Give your team a shared language for how people communicate, and strategies for working with the differences.
When a team isn’t working well, people usually reach for the same explanation. It’s a personality clash. Those two just don’t get along. He’s too blunt. She’s impossible to read.
Underneath that is usually something simpler. People on the team communicate differently, and nobody has ever named the differences out loud. So everyone keeps working the way that feels natural to them, and keeps being surprised when it doesn’t land the same way for everybody else.
Everything DiSC® gives a team the language to talk about that. People learn their own communication style and what they tend to prioritize. They learn how their colleagues are wired differently. Then they get specific strategies for stretching and flexing to meet each other partway.
We deliver Everything DiSC across Canada as certified facilitators, in person and online, for teams of six and for organizations of several hundred.
What Our Clients Say
“The training Hone did with us stuck and made a real difference. We integrated it into daily operations.”
Bruce Marginson, President, Fusion Security
“His training is practical, engaging, and leaves participants with skills they can actually apply.”
Kelli Van Leeuwen, Director, Human Resource Operations, Legislative Assembly of British Columbia
“Randy’s sessions are always highly reviewed by our staff, both new hires and seasoned leaders.”
Colleen Sparrow, Program Lead, Learning Centre, BC Assessment
How to know when DiSC® is the right solution
Teams usually call us when one of these is going on.
There’s a new team, a new leader, or both. Nobody wants to spend the first six months working out how everyone operates. A half-day or full-day DiSC® session gets a new group through that conversation quickly, and gives a new leader a fast read on the people they’ve just inherited.
Someone’s behaviour is having an impact they can’t see. They’re direct, and people hear dismissive. They’re thorough, and people hear slow. Their intention and their impact have come apart, and the feedback isn’t getting through.
The same misunderstandings keep coming back. Different topic every time, same breakdown. Usually it’s two people who take in information and make decisions in completely different ways.
Disagreements don’t get resolved, so people stop raising them. Meetings are polite. Nothing gets settled.
People have stopped giving each other the benefit of the doubt. They’ve moved to judgment and they’ve stayed there. “That’s just how she is” becomes the working assumption.
If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking I get along with everyone here except this one person, that’s the situation this is built for.
What is DiSC®?
Everything DiSC® is a personality assessment that measures two dimensions of human behaviour.
Both dimensions describe how a person is wired, not how capable they are.
Pace. Some people are naturally fast-paced: active, bold, assertive. Others are naturally moderate-paced: calm, thoughtful, deliberate. Most people sit somewhere along that line rather than at one end of it.
Focus. Some people are naturally logic-focused: analytical, questioning, objective. Others are naturally people-focused: empathetic, accepting, warm. Plenty of people sit in the middle here too.
Put those two dimensions together and you get the four DiSC styles: D (Dominance), i (Influence), S (Steadiness) and C (Conscientiousness). Because people can lean toward one style or sit between two, there are twelve style combinations in all.
Your style is the zone you’re most comfortable in.
Everyone uses all four styles. The question DiSC answers is which one or two you’re most at home in, and where you go by default when work gets fast and stressful and everything is a priority.
Everything DiSC will not tell you who is good at their job.
It measures preferences and tendencies. It doesn’t measure skills or abilities.
Preference and capability are two different things.
How a DiSC® engagement works
Ideally, plan for four weeks to set up from the first conversation to session day (although it can move faster. We’ve had a client with a date already booked call on a Monday, get questionnaires out the same day, and run the session the following week.)
Here’s the process:
1. We agree what success looks like. Before anything gets scheduled we work out what you want to be different afterwards, and how you’ll know.
2. You send us names and email addresses. Those are used to issue the questionnaires and nothing else. Nobody is added to a mailing list, ours or Wiley’s.
3. Your team hears about it before the email arrives. Someone inside the organization lets people know what’s happening, why, and what to expect. We’ll draft that message for you if it’s easier.
4. Everyone completes the online questionnaire. It takes most people about 15 minutes. Two weeks is the usual window, with a third week for following up with anyone who misses it. We’ll keep you posted on how many have finished as the deadline approaches.
5. You decide when people see their results. Three options: release them the moment someone finishes, share them a few days before the session, or reveal them in the room. Most clients choose instant access, because people start reading their own profile and looking up their colleagues, and they arrive curious.
6. We deliver the session. Half a day is the minimum we’d recommend, and a full day gives the group room to work through more of it. In person or online, in-house or across multiple sites.
