What is your natural style vs. your adapted style, and why does it matter?

01.08.2020

Have you ever had to take a DiSC assessment at work? DiSC assessments can be given before you start a new job, or when you have a new executive joining your team in a leadership position and he or she wants to understand more about how each person on the team is inclined to work. If you’re unfamiliar with DiSC, the assessment is defined by Advanced Hiring Systems as “..A non-judgmental personality test that looks at the way people think, behave, and how they interact with one another.” After taking a DiSC assessment, your results will show which of the four “personality” categories you rank highest and lowest in, and what traits come naturally to you versus what traits you have adapted to possess based on your environment or stressful life events. What do you gain by understanding your natural style vs. your adapted style?

 

You’re likely to be more aware of your behavior

What your “gut is telling you” is your first inclination and should be considered your “natural behavior” or natural reaction to a situation. It’s the behavior you display when you automatically react to a situation instead of how you might react if you had time to think about a situation, and then react to it.  For example, think about when your parents punished you when you were younger. Your instantaneous reaction might have been to throw a temper tantrum, slam a door, or bargain to get your punishment lifted. But as you have evolved into an adult, your inclinations to go back to your behavior as a child might not have changed, but society has taught you what is an acceptable reaction when things don’t go your way.

Meaning, you might still want to slam a door, throw a temper tantrum, or bargain to get your way, but you’ve gained other tools to be successful in this situation. The learned strategies would be examples of your “adapted” behavior that are a result of having learned societal expectations, and changing your behavior based on trial and error. 

You can take your DiSC results and apply them to understanding why you react one way in a situation, and your colleagues react in the opposite way. It could be a direct result of you being more dominant in one DiSC trait versus another. If you are able to compare your results with those of your colleagues, you may understand how changing the way you react in situations will result in an improved working relationship with people who have different dominant traits than you.

 

You’ll understand why you like certain things and avoid others

Let’s take an example of a stereotypical, introverted Accountant. This Accountant would prefer to sit in his or her office with the door shut, alone, looking at their numbers and data for the majority of the day. Their talent with interpreting and calculating data will cause them to lead their peer group, and quickly scale the career ladder at their company right into a leadership role. The new promotion requires them to manage their peers and direct reports, and adds a new responsibility; bringing in new clients and new business. This new role is something the Accountant can do, but when asked what they love about their job, the response will likely have nothing to do with managing or interacting with people, it will be working with their data. 

 

It can help you understand where to take your career

If you can understand your natural behavioral style and how that might conflict with a potential career opportunity, you can self select out of a job that on the surface might seem perfect, but upon deeper reflection wouldn’t be the right fit. To go back to our Accountant example, you might love working with numbers and not managing people, so a role that causes you to manage more people and spend less time doing the work is not going to bring you joy or the kind of career progression that will ultimately leverage your skill set.  

You’re not unique in experiencing this internal struggle. The feeling of being pulled in two directions is a battle between our natural behavior and the adapted behavior we have developed to broaden our skillset or emotional repertoire. It can be one of the primary causes of long-term career frustration and under-fulfillment. Meaning, just because you can be all things to all people, doesn’t mean it will take you where you want to go, or bring meaning to your career.

 

If you are approached by your boss about taking a DiSC assessment this year, don’t look at it as another non-work-related task, rather embrace it as another way to learn a little more about who you are and what you’re good at. You’ll learn what your natural style versus your adapted style is, and learn something about yourself that you didn’t know before taking the assessment. Your new knowledge might just point you in the direction of your dream job.