Factfile: team building with DISC

Understanding Teams

One of the things that DISC models particularly well is the way that a person will interact with others, and a natural development from that fact is an examination of a individual in the context of a team.

Discus includes a new extension of DISC theory designed specifically to examine a members attitudes towards work in a team, and to identify the likely types of role that individual will adopt.

Discus doesn't stop with the individual member: it includes a complete team profiling suite, that's capable of describing the make-up of any team in DISC terms, and analysing the team as a whole, its leadership and the relationships within it.

A screen from the Teams section of Discus, showing how it can describe the membership of a team using DISC profiles.

Beyond describing and assessing teams, Discus also includes a Team Profiler - a tool that can actually construct ideal teams. Based on a behavioural definition that you provide, the Team Profiler will search through all the combinations of DISC profiles it can find to locate the best possible matches to your ideal team definition.

Four Team Factors

The four factors used by Discus to describe teams are derived from the standard DISC factors. They are:

• Direction
• Communication
• Stability
• Productivity

Unlike ordinary DISC factors, each of these also has an 'inverse' value to complement the main team factor:

• Participation
• Application
• Flexibility
• Resourcefulness

There are also a host of 'subfactors' deriving from these: the Understanding Teams handbook supplied with Discus explains all these terms in detail.

Find out more

• DISC Reference Library
• Team Building with DISC
• The Discus Profiler