The Value of a DISC Assessment Goes Beyond Self-Awareness

“So is DISC a personality test?”

I get asked that more than almost anything else. In sessions, on calls, at dinner when someone finds out what I do. And the answer is no. It’s not a personality test, and the difference isn’t a technicality. It’s the whole reason DISC is worth your time.

Here’s what I mean.

So what is DISC, exactly?

DISC is a language for how people communicate. Each letter is one piece of it. D is Dominance (think direct, decisive). I is Influence, the interactive, people-first piece. S is Steadiness, which shows up as stable and even-paced. C is Compliance, the part of us that cares about getting it right. If you want a fuller walk through each one, I’ve laid them out in the four DISC styles explained.

I find it just as useful to start with what DISC is not. It has nothing to do with IQ. It doesn’t measure your intelligence. It doesn’t measure your education, your training, or your past experience, and it doesn’t measure your values.

So what’s left?

How you do what you do. That’s it. DISC is a measurement of how we communicate, and it has three qualities I come back to again and again:

• It’s observable. You can see it. You don’t need anyone to fill out anything to start noticing it.
• It’s universal. You could travel anywhere in the world and watch these same four styles play out.
• It’s neutral. There is no best style. There’s no right or wrong. We’re just different.

That last one matters more than people expect. The goal isn’t to figure out who’s winning. It’s to appreciate the differences in how we communicate, so we stop taking them personally.

Behavior is coachable. Personality isn’t.

This is the heart of it, so I’ll be direct.

A personality framework describes who you are. It’s something you were born with. It’s in your DNA, it’s what makes you uniquely you, and I’m not interested in changing it. Honestly, I couldn’t if I tried.

Behavior is different. Behavior is situational. You can speed up or slow down. You can get straight to the point, or you can take a few minutes to talk personally first. You can control every one of those choices, which means I can coach you on them. I can’t coach you to change your personality, nor would I want to! But I can absolutely coach you to change how you show up in a conversation.

That’s the value in one sentence: DISC gives you something you can actually do differently, starting with your next conversation.

The two tools people usually mean when they say “personality test” are Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram. Both are good tools, and both are about self-awareness. They just measure something else.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator grew out of Carl Jung’s theory and was built by a mother-daughter team, Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. They created it during World War II to help women identify jobs as they entered the workplace, which I think is a fascinating origin. It sorts people into 16 types based on how you take in information and how you prioritize it when you make decisions. (I’ve written up the full comparison in DISC vs Myers-Briggs.)

The Enneagram uses nine types and goes a lot deeper. It pulls in childhood wounds, fears, and beliefs, and how those shape the way you make decisions. My daughter is all in on it, so I’ve learned a lot from her and read a ton on my own. You’ll see a few threads of human behavior woven through it, but it’s measuring something very different. DISC vs Enneagram lays out where the two overlap and where they don’t.

If you’re curious, here’s me across all three. On the Enneagram I’m a three wing two. On Myers-Briggs I’m an ENTJ. On DISC I’m High I, High D. All three are true, and all three are useful. But only one of them tells me what to adjust when a conversation isn’t landing.

A language you can learn like any other

I’ve been studying human behavior for more than 30 years. These days I can sit and watch someone, and before they say a word, I usually have a pretty good read on their style within 30 to 60 seconds.

I’m not telling you that to show off. I’m telling you because it’s learnable. DISC works like English or Spanish or French. Nobody is born fluent in it. You pick it up by paying attention and practicing, and the more you use it, the faster you read people.

And because it’s universal, the styles show up everywhere, just in different proportions. TTI’s 2017 norming research, drawn from 1.7 million US assessments, puts the US at about 18 percent High D, 34 percent High I, 32 percent High S and 16 percent High C.

The same research compared 27 countries, drawing on behavioral reports from more than 90 countries in 48 languages, and the mix shifts from place to place. According to that data, Mexico has the highest share of High D, at 26 percent. Peru leads on High I at 43 percent (those are my people, and I clearly need to visit). Singapore has the most High S, at 39 percent, and the Dominican Republic is tied for the most High C, at 26 percent.

Where did all this come from? Further back than you’d think. Around 400 BC, Hippocrates noticed four distinct types of people. He was a doctor, so he described them in terms of bodily fluids: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. (Kind of disgusting. We don’t use those terms anymore, thank goodness.) In the 1920s, William Moulton Marston laid out the four behavioral types in Emotions of Normal People, and the behavioral theory we use today traces back to that work. Marston never built an assessment, though. That came in the 1950s and early 60s, when Walter Clarke created the first instrument to actually measure behavior. TTI Success Insights has built on that foundation ever since. (I tell the longer version of this story in the All Things DISC episode of Help for Leaders.)

