How To Quickly Profile People, part 1

Criminal Minds is enthralling.

A bunch of gun bearing nerds with a private airplane fly to places to find serial killers by profiling their behaviour and personality. So cool.

Maybe you want to be a profiler too.

If you thought I was going to say next, “and here’s how you can do it”, well, sorry. You can’t. Unless you get a degree in psychology, train a number of years, and get hired by the FBI.

However, I can offer a simple profiling technique you can use for fun and profit. Well, mostly for fun, I guess.

First though, we need to talk about the actual profiles.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about how to quickly identify people’s profile without them having to take a test.

We’ll round up the week with some tips on how to manage or coach each personality.

Introducing DISC

DISC is a pretty old model for personality assessment. It’s not considered really scientific, but that actually doesn’t matter much in this context.

The fact is that “scientific” personality assessment means you can replicate the result consistently: if you take the same test two years apart, you’ll get the same results.

We don’t care. What we’ll do is to simply and quickly categorise people we work with. Note that you might need to reassess and correct your stance in the long run, but it works pretty well at an approximation.

How does DISC work then?

The idea is that every personality sits somewhere on a spectrum. This spectrum is shaped like a wheel (or, well, a disk…), and has the four letters on it. It starts (arbitrarily) at D, moves to I, then S, C, and eventually goes full circle to D.

Let’s see them quickly:

D is for Dominant

“Dominant” people are driven, direct, self-confident. They are generally go-getters, and are motivated by success and competition. They like competency and concrete results. They worry about lack of control and being taken advantage of. They struggle to be vulnerable.

I is for Influencing

Influencers are charismatic, enthusiastic, collaborative. They value relationships, freedom of expression and coaching. They have a strong focus on individuality. They worry about social rejection and disapproval, and fear being ignored and not feeling listened.

S is for Steady

Steady people are loyal, patient, warm. They value helping others and security. They get motivation from cooperative settings, and being sincerely appreciated. They worry about losing stability, change, and offending others.

C is for Compliant

Compliant people are systematic, analytical, objective. They like to learn stuff and are perfectionists. They enjoy challenges and accuracy. They worry about being wrong and they fear criticism.

That’s it.

Before we continue, though, remember that:

• The words are technical. “Compliant” doesn’t mean passive or weak, for example. Dominant doesn’t mean violent or bossy.
• Everyone sits somewhere on this wheel. You could be, say, between dominant and influencing, or between steady and compliant.
• In reality people are very nuanced and it might not be super clear cut.

And that’s it for today! More on this tomorrow.