How to Find Your DISC Style (and Why People Guess Wrong)

Dan was sure of his letter before he opened the first question. He decides fast, he cannot stand long meetings, and he is usually the first to speak in the room. Obviously a D.

The test said otherwise. Influence came out on top, Steadiness right behind it, and Dominance only third. His first reaction was that the test was wrong.

Then he looked at what he had based his guess on, and it started to add up. The speed he reads as decisiveness is mostly an urge to talk the thing through immediately and out loud. He speaks first in meetings because silence in a room makes him uncomfortable. And when somebody has to be overruled, he tends to leave that to someone else.

Guessing your own style looks like an easy job. The catch is that you judge yourself by your intentions, while DISC describes the behavior other people can see from the outside. The gap between those two is usually wider than you expect.

Why the guess goes wrong so often

You compare yourself to the people around you

When you tick the box saying you act fast, you have no absolute yardstick in your head. You have the people you sit next to.

Psychologists Steven Heine, Darrin Lehman, Kaiping Peng and Joseph Greenholtz named this problem in 2002: the reference-group effect. On subjective rating scales, people automatically measure themselves against the group they live among. They demonstrated it on comparisons between cultures, but the same trap waits inside a single team.

An accountant working among analysts feels like the fast, pushy one. The same woman would answer the same questions differently in a sales department, because there she would be measuring herself against people who call the client before they finish reading the brief. She would not have changed. The yardstick would.

You read the description you would like to fit

Style descriptions are written so that none of them looks like a defect. Even so, most people want one of them more than the others. At work it tends to be D, because decisiveness, drive and ownership of results read better on a resume than patience does. Anyone who wants to see themselves in style D reads its profile through their best days and nods along.

Try answering this honestly: how much of what you would say out loud about your own behavior describes how you actually act, and how much describes how you want to act?

You fill it in from one role

Behavior can be adjusted, and most people adjust it at work for so long that the learned version starts to feel natural. A service technician who never argues with anyone at home can spend ten years negotiating hard about deadlines, because otherwise nobody would keep them.

What comes out is the style you have rehearsed, not the one that costs you the least energy. The fix is not taking the test twice and hoping the numbers meet somewhere in the middle. Pick one setting in advance and answer for that setting the whole way through.

What a questionnaire can and cannot do

A questionnaire will not correct the way you see yourself. It does one useful thing though: it never asks you for a letter, it asks about specific situations. Your guess breaks up into dozens of small decisions, and a self-image survives that far worse than it survives one question about what kind of person you are.

Our DISC test has 32 questions, eight per style, answered on a five-point scale. Each style gets its own number from zero to a hundred, so what comes out is not one label but four values side by side. Where the four styles came from and where the model stops is covered in the piece on what DISC is.

To get a result worth having, a few things are worth watching:

• Answer for the last month, not for your best days.
• Stay in one setting. Work usually makes the most sense, since that is what the model was built for.
• Do not spend more than a few seconds on an item; the first answer is usually more accurate than the argued one.
• Resist guessing what each question measures. That is exactly why the items are shuffled.

The second source people forget

Psychologist Simine Vazire compared in 2010 who reads a person more accurately, the person themselves or the people around them. The answer depends on the trait. For internal states such as anxiety, the person themselves was the best judge. For traits that carry a value judgment, intellect among them, friends were more accurate. And for extraversion, the part of you that shows, both sides were about equally accurate.

That has a practical consequence for DISC. The model describes surface behavior, so a colleague's view of you is not just an impression, it is evidence.

Do not ask them "what style do you think I am", though. Most people have no idea what that means and will answer in whatever way avoids annoying you. Ask about specifics:

• When I message you, does it come across as short or as rambling?
• Which do you hear from me more often: when will it be done, or what do the others think about it?
• When did I last hold you up? And when did I last steamroll you?
• What should I stop doing to make working with me easier?

Ask two people from different settings, ideally a colleague and someone at home. If they agree, you have your answer. If they disagree, you have learned something more valuable, namely that your behavior differs sharply between those two worlds.

The third source: your own trail

Behavior leaves a record you can read without anyone's help. Open your sent folder and go through the last twenty work messages. How long are they? Do they open with the conclusion or with the context? And when something needed sorting out, did you write or did you pick up the phone?

The second record is your calendar. How much of last week went on time with people, and how much on work nobody interrupted? Someone who calls a meeting straight away behaves differently from someone who would rather send a document and wait for comments.

Fatigue is the third trail. Which day drained you more, the one with seven calls or the one spent alone with a spreadsheet? The behavior that costs you the least energy is usually the one where your highest number ends up.

How to read the result

The result is not a set of letters but four numbers, and the gaps between them say more than the order does. The highest style is your primary one. If the runner-up sits within fifteen points of it, it counts as secondary, and together they make one of sixteen archetypes; the individual pairs are covered in the guide to combined profiles.

A flat profile, with all four numbers close together, is not a broken measurement. It usually belongs to someone who adapts to almost any situation, at the cost of people around them having a harder time predicting what to expect.

The lowest number tends to be as useful as the highest. It does not mark a fault to repair, it marks the situations where every step costs you more effort than it costs anyone else in the room. Someone with the lowest score in Conscientiousness is not sloppy, it is just that checking details wears them out sooner than the task itself does.

Then there is shelf life. DISC describes behavior, and behavior shifts with the setting, so after a year in a different role your result can look different. That is not the test failing, it is a property of what it measures. It also sets the model apart from typologies aimed at more stable thinking preferences, as the comparison of DISC and the 16 personality types shows. In both cases, treat the comparison with other people as approximate rather than as a norm.

Once the result is on your screen, run one test on it. Read your style description out loud to someone who works with you every day, and say nothing until you are finished. If that person laughs at exactly the sentence you thought was overstated, you have learned more than a second run through the questionnaire would tell you.