It's a truism that the majority of the commercial profiling today takes place in a recruitment setting, to help establish an applicant's suitability for a particular job, or to monitor their approach to their work.
That's certainly a task that's well suited to a profiling tool, but the popularity of profiling in recruitment can sometimes obscure its potential in other areas. Being able to break down individual patterns of behaviour and assess the factors that make them up is a capability with a scope that extends far beyond recruitment. In particular, its insights can help to enhance the effectiveness of interpersonal communication at almost any level, and that in turn can bring advantages throughout an organisation.
To see how these kinds of advantages can be put to practical use, we'll take some time look in detail at a typical practical example: training. It may not seem immediately obvious how personal profiling can have a role to play in a training situation, but in fact it can make a significant contribution.
If you've experienced training (whether as a delegate or as a trainer yourself), you'll have noticed that it tends to be a relatively standardised process. The material and style of delivery rarely changes to meet different audiences' needs. Instead, there tends to be an implicit assumption that course members will accept and absorb information in basically the same way as one other.
A behavioural profiler like DISC tells us another story, though: different people interpret and respond to information in quite different ways to one another. Ideas that fascinate one person, for example, can fail to engage another at all. It doesn't take much reflection to see that matches up with normal experience, but conventional training techniques tend not to take factors like this into account.
Where profiling can really help is in giving us a structured explanation of how these different attitudes and approaches work. Using DISC, it becomes possible to adapt a training style to meet individual preferences and needs, helping to make training that much more effective and rewarding for all concerned. For example, DISC can help to assess how training is seen by different individuals in areas like these:
- Interaction
A very common dynamic in a training situation involves interaction from the participants. Usually, we find a few individuals who contribute actively and openly, while others are less expressive, and even reticent. This can often lead to a training session becoming unbalanced, as the more extrovert members demand more attention from the trainer. DISC can help to identify the various factors that lie behind this situation - information that can be vital to keeping the training balanced.
- Personal Priorities
Individuals tend to have quite dissimilar objectives and priorities in a training situation, and these can act as a 'filter' to their perceptions. Some individuals focus on the practical results that can come from training, others on more personal issues, or on matters of change, and there are many more examples besides. Profiling can help to identify these priorities, so that training can be focused on those factors that individual delegates see as directly relevant to them.
- Acceptance
Connected with the question of personal priorities is the issue of acceptance. The readiness of different types of people to accept information will depend significantly on how that information is presented. Some people are naturally sceptical unless clear facts and reasoning are provided, for example, while others find such an approach dry and disinteresting. Understanding how to help an audience best accept information can be an important step in providing effective training.
DISC can take all these factors into account, as well as many others, and use them to describe a person's 'training profile' - the way they best respond in a training situation. There are many subtleties involved in this process, but at its most basic we can break down training profiles into four basic types, each based on one of the four fundamental DISC factors:
- Dominator
Dominators, as the name suggests, have a demanding and self-motivated style. They tend to think about training in terms of practical results, which means that, if they can't see a direct benefit emerging from a training session, they can develop quite a negative attitude. The assertiveness in their natures means that they have little hesitation in expressing their views - or their disapproval - within the training session itself. The focus for the trainer in dealing with Dominator participants is to maintain control of the training session and retain each participant's attention without embarrassing or discomfiting the Dominator from whom control often must be reclaimed.
- Communicator
Communicators also tend to contribute to the session and express themselves openly, but in a more personal and friendly way than Dominators. Where one or more Communicators are present in a training session, it will often tend to become relatively informal and open in tone. The trainer will need to tactfully redirect Communicators back to the material presented to guard against tangents and unrelated discussions typical of the Communicator's informal and expressive style.
- Contemplator
Contemplators are much more reticent than Dominators or Communicators. They like to think through new ideas and concepts, and they seek time to consider them and their potential effects. A key task for a trainer here will be to judge a suitable pace of delivery for their course material.
- Interpreter
Interpreters are the most analytical of training types. They are far more concerned with accuracy and detail than the other styles, and this means that they can be reluctant to accept information that isn't backed by solid factual information. For a trainer to retain credibility with an individual of this type, they will have to show a full command of their subject matter.
Of course, in reality individuals don't always fall neatly into one of four separate categories. More usually, we find combinations of these factors at work. For example, it's fairly common to find elements of the Dominator and the Interpreter combined - describing a demanding and formal person who can be a significant challenge to train. To take another example, elements of the Communicator and Contemplator are often found together, too, describing a personable and accepting individual who takes time to consider and absorb the details of training topics.
This level of understanding can bring some significant practical benefits. For example, consider the familiar dynamic that we've already encountered, in which one or two confident and outgoing individuals monopolise interaction with the trainer during a session. It's often natural in a situation like this to adapt to the training style to meet the demands of this vocal minority, as though they were somehow representative of the group as a whole. DISC shows us, though, that this is probably not the case - instead, we're simply seeing the effect of the more assertive behaviour associated with Dominators or Communicators. The less expressive participants will be more likely to exhibit behaviours consistent with the Contemplator or Interpreter styles, and so have quite separate and different training needs of their own.
This is just one practical example of how DISC can be directly useful to a trainer, helping them adapt their training technique to the particular needs of different individuals. What's more, it can help a trainer to balance the content of their approach, by ensuring that they focus on factors that influence and engage each of the main training profiles. Where circumstances allow, it can even be used to help delegates to understand their own approach, and adapt to the needs of a particular type of training.
To get the most out of training with DISC, you'll need a specialised solution that can interpret and describe the DISC factors, and the ways they interact with one another, in a detailed and insightful way. Axiom can provide a number of suitable solutions, based around the flagship solution Discus. To find out more about the Discus profiler, [click here].
