Data Dome Blog: News and Events

It’s Labor Day on Monday so we thought we’d put the World According to DISC lens on a family preparing for their annual cookout:

High D, Dad, is on a mission to make this the best Labor Day ever! He wants to throw a big cookout so he can show-off the big gas grill he is going to buy at a big Labor Day sale using the big bonus he got for blowing away his numbers last quarter. He hit his goal and then some and he’s ready to celebrate, so nothing is going to stand in the way of his long-weekend projects: mow the lawn, sweep the driveway, finish the deck, buy the grill, conquer the cookout.

High I, Mom, is right on board, now that all of her friend’s are back from their summer vacations she’s been anxious to get energized with a big gathering. A Labor Day cookout is the perfect excuse to bask in the approval of friends and neighbors. She’s trying to remember everyone’s favorite side dishes, desserts and drinks so that everyone will talk about what a wonderful time they had at the party. Last year someone wanted pickles and she didn’t have any so sent her daughter to the store in the middle of the party so the guest wouldn’t be disappointed.

High S, Daughter, is happy too – they do a cookout every year and in her mind it is a sacred family tradition. Sure it is a break from the normal routine, but she’s looking forward to helping her dad sweep the driveway and mom prepare the hamburgers, potato salad and special family recipe cole slaw like they do each year for the cookout. She’s a little concerned though about her dad getting a new grill – the old charcoal one always worked so reliably…

High C, Son, is indifferent about the occasion, but adamant that if you’re going to do a Labor Day cookout then you should do it right. Despite his mom’s suggestions that they get chicken to put on the grill because her friend said it was much healthier for a cookout, he insists that hamburgers are the proper choice due to their faster cooking time. An important consideration, he continues, because after studying the assembly instructions for the grill his dad plans to buy he estimates that it will take 3 hours and 20 minutes to complete the assembly and that the extra cooking time for the chicken would risk delaying serving the guests at an appropriate time. He shows his mom his proposed timetable for the day and she has little choice, but to agree.

So there you have it a family of disparate DISC styles coming together in perfect harmony to prepare for a traditional Labor Day cookout. We at Data Dome hope that you enjoy these glimpses into the lighter side of DISC and that you and yours enjoy a happy and safe holiday, and don’t forget the pickles!

Just a quick update on some upcoming sessions for our popular Align to Thrive workshop and the career-changing 2-day DISC Certification program.

Two-Day CPBS DISC Certification Training
This intensive program gives you the opportunity to learn DISC from twice-named TTI International Trainer of the Year, Arthur Schoeck. The Advanced Experiential DISC Certification is a behaviorally-based communication workshop. Participants will learn how to communicate using the DISC language as a way of understanding themselves and others. The workshop incorporates a behavioral assessment to give a more complete understanding of what DISC is and how to use it to interact with others and to appreciate others’ behavioral styles.

Each class is limited to eight people to ensure personal attention and optimal participation and interaction.

Sessions: September 28th & 29th, October 27th & 28th

Location: Data Dome Conference Center, 1040 Lindridge Dr. NE, Atlanta, GA 30324

Find out more and register here: http://datadome.com/certification_workshop.php

Align to Thrive!
A special half-day workshop offered in conjunction with Alignment at Work, LLC. This session is designed for business leaders looking to ignite performance despite the economic storm by developing a culture capable of emerging stronger and ready for sustained growth.

Is Your Team Aligned to Pull Through the Economic Storm?

Available Session Date: September 30th
Location: The Georgian Club: 100 Galleria Parkway, Suite #1700, Atlanta, GA 30339

Find out more and register here: http://datadome.com/align2thrive.php

There’s nothing like a summer garage sale to clear the clutter and pocket a little cash before the back to school season is in full swing. What kind of insight can we glean when we look at preparations for this common activity through the lens of DISC behaviors?

It’s no surprise with her high D DISC profile that Dianne has driven her family toward a big goal to accomplish this weekend: empty out the garage and the basement – it’s garage sale time! She’s got the whole family mobilized and she’s already thinking about the new sofa she’s going to buy with all the proceeds.

Her husband Stan, the high S, is a bit conflicted, he agrees it should be a family project, but he likes the comfort of the old sofa. In fact he’s been dragging his feet all week as Dianne has been pushing her agenda. Every item she wants to get rid of he feels nostalgic about, but since his wife and his kids all want to do this he doesn’t want to make waves.

