Case Study: Everything DiSC Management and reducing stress in the workplace

Name: Center for Internal Change
Price range: $$

The Goal:

In large organizations “people problems” often eat up too much productive time. Everything DISC Management Profiles was used to help managers understand that these issues are often reduced just by understanding differences in personal style and approaches.

The Company:

One of the 100 largest law firms in the United States
Over 1,000 employees

The Challenge:

With a large staff dedicated to supporting hundreds of lawyers with high expectations, team performance and productivity are essential to success. Teams needed to understand how to work better together. Team members vary depending on the project, so the skills they learned needed to be applicable when working with their manager and direct reports, but also needed to be transferrable to other situations.

Solution

Human Resources decided to start training a pilot group of their own staff. The HR team, who are all managers, took the Everything DiSC Management Profile. Some members of the HR team had been exposed to DiSC® previously and some had not. The half-day session was meant as a test of two things:

Would the program be accepted by other workgroups?
Would it give employees a tool to help them work better with others?

If this training met their goals, the next step would be to train another pilot group of managers from various departments.
The HR team overwhelmingly felt the program was what they were looking for and wanted to implement it with other groups. The next pilot group was a select group of managers and they were offered the Everything DiSC Management program, including the profile and facilitation, two months later. They agreed with the HR team: this program would benefit all managers and was the ideal tool to help them work better with their direct reports, increasing productivity and effectiveness.

The Results:

While listening to the managers, it became obvious that too much of the workday was spent on trying to solve “people problems” instead of getting the job done. Using DiSC, the managers were able to see that many of the “people problems” were differences in style and approach. The Everything DiSC Management facilitation, especially the video, gave managers practical advice and good visual examples of how to address people of different styles.

With the first two parts of the pilot a success, the next step was to offer the Everything DISC Management Program to a group of supervisors. The response was again overwhelmingly positive. One participant commented, “This was the best training session I’ve had since I became a supervisor.”

After each training session, participants were asked to respond to a survey about their experience. When asked if Everything DISC Management was relevant and enhanced their learning, 100 percent of the participants in the class strongly agreed.

Ongoing

One week later, my client purchased the Everything DISC Management and Everything DISC Workplace® Facilitation Kits and began a train-the-trainer program in order to move forward with their new initiative: company-wide DISC training. Although the implementation is gradual, their commitment to ongoing use will help employees internalize DiSC and use its language every day, increasing their teams’ effectiveness and efficiency.