results are sufficiently well defined that their interpretation can be almost completely automated.
Principles of DISC
What Can DISC Tell Us?
At its most basic level, DISC measures four factors of an individual's behaviour: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance. These are fairly complex constructs, and aren't easily expressed in single words, but they can be characterised as assertiveness, communication, patience and structure.
The real power of DISC, though, comes from its ability to interpret the relations between these factors. For example where a highly Dominant person has an equally high level of Influence, they will behave quite differently to an equally Dominant individual without that Influence. The factors combine like this to provide (theoretically) around one million different 'profiles' (that is, combinations of the four factors).
Using this information, DISC can be used to describe a person's general approach, including their motivations and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, and some of the basic assumptions they make about other people. It can also go far in helping to predict how a person will react to a specific set of circumstances.
The DISC Questionnaire
A standard DISC questionnaire consists of twenty-four questions. Each of these questions presents four options, and asks the respondent is to select which of these applies most closely, and which least closely, to their approach.
Creating a DISC Profile
A completed DISC questionnaire will contain 48 answers (one 'most' and one 'least' for each of twenty-four questions. The analysis process involves taking each of the forty-eight answers from the questionnaire, and associating it with a particular DISC factor. This is a more complex task than it might seem, because some answers to the same question will relate to different factors depending on whether the respondent chose them as 'most' or 'least'.
Finally, the results of this calculation are scaled, adjusted according the population averages, and plotted on a graph known as a 'DISC Profile'.
Profile Interpretation
The calculation of a DISC profile or profile series is, of course, only a step in the process. The most vital link in this chain is the description of a person's real behaviour based on the numbers shown in the profile. DISC profiles provide far more scope for interpretation than just the production of textual report. We expand the interpretation to provide information such as:
Traits
By looking at the relationships between different factors, we can build up a library of individual traits that a person possesses. By expanding this approach across the profile series, we can also assess traits that a person lacks, and even describe those that they are presenting in their behaviour, but which are not, in reality, present.
Stress
Pronounced variations between the Internal and External Profiles are often indicative of stress, and it is possible to measure, in general terms, just how much stress an individual was experiencing at the time they completed the questionnaire. It is also possible to estimate how effectively that individual will cope with stress, and to judge the probably source of that stress.
Job Matching
Especially where DISC is used in recruitment, Job Matching provides an extremely useful tool. This involves the construction of an ideal behavioural profile for one or more roles, and comparing these against an individual set of DISC results.
Candidate Matching
Candidate Matching is essentially the opposite of Job Matching. Once we have a selection of role templates, we can take one of these and compare it against a sequence of candidate profiles. This helps to quickly determine which candidate (at least in terms of behaviour) is best suited to a particular role.
