Dynamics of Team Engagement: DISC D3 as the key to effective recruitment, relationship-building and competence development - ebook

INTRODUCTION

I was not planning to write this book. At least not right now. And yet, here it is. Quite a way to open a book, isn’t it? Saying one thing and then doing the other? One might be forgiven for thinking so when reading the forewords to my earlier books. Already when writing ‘The power of differences in a team’ (‘Siła różnic w zespole’), I said that after completing ‘The leader’s Everest’ (Everest lidera) I was convinced that my next book would be a sappy novel or collected reflections on searching for the meaning of life. My plan was to take a short break from writing business-themed books, even though the two previous ones were very well-received. Shortly after finalizing the works on ‘The power of differences in a team,’ I became a mom, which placed a new target group in my horizon, :). So, why did I decide to write yet another business book?

My publisher, MT Biznes, suggested that I write a book on the DISC D3 behavior model in a business context, which is something I consider my bread and butter. After all, together with the EFFECTIVENESS team, of which I have the immense pleasure of being the leader, we diagnose behaviors, values, and attitudes to help organizations and their leaders build a supportive workplace, a space where people choose to be engaged, because they feel they are valued, appreciated and listened to. We teach our business partners the importance of understanding differences in personalities, about how they affect the quality of cooperation and – as you can imagine – the final performance. After all, we all know that in business, numbers do not lie and must add up.

Everything I know about the DISC D3 survey and behavioral psychology I learned from Dr. Bradley Smith – the co-creator of DISC D3 along with Dr. Sanford Kulkin, and the co-author of this book. He was the one who showed me the intricacies of this tool.

Dr. Bradley Smith is a valued expert specializing in the development of behavioral competence diagnosis tools. He has been analyzing people’s behavior in a business context for over 20 years. He has been the director for development in The Institute for Motivational Living® and its sister company PeopleKeys® (USA) since 1997 – which for many years has been successfully delivering effective online tools across the global market, including tests based on the DISC and DISC D3 model used in recruitment, employee development and team performance improvement.. Brad took part in many research projects investigating the soundness and reliability of behavioral competence assessments along with Prof. Larry Price, a psychometrist from the University of Texas. Brad holds two patents in the field of engineering and four in the field of technologies used to diagnose behavior and matching the right employees to the right workplaces. His PhD focused on development of organizations.

Brad’s forte is combining knowledge with technology. It was Brad who developed the way in which we currently generate and present the results of our DISC D3 competence survey and the way we use them (the algorithm, platform, compliance with legal requirements). I hope that I have managed to present his achievements in a way that is clear to my readers.

My forte in our professional relationship is applying DISC D3 in business across the European market, strategic support in implementing this model for individual HR areas, supporting the everyday work of teams and increasing the efficiency of processes, work methods after taking into account elements of their personalities and the impact it has on working as a team. Given my experience as a writer, we decided that I would be the narrator in this book.

I shared the publisher’s offer with my team. I told him that, on the one hand, I was quite excited, but that on the other hand, I didn’t know what decision I would take, as a project like this is quite time consuming, and time is something I recently seem to have too little of. In response, they assured me that we would organize work in a way that would guarantee me the time and headspace I need. At the same time, some team members were disappointed that the book I was planning for young readers would have to wait a while longer – it will have more time to take shape. That’s how I prefer to think about it (recently we have been talking a lot about children in our team, that’s probably why). Despite everything, we at EFFECTIVENESS always deliver what we agree on. Thanks to my team’s kindness and commitment to providing me with the time for writing and their belief in our work together, I did get back to my publisher saying that I would be happy to write the book.

I am well aware that my team’s commitment did not just appear out of nowhere. Something like this rarely just appears out of thin air, nor disappear without any reason. My team’s strong engagement is a fact I experience every day. It is the result of our working in the DISC D3 spirit (that requires everyone in the team to make an effort), me in particular. Significant engagement, taking personal responsibility for individual and team goals, avoiding sick leave or changing jobs suddenly is the result of skillful use of our knowledge about the differences in personalities: at the recruitment stage, to make sure that we hire the right person; during onboarding, so that the new employee feels “at home” as soon as possible, and everyday work with a team and in a team so that everyone has the best interest of our common workplace at heart.

Once I became used to the idea of writing another book, the notion of ‘engagement’ was to me the obvious context for writing about DISC D3. I imagined myself sitting in my office, wearing my headset set, with classical music on, writing about what I really believe in, what brings a lot of satisfaction to both me and others who have already experienced the value of working in line with the DISC D3 spirit. This is not me trying to advertise the concept of visualization. These are exactly the surroundings in which I am currently writing. In this visualization, I felt truly great. I was sharing there what I have learned about business, about myself as a team leader, about my coworkers and what my employees and our clients have achieved thanks to DISC D3. I planned my work and wrote this guidebook to the DISC D3 model for you.

It will help understand the significance of personality differences and in what areas of an organization it simply does not pay to disregard this aspect of working with people. Together, we will take a closer look at what is means to work in the DISC D3 spirit and when to use this model of behavior and tool so that it supports the underlying objective – which is to work in an environment where we do not need to fight for engagement, but where we support the factors which influence high engagement of each team member, regardless of their role.

I have been trying to describe DISC D3 not only as a model of behavior and a tool, but also to do so in a context which is important for the work environment, so that you can relate it to your own reality. Due to its importance, engagement, and in particular its alarmingly low level, is exactly such a context – regardless of the latitude (I present the findings of available studies later on). The level of engagement is largely influenced also by the quality of each process and activity in the HR department, each interaction in the workplace and understanding what your personality profile brings to the table. And it brings a fresh perspective, it discovers what we might not have been paying attention to or what we might not have been appreciating. It explains the reason for behaviors that are complicated and hard to understand or unacceptable attitudes. In other words, DISC D3 increases the areas you can impact, simultaneously limiting the scope of what you apparently do not have influence over.

