Fostering collaboration with the Everything DiSC® Personal Development Learning Experience

At Ballast Lane Applications we have teams of people from different countries, varied expertise, knowledge, training, and unique perspectives. Developing and maintaining a culture of collaboration is a priority for us, and we have found that learning, highlighting and understanding personality differences helps us to do this. Plus, it gives us the opportunity to learn about ourselves too! Below I will describe the tool we have adopted and the benefits and impact it has had on our work, relationships and culture.

Why use The Everything DiSC(R) tool?

We chose the Everything DiSC® Personal Development Learning Experience as our evaluation and support tool.. This is a widely recognized personality assessment that consists of a series of questions with scenarios that you respond to by indicating how you would handle each one. The results categorizes individuals into four primary styles (Dominant, Influential, Steady, and Conscientious), determined based on four dimensions (Active, Reflective, Skeptical, and Accepting). You end up with a visual representation of where you land, along with a report detailing the insights and learnings.

The assessment is facilitated by our partner at Pivot Growth Partners, and their EverythingDISC tool. Everyone at Ballast Lane takes the assessment, and there is opportunity for discussion meetings aimed at providing a deeper understanding of the styles it characterizes.

The results are specific and provide actionable insights. What’s really interesting is that you can see your profile against others in your team, find out in what ways you could be similar or different, and use those insights to understand why there might be conflicts. Recently I had a conflict with one of my colleagues, during which time he looked at our DISC profiles and found that we were the exact opposite positions in the model! We chatted about how we could each make some adjustments in order to ensure that we are able to collaborate more effectively with each other going forward, which was really helpful.

It’s also interesting to review the results with cross-functional team members that you know to have different personality traits than yourself. For example, a Client Executive will likely be quite different from a backend developer, and by reviewing those differences together you can learn a lot and improve the way you work together.

The DISC assessment, as part of our toolset at Ballast Lane, can be tied back to our Core Values:

• Ownership - Taking ownership of how we interact with people and how our personalities play into the dynamics of the team.
• Honesty- When reviewing results with another team member, we have to get out of our comfort zone a little and be honest with each other about how some of their actions affect us.
• Teamwork - Understanding how different people think and interact with each other, and an understanding of how our personality and actions affect others, help tremendously with the development of teamwork.
• Continuous Learning - We encourage our team members to always be learning and growing professionally and personally, and this type of tool can help with this.

The Everything DiSC® assessment is not a one-off activity that gets completed and hidden away, but something we come back to often, so that we can continue to learn about ourselves and others. It has been a great asset to our team at Ballast Lane.