Aha Moments with Everything DiSC

A few weeks ago, I flew to Minnesota to earn my DiSC certification. There, I learned a few things that I want to share with: the interested, the curious, and the skeptics.

First and foremost, the purpose of the lowercase i in DiSC is...

...less exciting than any story that you could probably imagine. It's there to simply differentiate the Wiley version from other DISC assessments. With that said, Wiley guarantees that their tool is reliable and valid. Other online tools don’t have that guarantee.

To clarify, reliability refers to how consistently something is being measured. Validity refers to how accurately it is being measured.

If other tools are guaranteed as reliable or valid, then that means they may not measure what they claim to measure.

For assessments like DiSC to be effective, they must be reliable and valid

Key takeaways included:

• The new Everything DiSC assessment is a robust and adaptive tool to drive dialogue around different communication styles and preferences.

• DiSC, which stands for Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness, can be used with the Myers Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI). Although it's not necessarily recommended, you can use both for the same group of people, in the same organization. I used to think it was one or the other, but have learned, and realize now, it does not have be one or the other. Each tool is valuable and stronger in different situations.

• Unlike the MBTI, DiSC measures only two personality dimensions. The first purpose is to help us understand our own behavior, styles, and preferences. The second, and related, purpose is to provide a shared language for discussing and understanding each other's behaviors, styles, and preferences.