Self-Awareness and Adaptability: A DiSC Workshop for Your Team

A lot of workplace friction starts with style. One person wants the bottom line in the first sentence, another wants the background first, and each reads the other as rude or slow. A shared way to talk about those differences fixes a surprising amount of it.

Our half-day DiSC workshop gives your people that shared language. Participants complete the DiSC assessment beforehand, then spend the session learning their own style and practicing how to adapt to colleagues whose styles differ.

What participants learn

By the end of the workshop, participants can:

• Identify their behavioral style from their personal DiSC report.
• See how their tendencies affect others, including how a habit that feels efficient to them can come across as abrupt.
• Recognize the strengths and limits of each style, including their own.
• Adapt their approach to communicate more effectively with people whose styles differ, in meetings, feedback conversations, and everyday requests.
• Commit to a personal action plan for the situations where adapting matters most to them.

How the DiSC model works

DiSC describes four behavioral styles. Most people lean toward one or two styles, and everyone uses all four to some degree.

Style	Tends to focus on	Often appreciates
D: Dominance	Results, speed, and decisions	Directness and the bottom line first
i: Influence	Enthusiasm, relationships, and persuasion	Recognition, energy, and collaboration
S: Steadiness	Stability, support, and cooperation	Patience, clear expectations, and time to adjust
C: Conscientiousness	Accuracy, quality, and logic	Details, data, and time to think

DiSC describes preferences and tendencies. The assessment doesn’t measure intelligence, skill, or job performance.

What happens before, during, and after the workshop

Before. About a week before the session, each participant receives a link to the online DiSC assessment, which takes about 15 to 20 minutes.

During. The facilitator walks through the DiSC model, helps participants read their own reports, and runs exercises where they challenge their assumptions about colleagues’ styles. Most of the session is discussion and practice.

After. Participants keep their personal DiSC report and the action plan they built in the session. The report is a reference they can return to before a difficult conversation or a new working relationship.

Bringing DiSC to your whole team

DiSC works best when everyone on a team shares the language. We run private sessions live virtual or onsite for intact teams, leadership groups, and groups of new managers, and we can focus the exercises on situations your team handles, such as handoffs between departments or feedback between a manager and their reports. Contact us for group pricing.

For managers, DiSC pairs well with Communication Skills for Leaders and Managing Diverse Workstyles. We wrote about one practical use in what a DiSC profile tells you about how your managers give feedback. Massachusetts employers may be able to offset training costs through the state’s Workforce Training Fund, and our grant team can tell you which program fits.