Marketing Career Zone

Would you like to understand yourself better and know what makes you tick?
Do you want to understand your strengths and learn how to make them even better?

Read on to find out more about how DISC personal profiles can help your marketing career.

Let’s start by giving you a little history about DISC. The DISC personal profile is a psychometric test. A psychometric test can measure one of two things - your ability and aptitude or your behaviour and personal style.

The DISC personal profile measures the latter and provides an insight into your preferred behavioural style, your strengths and limitations and what motivates you. You may have come across this personal profile before as it is often used as part of the recruitment process, appraisals, career development and to develop teams.

So what does it all mean?

DISC is an acronym and stands for:

D = Dominance
I = Influence
S = Steadiness
C = Compliance

Upon completion of a short questionnaire, you will receive a report which will help you to understand:

• Your strengths and limitations
• How you like to communicate with others
• How you cope with stress
• How you manage situations that may cause conflict
• How you make decisions
• How you are motivated and what may cause you fear
• How you like to manage others.

What style do you think you are?

Everyone is a combination of one or more styles as a working strength. Let me tell you about the different styles you may recognise in yourself or in other people.

If you are a dominant person, you will come across as direct, assertive and forceful. People who are high in this area are results driven and thrive in a challenging and competitive environment. They are great in a crisis, will make quick decisions and take action. On the downside they dislike routine situations and easily lose interest once a challenge has gone.

If you are an influencer, you will be a people-person. You will be positive, persuasive and like to build relationships with others. Motivated by recognition, you will be very communicative and will manage people by selling your ideas to them to get them on board to your ideas. On the downside, you won’t enjoy making decisions that put you in an unfavourable light, such as disciplining others, and may find it difficult to see things through to conclusion.

If you are a steady person, you will crave pace and security. You will come across as kind, patient and amiable, and will be a great listener. A persistent person, you will manage by organising and will communicate by listening to others. You will be great in a specialist or administrative role and will organise yourself and others well. On the downside, you don’t particularly like change unless you’ve been involved every step of the way.

If you are compliant, you will be motivated by rules and procedures. You will come across as careful, systematic, logical and precise and may be seen as a perfectionist. You will want facts to support everything that you can do, which may frustrate your colleagues who prefer an overview of a situation, and you will come across as cautious and considered in your approach.

Do you recognise your preferred style?

Although you have the generic characteristics of each profile above, people are generally a combination of different profiles with a preferred style often in combination with one or two other factors. Then the way someone behaves will depend on the strengths of the different characteristics. For example:

• Someone who is a DI profile is going to dominate through the force of their personality.
• On the other hand, someone with a DC profile will dominate through their knowledge and expertise.

An awareness of your own personal profile can help you to understand yourself better and what makes you tick. You will increase yourself awareness and also understand better the behaviours of other people.

You may have been in situations where you have been in conflict with someone else; maybe you have struggled to see someone’s point of view or not been on the same wavelength. If you understand your own profile, it can help you to understand yourself better and know how you can communicate more effectively with others.

You can also learn how to:

• Make the right career choices by understanding your key skills and how you can use them more effectively
• Identify what you might find difficult and how you can deal with this
• Understand how you relate to others and improve your relationships in different situations.

For more information about DISC personal profiles and how they can help you to be more successful in your career, download your free report ‘Understanding the Secrets of DISC’ today at http://www.selfdiscoverycoaching.co.uk/personal_profiles.html.