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Personality Style

Your personality style is your organizing principle. It propels you on your life path. It represents the orderly arrangement of all your attributes, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, behaviors, and coping mechanisms.

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Why the DISC Letters Have Failed Us…But the Styles Could Change Everything

Posted by HRDQ-U WebinarsCommunication Styles, Learning, Personality StyleNo Comments

By Merrick Rosenberg

Models of behavior and personality go back thousands of years to the ancient Greek and Chinese civilizations. In modern times, the DISC model was created by Dr. William Moulton Marston in his 1928 book, The Emotions of Normal People. In the 1950s, people started creating assessments to help individuals understand their style. And since nobody owns DISC, many organizations have created their own version of a DISC assessment that generates a graph and an accompanying report to explain the styles and results.

Of course, the end goal isn’t to simply understand your graph, but rather to increase self-awareness and provide a foundation for improving relationships and getting better results. After administering DISC assessments to more than 100,000 people, I noticed a clear pattern – People do not remember their letters. Further, they barely remember what they represent.

In fact, there isn’t even a consensus as to the words that are used in the DISC model. Dr. Marston’s words included: Dominance, Inducement, Submission and Compliance. With the exception of Dominance, most DISC publishers have swapped in new words for the styles while still honoring Marston’s original DISC letters. In some profiles, the I-style is represented by the word Influencing. In others, it’s Interacting. The S-style can be Steadiness or Supportiveness.

It’s confusing. There isn’t even consensus on what the letters stand for. It’s no wonder people can’t remember the words.

How did people try to make it easier? They stripped away the words and left the letters. But that leads to an even bigger problem – the letters lack meaning. This makes them difficult to remember. And if you can’t remember the letters, how can you possibly be applying them throughout your life?

The answer is: People don’t use the DISC model. While DISC training programs often get rave reviews, a few weeks after the training, their profiles are placed in a folder and so is their DISC knowledge.

How do we fix this problem? We need to replace the DISC acronym with something visual…something intuitive…something that doesn’t need to be memorized. We need a mnemonic.

A mnemonic or mnemonic device is any learning technique or tool that helps you remember information.  Mnemonics translate information into a form that is easier to retain than its original form, thereby putting the new knowledge into long-term rather than short-term memory. A common example is “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” which helps to trigger the notes on the treble clef when reading music.

In my first book, Taking Flight!, I introduced a mnemonic to help remember the four styles. By linking each style to a bird, people intuitively grasp and remember the styles.  If I were to say to someone two years after a DISC session to describe the S-style, they will, in all likelihood, have a difficult retrieving the characteristics from their memory banks. But if I were to ask them to describe a Dove style, they immediately conjure images of someone who is caring, helpful, harmonious, and compassionate.

To help people remember the D-style, think about the Eagle. These folks are confident, direct, results-driven and risk-takers. Parrots symbolize the I-style. Parrots are talkative, social, optimistic and enthusiastic. Owls represent the C-style, as they are logical, accurate, questioning and analytical.

Ironically, in stripping away the words and leaving just the letters, it may be user-friendly, but not brain-friendly. If we want people to utilize the DISC styles, we need to make them memorable. So the next time you think about the DISC styles, get rid of the empty letters and replace them with Eagles, Parrots, Doves and Owls.

This blog is from the webinar What If Everything You Know About Personality Is Wrong?.

Merrick Rosenberg is the CEO of Take Flight Learning and award-winning author of The Chameleon, Taking Flight!, and Personality Wins, three books about tapping into the power of your personality. Learn more at www.TakeFlightLearning.com and www.MerrickRosenberg.com.

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What’s Your Selling Style?

Posted by HRDQ-U WebinarsCustomer Service Training Games, Personality Style, SalesNo Comments

What makes one salesperson so successful and another unsuccessful? This longstanding question has been tackled by numerous authors as can be seen by the surplus of available books, articles, and journals on sales and selling. Each one tries to put his or her spin on the answer. Business experts have written about ambition, initiative, friendliness, loyalty, self-confidence, tact, adaptability, and the list goes on. We believe that all these areas focus on a similar theme. What is the biggest difference between success and failure in sales? Personality! It is the determining factor in what makes a salesperson great or just mediocre.

Our personalities shine through in everything we do, including the way we typically approach selling. Because sales provide an opportunity to work closely with customers, either face-to-face or by phone, one’s selling style is highly visible. Can people change their selling style and therefore improve their sales? Our answer is, “Yes!” By adapting one’s style to that of the customer there is a greater chance for a positive response and therefore a sale.

How to get people to utilize their selling style

Watch the free webinar Building Enriched Customer Relationships: What’s My Selling Style? In this webinar, you’ll learn about the sales training tool What’s My Selling Style, which helps salespeople learn how to make the most of their selling style. The 20-item assessment identifies personal selling then shows participants how to flex their styles. The participants are also provided with an opportunity to learn about ways that they can identify the style of their customers. With this increased awareness, salespeople will be able to use their selling style to maximize sales and rise ahead of the competition.