A DISC assessment of Dianne and Stan’s daughter, Catherine, would definitely reveal her high C DISC style. She’s almost as excited about the garage sale as her mom – she always been agitated by her brother’s chaos and clutter and sees the sale as her big chance to restore order. She’s been diligently preparing an inventory list and price tags, and is giving instructions to her brother on how to properly record each sale so there is no confusion about procedure.

Ian, Catherine’s brother, has a high I DISC behavioral style, and he’s also been looking forward to the garage sale. He’s told all of his friends to come over, that it is going to be the best garage sale ever, and he is looking forward to seeing all the neighbors on Saturday – he’s certain it will be just like a big block party.

So how will the big sale go? Will high D Dianne drive the sales or drive her family crazy? Will high S Stan, surrender his favorite sweater to the cause or will he sneak it back off the table and into the drawer where he’s always kept it? Will high C Catherine’s site plan for optimal layout of the driveway be adhered too? Will she arrange the old bicycles by size, color, or number of gears? Will high I Ian’s gregarious nature help keep the buyer’s entertained, or will he disappear when his friends decide to go to the mall? What about rain? Find out more in our next installment of World According to DISC, where the behavior is predictable, but the plot lines are full of surprises….

Smart hiring is crucial to your company’s success and making the wrong benchmarking choices can be costly – wasting time and money, and potentially harming culture and morale. To help you prepare for your next hiring decision we put together this list of top 5 common mistakes to avoid:

1) Assuming you’ve already got the best people.
Companies frequently select new employees by benchmarking the characteristics of current employees. While defining behaviors, skills and motivators that are characteristic of top performers can be useful, it assumes that YOUR top performers are the best available. Benchmarking against top performers in your industry can set the bar higher and help you identify key hiring attributes for a more effective team.

2) Past performance bias.
The business climate never stands still: new approaches, new technologies, economic changes, global shifts all impact the competitive marketplace. Just because something worked well before, doesn’t mean that it will necessarily continue to work when the climate changes. Benchmarking against past top performers may bias you towards skills that have become outdated or behaviors and motivators that aren’t well-suited to the current landscape.

3) Not having well-defined guidelines.
This can be subtle. Let’s say you need to hire to grow a new division. You might benchmark against an employee who has been great at maintaining high levels of quality – very systems and process oriented – so you hire someone similarly detail-driven who values rules and structure. Unfortunately, what you needed was also someone who thrived on making order out of chaos, which wasn’t one of the benchmarked employee’s characteristics. There is often a big difference between being good at building effective structure and being good at operating effectively within an already defined structure.

4) Too much like you.
This relates to the previous mistake. We all like looking in the mirror, but hiring someone just like ourselves might be a mistake. If we are not objective about what’s truly needed to build an effective team we may overload our staff with “mini-me” clones that appeal to us during the interview process, but throw group performance out of balance.

5) Identifying only what you want, not what you don’t want.
When gathering your benchmarks in preparation for a new hire you may notice that all of your top performers share some attributes. Maybe you’ve given them all DISC assessments and you recognize some overlapping behaviors, or they’ve got areas of overlap that can be measured by their Workplace Motivators results. Well before you rush to write the job description based on these findings ask yourself, “Did my bottom performers share any behaviors or motivators with my top performers?” Separating the desirable traits from the coincidental traits can make a huge impact in the success of your hiring process. Every commonality surfaced by your benchmarking should be compared against top and bottom performers to identify the ones which are unique to the top performers. Likewise, if you benchmark the bottom you may also identify undesirable traits, motivators or job-specific behaviors, which you wouldn’t have know to filter for if you only benchmarked the upper echelon of your team.

Taking the time to prepare for and avoid these mistakes is not as difficult as you might think. Assessments that take as little as 15 – 20 minutes to administer can save you thousands of dollars and untold time by identifying the data needed for more effective benchmarking, and more accurate application of those benchmarks to your hiring decisions.

DISC profiles are incredibly useful tools to aid in the understanding of people’s behaviors, but it is not uncommon for characteristics in some of the DISC categories to be confused. Even those who work frequently with DISC assessments will occasionally confuse High S behavior for High C and vice-versa. S stands for Steadiness and C for Compliance, but it might be helpful to think of these terms in the context of Pace and Procedures: The S indicates how you respond to the pace of the environment, while the C indicates how you respond to rules and procedures set by others. The High S sees rapid change as disruptive and therefore reacts with resistance, the High Chas a high regard for policy and procedure and is dismayed, even outraged at times, by perceived disregard for proper or logical steps in a process.

