Factfile: analysing relationships

How People Work Together

DISC provides an excellent tool for describing a person's general behaviour, and even predicting how that person is likely to react in a range of circumstances. If we have DISC profiles for two different individuals, though, we can go a step further, and look at the ways those two people will interact with one another.

That's the purpose of the Discus 'Relationship Assessment'. Given two sets of DISC profiles from your database, Discus will search for important factors in the relationship between the two. It can highlight important areas of synergy between the two, and also suggest likely causes of conflict.

A Discus Relationship Assessment looks at a relationship from the perspectives of both individuals involved.

Perspective is a critical issue when considering behavioural relationships: one person's view of the situation can often be quite different to the other's. So, each Discus Relationship Assessment is broken down into two separate sections, to look at the relationship from both points of view.

In a team context, Discus also understands that the role of team leader can significantly affect the workings of a relationship. In this situation, the Relationship Assessment will automatically take account of the leader's role, and adapt its contents to describe any likely effects of that condition.

Relationship Dynamics

In a team setting, working relationships form a complex web of interaction.

Discus analyses relationships by looking for dynamics in the relations between the two profile. 'Dynamics' in this sense refer to the relationships between DISC factors on the two profile shapes.

This diagram shows how dynamics work. For each combination of factors in a pair of DISC profiles, there's a corresponding dynamic, and by considering all these dynamics together, we can build a picture of the way a relationship works.

Find out more

• Relationships and Dynamics
• DISC Reference Library
• The Discus Profiler