7. We check back in 30 to 90 days. A virtual session on how it’s actually going: what people have applied, what’s getting in the way, what’s working. We offer to facilitate this as part of the engagement, because the habits either take hold in those first weeks back at work or they don’t.
How to integrate DiSC® on Catalyst into your workplace
The teams that get the most out of DiSC® are the ones who actively use it in the workplace.
Everyone who completes the questionnaire gets their own profile report and an account on Catalyst, Wiley’s online learning platform.
Access comes with the assessment and it doesn’t expire. You can add people as they join and remove them when they leave, and the team can keep using it long after session day.
Here are 3 ways to get the most out of your investment.
1. Get specific strategies to work better together
Catalyst lists everyone in your organization who has completed DiSC. Pick any one of them and you get a direct comparison: where each of you sits on the DiSC map, how many priorities each of you has, and where each of you falls on continuums like accommodating and strong-willed.
You don’t see anyone’s full report. You see what they care about, what tends to stress them out, and where the two of you are similar and different.
Then it gives you strategies for working with this colleague.
- What to do if there’s tension between you.
- How to connect.
- How to collaborate on a project.
- How to get their buy-in.
2. Increase meeting effectiveness
Before a one-on-one. One client tells his direct reports he expects everyone to check the comparison before they meet. Where could each of us stretch to meet the other? What would you like more of from me?
When two people are stuck. Pull it up together. Often the answer is that one of you is fast-paced and the other is moderate-paced, and neither of you had named it.
Before you run a meeting. Look at who’s in the room. A D style would rather this had been a memo. An i style wants a few minutes of connection first. An S style is watching whether everyone is being heard. A C style wants the agenda and the data.
3. Onboard and integrate faster
When someone new joins. They complete DiSC as part of onboarding, and the team can get to know how they work straight away instead of over six months.
When two departments get thrown together. Someone in marketing and someone in HR end up on the same project. Neither was in the same session. Both are on Catalyst.
What makes our DiSC® sessions different
We start every session with the same goal: a culture of communication that works for everybody.
We open the session with this before diving into individual profiles.
Without understanding how other people prefer to communicate, everyone operates from their own preference and gets frustrated that nobody else is doing the same. The fast-paced people wonder why everyone else won’t speed up. The moderate-paced people wonder why everyone else won’t slow down. A culture that works for all of them requires give and take.
DiSC® is simple enough that a team actually uses it
It’s as rich in psychology as any other assessment, and it carries the validity and reliability metrics a psychometric tool should have. What makes it work for teams is the simplicity. Four main styles. Where do you fall, where do I fall, what’s the difference between us.
A group can get their heads around that in a four-hour session and start using it immediately, in meetings, in one-on-ones, in how decisions get made, in project work.
“Stretching and flexing” becomes the new norm for communicating
When we go back into an organization months later, that’s the phrase people are still using. I’m here, you’re there, I need to stretch and flex to meet you where you’re at.
That’s the behaviour we’re after, and it’s why we say plainly and repeatedly that no style is better than another. Any style can lead well on one condition, which is that the person is willing to stretch outside their comfort zone. There’s a time to be direct and firm. There’s a time to be supportive and patient. There’s a time to be enthusiastic. There’s a time to question the plan and look at the risks. No single style covers all four.
DiSC® connects to the rest of leadership and team work
Self-awareness is the first component of Better Leaders in our framework. Moving a team from judgment to understanding sits at the centre of Stronger Teams.
DiSC® is usually where both of those start, which is why it’s often the first work we do with a team and why it leads naturally into conflict work or The Five Behaviors® afterwards.
Is Everything DiSC® right for your team?
DiSC® works when everyone at the table is willing to meet in the middle
The whole point of a session is give and take. People find out where their colleagues actually differ from them, and then agree to stretch toward each other. That works when everyone in the room brings a willingness to understand the others and move partway toward them.
It works less well when one person has to get their way every time. You can still run the session, and it’s often worth doing anyway. But if someone won’t move, DiSC® on its own won’t change that, and it’s usually a coaching conversation rather than a training one.
DiSC® applies across all workplaces
We’ve delivered it to teams of six and to organizations of several hundred, across government, health authorities, universities, nonprofits and private companies.
Every style turns up in every sector and at every level, so it applies as readily to a finance team as to a group of front-line supervisors.
DiSC® is not a hiring or promotion tool
It measures preferences and tendencies. Someone’s style tells you nothing about how capable they are or how well they’d do a particular job, and screening candidates with it will give you a false read.