Broadly speaking – this book is a compendium of knowledge on engagement – what it is, why, despite being in the same workplace, some people are more engaged than others, what causes sudden drops or peaks in engagement and what you can do to build a team and organization with people who will want to join you towards a common direction. When talking about engagement and DISC D3, I will focus on sharing good practices (while simultaneously pointing out mistakes that organizations make when using competency surveys). Of course, my aim is not to point out mistakes, but to show how to correctly use DISC D3 so that it serves its purpose. I will guide you throughout the practical application of the tool in HR processes. I will describe each DISC D3 element and provide actual examples from teams and companies (our experiences, as well as experiences of the clients we cooperate with, who have experienced the value of DISC D3).

At times, certain names and various references have been changed to protect individual privacy, as this information does not impact the behaviors discussed (the interviews and comments you will find in Part 2 of the book are exceptions). I opted for this solution as the book is about people in business, people who have various strengths, but who also make mistakes – that is why I would like to avoid any connotations with specific persons or organizations.

The work environment, each organization, regardless of its size or line of business, needs engaged employees. Let us delve deeper into this issue and discover using DISC D3 what until now might not have been clear or identified.1. What is engagement?

Let us begin our reflection on reinforcing employee engagement using DISC D3 by asking ourselves what engagement is, exactly. The terms “employee engagement” and “disengagement” were introduced to business by William A. Kahn, professor of business psychology at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. In his article Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work, published in 1990, Kahn defines these concepts in relation to the work environment. Personal engagement, he argues, refers to behaviors through which employees contribute and express themselves while performing tasks in the work environment. Personal consent to playing a professional role requires stimulating the employee’s personality and is expressed physically, cognitively and emotionally. The concepts of personal engagement and disengagement take for granted the fact that, in the context of working life, people need both self-expression and self-fulfillment. Kahn does not elaborate on the concept of employee engagement in terms of the gains it can generate for enterprises.

Engagement is not the same as job satisfaction or loyalty to the company. Nor is it the same as short-term enthusiasm or individual achievements. Engagement is a stimulus that causes an employee to stay at work slightly longer than they need to, of their own volition, to finish what they are working on; they do not need the carrot and stick to give the best they have to offer, also in the long-term. This stimulus is triggered by the fact that the employee is free to act in line with their personality and by being in an environment where they truly fit in personality-wise.

Where does disengagement come from? An employee’s engagement decreases when part of their identity is “taken away,“ when that part of the personality a person wants to express at work is ignored. If this happens, this part of the person switches to “automatic” mode. The “I only go there to get paid; at work I only do my best to the extent that I get paid for” attitude is a manifestation of the employee’s poor engagement. To illustrate this phenomenon, I will describe, for instance, the issue that talking about money is not the same as saying that it is money that motivates some employees to act or influences their level of engagement in the long term. Just by looking at the way employees talk about pay – listening to these messages through the lens of DISC D3 personality profiling – we will be able to recognize what really is the source of their poor engagement.

Going back to the definition of engagement: later academic studies addressing this topic refer precisely to the above-mentioned source as the basis for further research and reflection around this issue. Interestingly, subsequent studies on employee engagement take these reflections to another level – they explicitly link engagement to business, correlating its level with company performance. Based on Kahn’s work, the subject is first developed by Linda Barber, Sue Hayday and Stephen Bevan in From People to Profits, published in 1999 by the Institute for Employment Studies. In addition to the theoretical considerations regarding engagement, the authors describe research carried out among UK companies indicating the impact of employee engagement on sales and financial performance of organizations. They have demonstrated that disengaged employees significantly impact customer dissatisfaction and a decline in enterprise revenue, while engaged employees substantially increase the revenue of the companies they work at.

The greater the employee engagement, the better the organization’s financial performance.

In addition, the research described in the above publication addresses the impact of poor engagement in terms of more sick leave taken and employee absence and therefore increased costs for their employers. The authors go further in their analysis of engagement and identified aspects of collaboration through which employee engagement increases. Among them were managerial support, giving feedback, listening to employees’ needs, giving development opportunities and caring about the company culture.

These conclusions have been confirmed by further research centers. In 2004, the Institute of Employment Studies defined the concept of “engagement,” linking it directly to the profits of organizations. In contrast, a 2007 research paper by Dr. Thomas A. Watson, a lecturer at Bournemouth University, came up with the finding, later published many times, among others, in Engage for Success, that the correlation between engagement and financial performance after one year was twice as strong as the correlation between engagement and financial performance in the previous year. The results of the above research involved three banking-related organizations in the UK and one in Ireland. They found that increased employee engagement translated into greater customer satisfaction, which in turn resulted in improved sales performance (a 6 per cent increase in the profit earned by the sales department). Watson went even further in his research. The following year, he conducted a 12-month research study on 664,000 employees from over 50 different organizations (from small enterprises to large corporations). The results spoke for themselves: companies with highly engaged employees had a 19.2% higher profit. In contrast, companies with disengaged employees had a profit decline of 32.7%!. Subsequent research conducted after 2012 in companies such as Marks & Spencer, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Rentokil Initial confirmed the earlier theses of a strong relationship between the level of employee engagement and the organization’s financial performance.

Analyzing the results of the aforementioned studies, it is difficult not to recognize the importance of the knowledge business can gain thanks to Kahn’s definition of engagement, and how groundbreaking it has been to study this issue in terms of its impact on the condition of companies.

The level of employee engagement impacts the financial performance of companies – as confirmed by relevant research. Now is the time to ensure that engagement levels are as high as possible, because the data show that we really still have a lot to do.