Staff and student leaders at Delaware State University were in for a surprise after viewing results of their personality assessments during our DiSC Training Workshop.
28 participants came together for a highly successful workshop designed to give insight into personality types and how they affect communication.
Participants were co-workers who ran the campus gym facility…a highly social job that involves sensitivity and good communication skills in order to work with and assist people using the gym.
The 3-Part Goal
The workshop began with an explanation of the 3 goals of the workshop…understanding ourselves, understanding others, and using those insights to work better together as a team.
This was a very lively group, so things rolled right along. Of course before we could dig into learning how to understand one another and communicate better, each participant had to take the DiSC Personality Assessment. To save time, these were done beforehand online, then printed out and brought to the workshop for sharing.
The 4-Part DiSC Personality System
After completing the DiSC Assessment, each participant could then be placed into one of four DiSC personality categories. These are Dominance, Influencer, Steadiness, and Compliance.
What surprised everyone was that although there was a pretty good mix of personalities present that day, the largest group fell into the Compliance category. People in this category are the very analytical thinkers who don’t tend to be very people-oriented.
This was a major revelation to the management group because the vast responsibility of these staff members was to work with and assist people!
We discussed ways that we could remedy some issues by taking a look at the responsibilities and exposure that these Compliance Types had with others. The management and group seemed very receptive to the workshop and the challenges that they were given.
The Wrap-Up
It had been a pretty intense workshop, although everyone really enjoyed it. The final wrap-up session allowed us to end on a lighter note.
This was a lesson on how important it was to encourage and congratulate others on a job well done. In this case it was really appropriate! They did an exercise in which each person shares a personality strength that he or she observed with each team member. Then they were asked to support the observation with an example of when they saw the team member exhibit the strength. This was a very heartwarming ending to what had been a very insightful workshop for everyone involved.