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How Understanding Our DiSC Profiles Strengthens the TME Team

How Understanding Our DiSC Profiles Strengthens the TME Team

Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, and we all know that playing to our strengths tends to produce superior results. As an organization, we began to wonder how we could best discover each team member’s strengths and how we could leverage them to better serve our clients. By examining more about what makes each of us tick, could we create an environment where each one of us could flourish? And how could we formulate our teams and assign accounts so that each client is working with the professionals most suited to bring out their best?

To answer these questions, we partnered with North Rock Leadership to complete a full-team DiSC assessment.

Why DiSC?

The DiSC assessment is comprised of a series of questions, used to determine the behavioral factors that influence how someone works. No one set of behaviors is better than another. Rather, it can help people learn to work together by focusing on each other’s strengths and delegating tasks so that individuals have the best chance for success.

Once all the data is compiled, people are placed in one of four categories that are characterized by the traits each person exhibits most strongly. Each letter of DiSC stands for one of those categories.

Here is a brief overview:

D – Dominance: This individual exudes confidence, focuses on accomplishing results, and looks at the bottom line. They can sometimes be blunt and tend to get straight to the point.

i– Influence: Someone falling into this category places emphasis on persuading others and building relationships. They’re typically enthusiastic, optimistic and sales friendly.

S – Steadiness: The steadiness category is generally for those who value cooperation, sincerity and dependability. They have a calm manner and approach, and they don’t like to be rushed.

C – Conscientiousness: This individual focuses on quality and accuracy. They value expertise and are very detail oriented.

A Closer Look at the TME DiSC Results

The results of our assessments reveal that our team covers the full map of behaviors.  The team is evenly split between challenge-oriented and collaborative personalities, and heavily concentrated in personalities that focus on action.  This isn’t surprising given the type of work we do. Event planning requires a certain amount of confidence and enthusiasm, to say the least. Our steady and conscientious counterparts balance the team out.

If you look at how our results are mapped out, it’s easy to see that no one of us is exactly like another. We may have three Ds for example, but we have one very close to the middle, one that’s almost a C, and one that is very close to i. The graph indicates the traits that each of us is closer to, and it’s interesting to see that even in our different work styles, we do still have traits in common. Understanding where we all fall helps us work together better than we had before.

How We Applied What We Learned

The outcome of the assessment was a broader understanding of our work styles, allowing us to better team up on client assignments. For example, having two influencers on an account requiring a great deal of analytical analysis isn’t advantageous to anyone.  Whereas pairing up an influencer and a conscientious behavior type could serve the client quite well and play to the account managers’ strengths. An account with a point of contact who likes to have friendly chats at each meeting may find a dominant person to be a little too pushy or blunt. Adding a steady person to the mix can help facilitate collaboration between all parties.

From an internal perspective, understanding the stressors and motivators for each member of the team is very helpful. For some, working collaboratively is the key to success. For others, a heads-down analytical approach is more desirable. By pairing up complementary profiles, delegating responsibilities becomes much easier. This knowledge helps to anticipate the needs of our colleagues and facilitates better communication when conflicts do arise.

When all is said and done, our goal is to create an event that wows your attendees. We want our clients to be happy with the result and throughout the process, but we also want our employees to work in a way that they’ll thrive. By completing a full-team DiSC assessment, we were able to find the best way to do that!

What is Your DiSC?

Now that we’ve told our story, it’s your turn! Have you done a DiSC assessment or something similar? What did you think about the results? Tell us in the comments how it worked out and if you found it as valuable as we did. If you haven’t done one yet and you’re interested, reach out! We’d be happy to help your team conduct a DiSC assessment, too.