Using it after someone joins is a different matter. Putting a new hire through DiSC as part of onboarding helps the team understand how they work straight away, and it’s one of the better uses of it.
If you’re not sure, ask us
Tell us what’s actually going on with the team and we’ll say whether DiSC is the right tool for it. Sometimes the answer is facilitation instead, or coaching for one person, or something else entirely. We’d rather point you at the right thing than sell you a session that won’t fix it.
Common questions about Everything DiSC®
Will people end up labelled or put in a box?
This is the concern we hear most.
A DiSC® style describes a comfort zone: where someone is most at home when they communicate and work. Everyone uses all four styles. The only question is which one or two come most naturally.
We explicitly discourage groups from using style as a label for each other. Saying “you’re being such an S style today” is exactly the habit we tell people to avoid. Someone has S style tendencies. That’s a different statement from calling them an S.
Is one style better than another? Is there a best style for leadership?
No to both.
All four styles are equally valuable. Any of them can lead well on one condition: a willingness to work in ways that don’t come easily.
Leading well asks for directness some days and patience on others, and no style supplies both on its own. Every leader has stretching to do. They just stretch in different directions from each other.
I am who I am. Can this actually change anything?
A preference doesn’t limit what someone is capable of.
People stretch into ways of working that don’t come naturally to them all the time, and they get good at it. What DiSC adds is awareness of when they’re doing it and why, so the stretching becomes deliberate instead of accidental.
What it won’t support is using a style as a reason not to try.
The biggest mistake anyone makes with DiSC is treating their own style as an excuse for poor behaviour. Being direct and blunt is a preference. It doesn’t excuse skipping past the effect your words have on somebody.
How is this different from Myers-Briggs or Insights?
Every personality assessment is imperfect, and most of them are useful in some way.
We chose DiSC because our work is about teamwork and leadership. It’s as rich in psychology as any other assessment, and it carries the validity and reliability metrics a psychometric tool should have.
What sets it apart for teams is that it’s simple enough to stay in use. Four main styles and a model you can point at. You’re here, I’m there, what does that difference mean for the two of us?
A group can get their heads around that in a four-hour session and start using it the same week. DiSC also works alongside other assessments rather than replacing them, so if your organization already uses Myers-Briggs, the two don’t conflict.
What happens to our people’s names and email addresses?
They’re used to issue the questionnaires and nothing else. Nobody is added to our mailing list or to Wiley’s. This comes up most often with government and public sector clients, and it’s a reasonable thing to ask.
What if someone doesn’t agree with their results?
It happens, and it’s rarer than people expect. Wiley’s research puts agreement above 90%, and in a typical year we’ll see a handful of people across all our sessions who feel their profile doesn’t sound like them. Sometimes we have them complete the questionnaire again, and they often come out with the same style.
If someone does disagree, our guidance is to treat the profile as a starting point. If roughly half of it or more rings true, that’s usually the right comfort zone. The session is where a disagreement becomes useful anyway, because it can be talked through in the room.
This is worth bearing in mind when you decide when to release results. Instant access builds anticipation and most clients choose it. The trade-off is that someone who reads their profile four weeks early and doesn’t like it, has nobody there to talk it through with at that moment.
Is Everything DiSC® scientifically valid?
It carries the reliability and validity metrics required of a psychometric instrument, and Wiley cites more than 40 years of research behind the assessment.
The DiSC model itself is older. It’s rooted in the work of psychologist William Moulton Marston in the 1920s. The underlying psychology has stayed fairly consistent since, while the assessment built on it has been revised repeatedly over the decades.
- Download DiSC theory and research (7 pages)
- Download full Wiley research report (72 pages)
Do certain styles suit certain industries or careers?
There’s no research establishing that, and we’d be wary of anyone who claims otherwise.
You do see patterns. More C styles in engineering and accounting. More S styles in nursing and social work. More D and i styles in sales. But every style shows up in every sector, because style measures preference rather than capability.
Can we still get comparison reports if we’re not on Catalyst?
Yes. Catalyst’s colleague section has replaced them for most clients and does more than they did. If you’re on standard Everything DiSC Workplace rather than Catalyst, we can generate comparison reports for you directly.
Talk to us about DiSC® for your team
Tell us what’s going on with the team and we’ll tell you whether DiSC® is the right fit for it. If it is, we’ll walk you through what the engagement looks like, what it costs, and how far ahead you’d need to start. If it isn’t, we’ll say so and point you at what would help instead.