 

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What Four Things Your Personality Reveals

Posted by HRDQ-U WebinarsPersonality StyleNo Comments

 

Your personality reveals many things about yourself that you may not realize. It’s important to know your own personality style, which will help you in both your professional and personal life. Your personality style can help you further understand yourself and lead you in communicating and working more effectively with others.

These are the four personality styles and what they mean:

  • Direct – Someone who is upfront and realistic
  • Considerate – Someone who is thoughtful and compassionate
  • Spirited – Someone who is energetic and enthusiastic
  • Systematic – Someone who is organized and logical

These four styles and who we are guide our actions, decisions, and general life approach. Looking deeper, there is also expressiveness and assertiveness, which are learned behaviors that we use as a means of coping with the demands and expectations placed upon us. These help to explain how we can appear to have one personality at work, while actually having another in our personal life.

There are four main things that your unique personality reveals. These are only four benefits of knowing your own personality style – there are countless more.

  1. Your self-awareness

The more you know about yourself, the more you’re able to determine what you really need in your life. Knowing your personality style helps you become more self-aware.

  1. Where you get your energy from

When life throws you a curveball, you need to engage your problem solving skills. An introvert needs downtime in order to recharge, while an extrovert needs people time in order to recharge.

  1. Strengths and weaknesses

Reveal aspects of your personality by highlighting your creativity, personality trait and how you resolve conflict. The more insight you have, the easier it is to determine your strengths and weaknesses.

  1. Inform your career

Personality tests reveal aspects of your personality that are relevant to your work environment. Knowing your style can help you figure out your career path.

 

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Three Tips to Improve Your Relationships at Work

Posted by HRDQ-U WebinarsCommunication Styles, Corporate Team Building Games, Human Resource Training, Personality StyleNo Comments

By Michael Bungay Stanier

Moving in the direction you’re aiming for at work, be it by promotion, title change or new responsibilities, will generally make you feel great. We spend a lot of time and energy worrying about our careers and discussing ways in which we can personally move forward, learn and grow.

But one thing that is sometimes overlooked when discussing our careers is the relationships in our workplace. Positive relationships can have powerful effects on how you (and your colleagues) feel at work.

I’m not talking about those relationships where you can chat with one another easily (though that in itself is no small thing). I’m talking about the comfortable — and beneficial — relationship that colleagues can achieve when both parties are working together to do more Great Work.

As a manager, the best thing you can do is ensure that you maintain such a relationship with your employees. Here are three tips on how to do that.

  1. Tame Your Advice Monster

 Many of us have the tendency to give advice when someone comes to us with a problem. It’s only natural, especially in a leadership role, to want to help with an issue we’ve been presented. But when we jump in with advice, we often don’t get to the heart of the issue because we’ve already set off trying to fix what we think is wrong. When you do this, the other person might feel like you’ve taken over, despite your good intentions, or they might feel that your advice is unhelpful. Neither option is good for your relationship.

Edgar Schein, in his book Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help, explains that when you jump in to help someone, you essentially put them “one down” in the relationship, and put yourself “one up.” In doing so, you categorize yourself as the smart one and the person in control. This status imbalance can have damaging effects on a relationship, as you can imagine.

The best way to increase the comfortability of the situation, and therefore create a better relationship, is to let the other person talk.

  1. Ask Questions

If you can manage to avoid giving advice, you can then ask your employees coaching questions — questions to find out what they really need from you — instead. By asking questions, you’ll encourage them to come up with their own answers and new options, and you’ll be promoting personal development in the workplace.

Not only does asking questions keep you curious, and therefore make the other party feel valued, but it also encourages learning. Having people answer questions increases their chance of remembering the information involved, and they will likely remember the conversation with you as being productive — and that’s another step toward an especially positive relationship.

  1. Coach for Development

Tips #1 and #2 are part of an overall coaching plan. In my book The Coaching Habit, I outline seven questions you can use to effectively coach your employees in 10 minutes or less. Coaching for performance is about addressing and fixing everyday issues. That kind of coaching makes you a helpful manager, but it’s your ability to coach for development that will make your relationship important to others.

Coaching for development is about coaching the person dealing with the everyday issues. This can begin with your simply asking questions, and it is the type of coaching that encourages people to learn, improve and grow. It makes people happy to have you on their team — which can take your relationships from good to great.

If that isn’t motivation enough, learning to coach well will also help you do less and have more impact.

This article was reprinted with permission from the author.

Michael Bungay Stanier and HRDQ-U are hosting a webinar March 1st at 2pm ET. Save your seat here!

Michael-Bungay-Stanier-headshot-200x300Author of The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever, Michael Bungay Stanier is the Senior Partner and Founder of Box of Crayons, a company that helps organizations do less Good Work and more Great Work. It is best known for its coaching programs, which give busy managers practical tools to coach in 10 minutes or less.