To illustrate this idea let’s examine the birth of one magazine and the reaction of another. When the Consumers Union Reports first appeared in 1936 with the mission of providing “information and counsel on . . . goods and services” and to “maintain laboratories . . . to supervise and conduct research and tests” they ended up causing a bit of a stir: An article in the Reader’s Digest came out quite strongly against the fledgling organization. In an article entitled “Guinea Pigs, Left March!” by Stanley High, Reader’s Digest attacks Consumer Reports science-based approach to testing and recommending products based on the test results, claiming “They are out to discredit, if not to destroy, the system.” Good Housekeeping went so far as to accuse Consumer Reports of extending the Great Depression. Relations between the magazines were not helped by the fact that Consumer Reports dismissed Good Housekeeping’s Seal of Approval as a “fraud.”

Vindication and acceptance of Consumer Report’s once-heretical approach came through consistent adherence to scientific testing and verifiable data. In 1953, it reported that smokers were exposed to as much nicotine when they puffed a filter-tipped cigarette as they were when they lit up an unfiltered Lucky Strike. The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory committee cited the magazine’s research in its landmark report warning of the dangers of smoking in 1964. Consumer Reports’ toy testing helped pave the way for the 1969 Child Protection & Toy Safety Act, which passed a year after the magazine tested a group of electric toys and found a quarter of them hazardous. These and many other examples helped prove the case for the magazine’s data-centric approach.

Consumer Reports approach from the start has been grounded in a deep-set respect for scientific process and adherence to policies designed to avoid the potential taint of unfair influence that might derive from accepting payment from a motivated manufacturer. This is exemplar of the High C behavioral style. On the other hand, the depression-era staff of Reader’s Digest and other magazines such as Good Housekeeping saw this new paradigm as threatening to the status-quo of the advertiser relationship, which funded their magazines, and their own role in that relationship among magazines, advertisers and consumers. The sudden emergence of a new approach and business model that Consumer Reports represented was threatening to the established norm and without adequate time to adjust, the magazine exhibited a similar behavior as a High S individual might when faced with an environment that is changing faster than one can comfortably adjust to.

To summarize:
The High C‘s want the data and will act on it.
The High S‘s want things the way they’ve always been and will defend the status-quo, even sometimes when there is proof available of viable (and sometimes superior) alternative.

The DISC behavior of the High C Consumer Reports is to value the process for it’s analytical rigor and to hold it’s independent procedure as sacrosanct to it’s mission. Reader’s Digest representing the High S DISC style, reacted negatively to the sudden shift in the environment of the magazine industry and the disruption of the relationship norms it was comfortable with. Hopefully this example helps clarify the difference between a High C and a High S – While people aren’t magazines, applying the insights of DISC behavioral profiles can help you and your team avoid the kind of conflicts associated with clashing communication habits expressed by differing DISC behavioral styles.

Last week the entertainment industry was surprised by the announcement that Ellen DeGeneres was leaving American Idol after being part of just one season on the highly popular show. So what’s behind this move? Well if we look at it from the vantage point of the World According to DISC it becomes clear that we are seeing some classic High I behavior:

DeGeneres was quoted in Variety as saying, “I also realized this season that while I love discovering, supporting, and nurturing young talent, it was hard for me to judge people and sometimes hurt their feelings.” This is a common sentiment for those whose DISC assessment reveals a high measure in the Influence (or simply, “I“) category. High I‘s tend to avoid social rejection – they don’t like to make people feel uncomfortable nor do they like to feel socially uncomfortable themselves. Some of the negative attitudes and harshness associated with the show’s critiques would cause stress for someone with an I-oriented DISC profile as Ellen appears to display.

In the same article Ellen DeGeneres is also quoted on how she left things with the show’s producers, “I told them I wouldn’t leave them in a bind and that I would hold off on doing anything until they were able to figure out where they wanted to take the panel next.” Again this fits right into familiar High I territory – there is a strong impulse for the High DISC style to avoid being seen as “the bad guy,” they would prefer to part on good terms and do what they can to ensure that they will continue to be well thought of even in a situation such as quitting.

It is not hard to glance at our DISC adjective chart to see words under the “I” column that are commonly associated with Ellen, such as: gregarious, pleaser, warm, enthusiastic and magnetic. However, much as we would love to have Ellen DeGeneres visit Data Dome and take one of our DISC assessments, these World According To DISC observations made here are based solely on her general media presence and some of her quotes in the entertainment press.