If you read our article from last week, you will know that our workplace solution among many other magical ingredients, uses the Everything DiSC Workplace® report. This report gives us a framework for understanding behaviours – our own and that of others, which means we can then start to develop strategies for how to interact.

This week we wanted to introduce ourselves – at least the humans in Human Everything – to show how we have used our workplace reports to interact with each other.

It’s been 8 year’s since we met to this very day, actually. Our origin story? It was a bridesmaid/best man scenario where we drank a lot of gin at a ceilidh wedding (I managed to not fall over, Colin managed to spin the grooms mother onto the floor). We went for a 10km run the following morning (where I managed to not be sick and Colin managed to not get us lost) and we have been pretty much inseparable ever since.

Fast forward 6 years to lockdown where we have spent every single day working together on Human Everything and you would have thought we would know each other pretty well by now.

And we do.

However, doing the Workplace Report really highlighted where we were each coming from, our working styles and preferences and with that brought a new level of understanding and clarity of each other.

For those who are new to Everything DiSC, I won’t go into too much detail so this is just a whistlestop overview.

Essentially DiSC describes four basic behavioural styles:

D: Dominance

I: Influence

S: Steadiness

C: Conscientiousness.

We like to think of these four different areas not so much as the words listed above, but more like:

D = get it done

I = get together

S = get along

C = get it right

This gives you a better understanding of the priorities each of the four styles tend to have. (Of course, human behaviour is far more complicated than this, we are just applying very broad brush strokes here).

While we are a blend of all of these styles, there will be a basecamp that you naturally default to.

I am an S style, Colin is a C. Here we are on the map:

The words around the edge of the circle are workplace priorities. These are elements in the workplace where we tend to feel most comfortable, where our energy tends to go.

The map tells us that at work, Colin tends to prioritise accuracy, stability and challenge. I tend to prioritise support, stability, collaboration and action.

So while we share the same priority for stability, delving deeper into our own profiles we know that:

we both look for compromise
we tend to be accommodating
we are gentle and reserved
we don’t mind working alone

That makes sense to us. We share the same kinds of values as each other and so none of this sounds remarkable or really anything we didn’t already know.

The really interesting part, and the bit where the real value in it lies, is that we can also read our profiles to understand how we are different, and this is where things started to make a whole lot more sense.

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

In terms of our differences, I prefer a fast pace, Colin prefers a slower pace. Colin is detail oriented – I am less so. He loves structure, me… less so. Colin wants closure and things to be completed while I on the other hand like to leave options open.

When it comes to working together, how does this knowledge make a difference?

Well for starters, when Colin jokes about me causing absolute mayhem with the filing system I now know that my miss-filed documents are driving him up the wall.

The throw-away comments about how he is learning to “embrace the chaos” (his words, although I feel rather overly dramatic), are actually his cry for help that I need to slow down, and listen. And I suppose, also use the correct filing convention.

When I jump into a situation and start asking questions immediately because I want to drive things forward straightaway and he starts to look stressed, it’s because his desire to get things right and accurate need him to step back and think things through. Knowing that, I now know to keep my mouth shut and wait for him to arrive at his conclusion, and that any carrying on trying to get a response from him is only going to achieve stress for him and frustration for me.

I’ve seen this play out over the months over and over again and it is part of the reason why we know not only how to work well with each other, but when to.

Of course, there’s more to Colin than someone who patiently files his documents in order and conscientiously does the finance spreadsheet at the end of each month, as much as there is more to me than the person who doesn’t know where the finance spreadsheet is and wants everything to have been done three days ago… as for Edward, we aren’t sure that the DiSC profile works for cats. If there was one though, I’d like to think it looks something like this: