A DISC assessment can help you understand how you tend to communicate, make decisions and respond to workplace situations. But it cannot tell you how emotionally intelligent you are.

There is a persistent stereotype about successful salespeople: they are outgoing, charismatic, highly persuasive and capable of starting a conversation with almost anyone. Some excellent salespeople certainly fit this description—but many do not.

In fact, some of the best phone-based salespeople I have worked with have demonstrated strong Conscientiousness (C) style characteristics.

he evidence from personality psychology suggests that our underlying tendencies are relatively stable, particularly as we get older. However, they are not permanently fixed. More importantly, the way we express those tendencies can change considerably according to our role, experience, confidence and environment.

A DISC workshop is designed to help people better understand their own behavioural style, recognise the preferences of others and adapt the way they communicate and work together.

Workplace conflict is rarely caused by behavioural differences alone. More often, conflict develops because people misunderstand the intentions behind those differences. One employee’s directness is interpreted as aggression. Another person’s caution is seen as resistance. Enthusiasm is mistaken for a lack of discipline, while patience is interpreted as avoidance. A DISC assessment can help teams replace these assumptions with a more constructive understanding of workplace behaviour.

DISC and Myers-Briggs are two of the best-known behavioural and personality assessment frameworks used in workplaces. Both can help people understand themselves, recognise differences and improve how they interact with others. However, they approach this task in different ways.

Over the past 20 years, I’ve been involved in many leadership development programs. While each program has had a different focus, one theme comes up again and again when participants reflect on what they’ve learned and what they will apply.

These learners regularly suggest that completing a behavioural style profile, such as DISC, has changed the way they understand their relationships and the impact is rarely limited to the workplace.

Most introductions to DISC stop at a simple description of each style. D styles are direct, I styles are enthusiastic, S styles are patient and C styles are analytical.

While these descriptions are useful, the real value of DISC comes from digging beneath the visible behaviour. To work effectively with different DISC styles, we need to understand what drives the behaviour, what each style is trying to achieve and what may happen when pressure rises.