New Rules to Measure Effectiveness

There’s a new yardstick for measuring success. The best used to be the brightest—often measured solely in terms of math and verbal skills. Presently, we are in the Knowledge Era, and in this new workforce, those who become star performers do so not just because they're smart, but because they handle themselves and others well.

As Daniel Goleman (www.danielgoleman.com [1]) writes in Working With Emotional Intelligence:

“These rules have little to do with what we were told was important in school; academic abilities are largely irrelevant to this standard. The new measure takes for granted having enough intellectual ability and technical know-how to do our jobs; it focuses instead on personal qualities, such as initiative and empathy, adaptability and persuasiveness….In other words, what matters is a different way of being smart. This is no passing fad, nor just the management nostrum of the moment. The data that argue for taking it seriously are based on studies of tens of thousands of working people, in callings of every kind.”

“DiSC®” Talk

If you haven’t come across it already, you will begin to hear conversational references to something called “DiSC® [2].” This acronym refers to a self-administered instrument designed to provide feedback that can be useful in improving individual performance within the context of Emotional Intelligence (EQ), which is sometimes referred to as “people skills.”

Just as you can easily observe whether someone has a preference for writing with his or her right or left hand, you can observe other preferences that people have for behaving in certain ways.

People are said to have a preference for a particular behavioral style. The letters D-I-S-C represent the words Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. They are icons from the DiSC® Personal Profile, an instrumented learning tool published by Inscape Publishing. Each of the above four words actually represents a dimension of behavior encompassing some general characteristics of a particular behavioral style that a person naturally prefers.

The DiSC® Personal Profile [3] will shed light one what one or two dimensions prove to be a respondent’s preference. For more information and an in-depth look at profiling technology, go to www.inscapepublishing.com [4].

The underlying concept that behavior can be generalized into four basic styles is thought to have originated with Hippocrites, who is most often thought of in the context of his contribution to medicine.

While behavior can be generalized, at no time does this suggest that people should be categorized—human behavior is obviously much too complex.

What is useful, however, is to provide people with a way to describe different behavioral preferences, a jargon to discuss these differences, and strategies to make sense of inevitable conflicts that arise so that the outcome of such conflict will be productive rather than destructive.

Re-thinking Learning Design

The basic premise of this new design for training is that we need to approach it from an entirely different direction. Differences in behavioral style are often viewed as “good or bad,” as opposed to just being "different." We are in the Knowledge Era. It contrasts from earlier Agricultural and Industrial Eras in that productivity is no longer as tangible, measurable, and definable.

In the Knowledge Era, productivity is more often measured in terms like interpersonal effectiveness. Peak performers are evaluated not just by how smart they are, but by how they handle themselves and others (i.e., being "people smart"). Some misconceptions about being "people smart”:

• It isn’t a matter of merely being “nice” or “touchy-feely.” In fact, circumstances may require bluntly confronting someone with an uncomfortable but consequential truth that they have been avoiding.
• It doesn't mean giving free rein to feelings—“letting it all hang out.” Rather, it requires managing feelings.
• Neither gender has an advantage—each of us has a personal profile of strengths and weaknesses.
• Unlike IQ, which changes little after our teen years, EQ (Emotional Intelligence) seems to be largely learned and continues to develop as we go through life and learn from our experiences.

Using learning instruments like DiSC® [5] can help us clarify those behaviors that we prefer in the workplace. Our lives will become easier as we better understand ourselves. With increased awareness of behavior differences between our co-workers and ourselves, it will be easier to find the best strategies to cross the behavioral “bridges” between us. In the end, the organization will surely benefit from this type of training tool. With 60 million people already DiSC profile users, how can you argue with that?

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