Download free chapters of Michael’s latest book here.

 

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The Funology of Engagement

Posted by HRDQ-U WebinarsCommunication Styles, Corporate Training Materials, Human Resource Training, Personality Style, Team Building ExercisesNo Comments

By Marc Ratcliffe

FUN = enjoyment, amusement, or light-hearted pleasure.

OLOGY = subject of study; a branch of knowledge.

FUNOLOGY = A study of (learning) enjoyment!

Author Joanne Oppenheim wrote “when fun goes out of play, most often so does the learning…” I wholeheartedly agree. There is a misconception that we are not serious about learning if we are having fun. On the contrary, we can be very serious about our profession, the art of our instruction, the well-being of our participants and even the importance of our subject matter. This doesn’t mean we have to take ourselves too seriously. It doesn’t preclude us from bringing levity to our delivery and doesn’t deny us the opportunity to shine a big bright light on our content. Fun is not the enemy. The way that we involve learners and engage their learning is what counts and fun can be an effective vehicle for creating the kind of atmosphere where students feel comfortable and learning can thrive.

Having fun does not diminish learning capacity or marginalise subject matter. In fact, it is likely to make it more memorable and help the content to stick, if it evokes wonder and excitement! We are seeing this with the rapid expansion of gamification within the learning and development sphere. It is more than just a catchy buzz term; it as an educational movement which is fast gaining traction in the mainstream, because it works.

With fun you stop the clock watching, the sneaky email checking and the classroom snoozing. Because, if we are doing it right, we will be constantly involving the audience and inviting contributions so they haven’t got time to be distracted by other things. Fun is therefore a conduit to learning, focus and retention.

Moreover, we can use fun as a distraction TO the learning rather than a distraction FROM the learning.

Here are five tips to engage any audience:

  • Use a pre-training exercise- the sets the scene for creativity and honours those who are there on time. This could be a word puzzle like hang man, number puzzle like sodoku, physical puzzle like Pictionary or a short video used to stimulate interest in the following content.
  • Get them connecting in pairs/small groups- there is safety in the smaller numbers and some participants will need to build confidence in smaller groups first, before sharing with the group at large.
  • Recognise their experience and use it! The best trainers harness the experience of the whole group, rather than just their own. An experience line-up can be a quick way to identify the experience in the room and then you can encourage table regroupings based on a more diverse mix of experience. For instance in the activity “experience pods”, you could ask the class to form new table groups with a minimum combined experience of 15 years per table.
  • Chunk into bite-sized pieces- This has been a tenant of effective education for many years. We don’t want to overwhelm the participants, so we break the content down into more digestible pieces. This, therefore provides a perfect opportunity to inject fun in the form of quizzes, polls, problem-solving tasks, team-building activities, gallery walks and poster development as a way to promote retention and reinforcement and check for understanding as you go.
  • Involve the audience early and often- If they are not playing, they are straying so seek opportunities to involve the group in the flow of content. This could be in the form of self-reflective tasks like action planning and consideration of things to “start, stop and continue”; small-group activities such as poster tasks and table discussions; and whole group involvement though debates and sit-stand polls.

We have more to distract us than at any other time in human history; text messages, instant messages, push notifications and any number of other alerts finding their way to our mobile devices and wearable technology. Now is not the time to be drilling down on which cannon of classics we should be the focus for our students. Rather, we should be concentrating on how we keep them engaged and consider how to leverage their existing devices and current preferences for consuming media. If we can create dynamic and meaningful learning opportunities which tap into fun and enjoyment we can truly teach anything.

This article was reprinted with permission from the author.

Marc and HRDQ-U are hosting a free webinar on May 25thth a 2pm ET. Register here! 

Marc head shot 2Marc Ratcliffe is the CEO and founder of MRWED Training and Assessment, Australia’s largest provider of Trainer Training and five time-listed Australian great place to work. He has been involved in Workplace and Vocational Education for 23 years and has conducted more than 300 Training and Assessment courses since 2000. He is the author of the “The Trainer’s Toolkit” (2011) and “The Trainer’s Cook Book” (2014) and is a co-author of three of the “S.C.O.R.E. for Trainers” publications. He has presented workshops internationally in 12 countries and is certified to deliver Bob Pike’s Train-the-Trainer Boot Camp, the world’s most respected train-the-trainer program.

In 2009, he was listed as one of the top 10 young trainers in the world by US Training Magazine, was awarded a Global HR Award for “Strategic Leadership” by the World HRD Congress in 2012 and was named as AITD’s Learning and Development Professional of the Year in 2013. Most recently, Marc was named as a finalist in the Category of “HR Champion” at the Australian HR Awards (2014) and was presented with the “Outstanding Leadership Award” (2015) by the World HRD Congress in Mumbai.

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  • Why the DISC Letters Have Failed Us…But the Styles Could Change Everything
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