DISC in Teams: Building a Mix That Doesn't Tear Itself Apart

Four people in a meeting room, every one of them the decisive type who goes straight at the problem. The meeting lasts twelve minutes and produces three decisions. A week later it turns out each of them walked away with a slightly different version of what was agreed. Nobody asked a follow-up question, because in that group asking one looks like hesitation.

From the outside, the most action-oriented team in the company. On the inside, four people talking over each other and spending three months shipping something nobody wanted by the time it arrived.

A team is not the sum of its personalities. It is a mix of behaviour. And the four styles DISC describes do not average out inside a team: when one of them clearly dominates, its blind spot becomes the blind spot of the whole group, and nobody in the room has any reason to notice.

The model goes back to the American psychologist William Moulton Marston and his 1928 book on the emotions of normal people. It rests on two axes: pace (active or measured) and orientation (toward tasks or toward people). Their combinations give you Dominance (D), Influence (I), Steadiness (S) and Conscientiousness (C). What the model measures and what it does not is covered in our guide to DISC.

Why teams drift into a monoculture on their own

The American psychologist Benjamin Schneider described a cycle in 1987 that he called ASA: attraction, selection, attrition. People are drawn to organizations that resemble them. They are then selected by people already inside, who are looking for that resemblance. And whoever does not fit eventually leaves. The result is a group that grows more like itself every year without anyone planning it.

In practice it looks completely innocent. Somebody in the debrief says "they were a good fit", which usually means "they behave like us". A manager with a strong D picks the candidate who talks fast and does not slow things down, and reads a calm, steady person as someone with no energy. An analyst with a strong C picks the one who came in with prepared material, even when the team desperately needs somebody willing to pick up the phone and call a client.

Think back to the last person your team hired. What actually decided it? If what comes to mind first is that the conversation flowed nicely, there is a fair chance you hired another piece of yourselves.

What your team is missing, based on what it has most of

The table below is not a ranking of styles. It describes what happens when one style dominates a team over a long stretch and nothing balances it out.

Even representation is not the goal. Most teams will never have a quarter of each style, and that is fine. What helps is knowing which behaviour nobody on the team performs at all.

A missing style also does not have to be hired. Often it is enough to name who takes it on in a given situation: who is going to be the person asking about risk in this meeting, even if they get no pleasure out of it. Borrowed behaviour is not the same as natural behaviour, but it beats an empty seat.

Same team, different phase of the project

Take a project you know: rebuilding the company store. In January somebody has to decide whether the company goes for it at all, and that is when a person who can decide on incomplete information and carry the room is worth their weight in gold. In February comes the budget, the data migration plan and the list of everything that can go wrong. The same speed that helped in January is dangerous here.

From spring into summer comes the dull stretch where a piece of work gets cleared every week and nothing visible happens. What survives that phase is an even pace that does not need excitement to keep going. Two weeks before launch somebody discovers a third of the work is not done, and the microphone belongs to a different person again. After launch, someone has to work through the complaints, fix the small stuff and write down how the whole thing actually works.

The same trait is an engine in one phase and a brake in the next. The worst moment arrives when a phase ends but the microphone stays with the same person, because everyone left it there out of habit.

So a team does not need styles in equal proportion, it needs influence to rotate. That is not something the model arranges, it is the job of whoever runs the meeting. A boss who leads everyone in their own style will manufacture a monoculture even out of a mixed team, which is the subject of our article on leading with DISC.

A mix is harder work than the advice suggests

A varied team is less comfortable than a monoculture. Meetings run longer, fewer things go without saying, and you have to explain things that are obvious to you. That is exactly why "hire someone who is not like you" so rarely survives contact with reality.

Daan van Knippenberg and Michaéla Schippers reviewed dozens of studies on work group diversity in the Annual Review of Psychology in 2007. Their conclusion is more sober than the usual quotation of it: diversity in itself neither lifts performance nor sinks it. What decides the outcome is whether the group can process its differences or splits into camps around them.

A few things that help a group process differences:

• An agenda sent out in advance. The measured styles need it to form an opinion in time; the active ones will survive it.
• A round where everyone speaks once, in order. Without it, quieter colleagues never get into a debate that is already rolling, and their objections surface a month after the decision.
• One sentence at the end of the meeting: who, what, by when. It has to be written down by somebody other than the person who talked the most.
• Clearly separated decision roles. Who decides and who comments gets agreed up front, not in the middle of a dispute.
• The right to object without proof. "Something about this feels wrong and I cannot say why" deserves a place in the room, because it often precedes a well-documented objection by three days.

Most friction in a team is not about bad intentions. It is about differences in pace and about whether a person looks at the task first or at the people around it. We went through the pairings one by one in the article on conflicts between DISC styles, and the specific wording that works with each style is in our communication guide.

DISC is not the same thing as a team role

These two views get mixed up because both talk about teams. They answer different questions.

DISC describes how you behave: how quickly you move into action, and whether you look at the task or the people first. It comes home with you and goes on holiday with you. A team role describes something else, namely which job you take on inside a specific group. Who watches the deadlines, who brings ideas, who negotiates outside, who holds the group together.

The difference shows best in one situation. A person with strong conscientiousness is the quality guardian on one team, because nobody else is doing it. Move them into a team of analysts and they turn into the one pushing for a decision and reminding everyone of the deadline. The behaviour did not change. What changed is which seat was empty.

Both views earn their keep. DISC explains why communication with one particular colleague keeps grinding. The team roles test shows which job on the team has no owner.

Map your team in one afternoon

Draw two axes on a whiteboard. The vertical one is pace, measured at the bottom, active at the top. The horizontal one is orientation, tasks on the left, people on the right. That gives you four fields: D at the top left, I at the top right, S at the bottom right, C at the bottom left. Everyone writes their name in their own field.

Then look mainly at the empty space. An empty quadrant is not a cosmetic flaw, it is behaviour your team does not produce at all. Not because it is unnecessary, but because nobody is holding it.

For the map to be more than a guess based on impressions, everyone needs their own result. Our DISC test has 32 questions and takes about five minutes; besides the main style it identifies the secondary one, so you end up with one of 16 profiles, The Strategist or The Host among them. Treat the comparison with other people as approximate.

Two rules so the map does not do damage. The result belongs to the person and not to the company, so anyone who does not want to share it does not share it, and nobody guesses somebody else's style behind their back. And a style must never be a criterion for who gets promoted or let go, because DISC describes behaviour, not performance and not ability.

Next time you put a team together for a project, ask one question before you start picking names: which phase will run the longest, and who will hold the microphone during it?