One Company Gets DiSC®

This is the final article in a four-part series covering the concepts, applications and history behind DiSC®. It's one thing to take the profile and learn about behavioral styles but it's surely another to understand how to put DiSC to work for your organization. This series of articles will help you understand the theory behind the DiSC model while also providing insight into the sales, management and workplace applications. 

One Company Gets DiSC 
By 1978, Marston’s book had been on the marketplace for 50 years but there was no easy way to make his words on paper work as a tool to change businesses. Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) was a household name, being tossed around board rooms and conference rooms as “must have” training, but implementing MBTI practically requires a degree. By this time, different industrial psychologists had worked with both concepts and tried to build different kinds of tools using Marston’s theory and Jung’s archetypes without much success. John Geier, PhD was the first to successfully operationalize the DiSC model in the form commercialized by Inscape Publishing. Inscape Publishing offers the original DiSC© instrument, says Barry Davis. “Marston didn’t propose measuring it; he just proposed that the world consisted of these four psychological types and that we could make meaning of them and understand people better if we understand these generalized notions about how people function.” “Our original tool was called just the DiSC Personal Profile System. Then we created the DiSC Personal Profile Software, which was an electronic way to do DiSC. Recently, Inscape Publishing changed the way it packaged its DiSC systems, literally. “We used to sell assessments. Four years ago, Inscape Publishing took everything it had learned about DiSC and organized it into a system called DiSC Facilitation System,” explains Barry Davis, Vice President of Product Development and Marketing at Inscape Publishing. Introduced in early 2008, this product and approach mark yet another step forward in helping Training and Human Resource Managers successfully use DiSC in their companies. “We have really moved from just selling assessments, to selling all of the tools that are useful in applying DiSC to a specific organization or training need. That is really a big change,” says Davis. “We still have PhDs on our staff, psychologists, who develop the assessment and measuring part and the reports but we also have instructional designers, writers, video creatives, editors, web developers and marketing researchers. We have all of the functions under this roof.”  
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Full Series of Articles
The Concept Behind DiSC: You do the Math  
Digging into DiSC History  
Putting DiSC Management to Work  
One Company Gets DiSC

Putting DiSC Management to Work

Everything DiSC Management is a well-tested, proven training system; there is no question about that. But how do end users make it work? The process starts with managers learning what their own style is. Once they get a handle on how they like to interact and work, the next step is figuring out their employees’ styles then adapting their own style to meet the other person’s needs and get the work done. Based on extensive and ongoing research, Everything DiSC Management uses online pre-work to create a personalized report for every manager. The six, one-hour training sessions include video, activities, and guided discussion are easy to use and make it convenient for organizations of any size to help managers recognize and address their employees' diverse personality styles. “By learning a straight-forward process, managers can develop skills to bring out the best in their employees,” said Jeff Sugerman, CEO of Inscape Publishing. “Participants learn the skills they need to increase employee engagement: directing and delegating, motivating, developing others, and how to work with their own managers.” The robust program and the multi-modal approach to training makes it easy for anyone to deliver training that meets each user’s behavioral style. And it makes it easy for managers and supervisors to learn how to use DiSC quickly and effectively. “Managing is one of the hardest things people can do,” says Sue Bowlby, President of Corexcel and a Diamond Distributor for Inscape Publishing. “Everything DiSC Management is the only product focused on managers, assessing their skills then working on their teams and their organizations.” Inscape Publishing describes Everything DiSC Management as, “...classroom training that uses online pre-work, engaging facilitation and contemporary video to create a personalized learning experience” that focuses on five areas: Read Full Article

Digging into DiSC History

The most recent iteration of the behavioral styles concept is DiSC but the theory currently underpinning DiSC dates back to 1928. That was the year that William Molton Marston wrote a book called The Emotions of Normal People. In his book, Dr. Marston proposed a system of psychology that used the acronym of DiSC for the first time. Marston’s idea was to prove brilliant but not many people actually remember that he was the father of the DiSC concept. One reason is that Marston was a Harvard trained psychologist working at Columbia University. He may have proposed the DiSC concept but, because it came out of academia, no one owned it. Another reason Marston’s groundbreaking work in the area of human psychology is often neglected is because there was someone else working in the same field, at the same time Marston was. Carl Jung developed, wrote about and created his theory about archetypes - early models of personality description. His research, which formed the basis for the Myers Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI), was published around the same time that Marston developed and wrote about DiSC. Jung was a well-known Swiss psychiatrist with much higher visibility than Marston but both made significant contributions to the area of study that would become known as psychometric research and the use of psychometrics relative to personality. Jungian archetypes and Marston’s DiSC theory are the foundation on which just about every four quadrant model on the market today are based on, many of which don’t even carry the DiSC name. Read the full article Digging into DiSC History