Where most people get DISC wrong

Here’s the thing that frustrates me.

A lot of people have taken DISC before. Somewhere along the way they sat in a session, got their report, learned their letters, nodded along, and filed it in a drawer. And now when DISC comes up, they shrug. “Oh, I’ve done that. I’m a High S.”

Great. Then what?

My guess is that session wasn’t facilitated in a way that showed them what DISC is actually for. It got treated as a one-time self-awareness exercise, and self-awareness is only the beginning. Knowing your style is step one. The value is in what comes after: understanding the people around you, and learning to flex your style so your message lands with them.

That’s where DISC goes from interesting to useful. It’s a tool for every conversation and every relationship, not a label you carry around. If you want to see what flexing looks like in practice, adapting your communication style with DISC walks through it.

What happens when a team actually uses it

Let me tell you about a team I worked with recently.

Their whole job was working with outside vendors. And several of those vendors were really difficult to work with. The kind of relationships where every project turns into a headache. The trouble was, this team had no real authority over the vendors. They couldn’t call anyone out on their behavior. They just had to absorb it and keep the work moving.

So they went through a DISC session together. They learned to identify behavioral styles quickly, both their own and the vendors’. And then they started doing something I love: they flexed. Instead of communicating the same way with everyone, they adjusted their own style to bridge the gap with whoever was on the other end of the call.

Then they took it a step further. They started pairing people on the team with specific vendors based on style. Think about what that means. Instead of sending whoever happened to be free, they matched each vendor with the team member who could connect most naturally with how that vendor communicates.

The relationships improved so much. And here’s the part that surprised them: the timeliness of their projects started improving too.

Nobody’s personality changed. The vendors didn’t change at all. The team simply learned to read what was in front of them and adjust. That’s coachable, observable behavior doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Did they gain authority over those vendors? No. They didn’t need it.

The value shows up at every level

When people ask me what a DISC assessment is worth, I think about it in three layers.

For you as an individual, it starts with self-awareness. You learn how you communicate and how you come across. That alone can head off a lot of conflict that never needed to happen.

For your team, it gives everyone a shared language. When you know your own style and the styles of the people you work with, you can talk through conflict in a healthy, productive way instead of a destructive one.

For an organization, it scales. We’ve worked with some of the biggest companies in the world, using DISC company-wide to strengthen communication, develop leaders and build teams. When everyone speaks the same language, good communication keeps moving through the whole organization instead of stalling in pockets. You can see the full range of reports on our DISC assessments page.

But it all starts with one person learning their own style. If you’ve never taken one, or you took one years ago and filed it away, start there. Take a complimentary DISC assessment. It takes 10 to 15 minutes, and you’ll get an overview of your style and how you communicate. Then use what you learn in your very next conversation.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is DISC a personality test?

No. DISC is a behavioral style indicator, not a personality test. Personality frameworks like Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram describe who you are, which is something you’re born with and not something anyone should try to change. DISC measures observable behavior: how you communicate. Behavior is situational, so it’s coachable. You can learn to speed up or slow down, get to the point or take time to connect personally, depending on who you’re talking to. DISC also isn’t a test in the pass-or-fail sense. There are no right or wrong answers and no best style. It’s a neutral language for understanding how people communicate.

Is there a best DISC style?

No, and this is one of the most important things to understand about DISC. Every style brings real strengths, and every style has blind spots. A High D gets things moving, a High I builds connection, a High S brings stability, and a High C makes sure the work is right. Teams need all four. The point of DISC isn’t to rank anyone. It’s to appreciate the differences in how people communicate so those differences stop turning into friction. Once you know your own style, the real work is learning to recognize the other three in the people around you.

Can you change your DISC style?

You don’t need to change your style, but you can absolutely change how you use it. Your natural style is how you tend to communicate when no one is asking anything of you. What DISC teaches is flexing: adjusting your pace, your directness and how much you talk personally so your message lands with the person in front of you. That’s a skill, and like any skill it gets easier with practice. Flexing doesn’t mean pretending to be someone else. It means meeting people where they are.

What is a DISC assessment actually used for at work?

Mostly communication, at three levels. For individuals, it builds self-awareness: how you communicate and how others experience you. For teams, it gives everyone a shared language, so conflict becomes a productive conversation instead of a destructive one. For whole organizations, it’s used company-wide to develop leaders, build teams and keep communication consistent across departments. The real value comes when people go past their own results and start reading and flexing toward the styles around them. A complimentary assessment is the easiest place to start.