Leveraging DISC like Profiles to Unlock Inclusiveness in a Team

Author

Nengi Krukrubo
August 12, 2023

In the middle of a turnaround years ago, I was frustrated in a discussion with an Engineering Manager and a Quality Manager.

I expected a short answer to a simple quality complaint but they were seemingly taking forever to get to the point.

Said, differently, all i wanted to know was the time and they were telling me how to make the watch.

We all wanted the same outcome so the fact the conversation got difficult was interesting. The question is why?

The answer came to the 3 of us 30 minutes later in a session with our HR business partner.

In this week’s issue, I’ll share the rest of the story on how understanding personality profiles helped improve my working relationships during a turnaround.

Knowing who you are dealing with allows you to flex your approach while keeping your main goal in mind.

The challenge is when we’re not not situationally flexible which causes unneccesary tension during difficult periods where multiple views and options need to be considered.

"If you knew me, you would know ____ about me”

After we got to the HR session on personality types. We went through our DISC profiles and a discussion about the traits of the different profiles.(see https://www.discprofile.com/what-is-disc for more information)

Here’s what I learned from that session shortly after we started that stuck with me.

  1. The Engineering and quality managers are C types which meant they were going to really talk through the issue to get a resolution

  2. I am a D type which meant in that situation I was really impatient in my need to the answer since i had to get to my next obligation

No wonder we had a clash of styles in those moments before our session! On a positive note, we ended up laughing about the meeting once we had our aha moment from our profiles.

As I reflect on that experiences years later, Here are the 3 good things we unlocked moving forward.

Unlock #1: We didn’t have to guess each others style or assume any more

We were able to use the profiles to better understand what, when and how to communicate with each other. I learned in a dynamic situation, I would need to make room for other styles to provide input in ways which were not neccesarily my approach and that was okay

Unlock #2: We could call out when we were having our profile moments and own it.

We got to the point where someone would say “I’m having a C moment” which meant, they were self aware and were able to make the rest of us aware of what was coming next. Some times, it was funny and other times, it just reduced the temperature when we were dealing with tough situations.

Unlock #3: We created a more inclusive space for all our team members.

Most importantly, the work we did on our personality profiles helped us realize it was okay to be ourselves and that the diversity of styles we brought was neccessary for our team to succeed.

As I’ve moved into different roles, leveraging faciliated sessions like this with a HR partner is one of the first things we’ve done that helps teams drive self awareness and unlock the inclusiveness we will need to build our path forward.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week!

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