8 Styles and Dimensions of DISC Leadership You Should Know

I will take you through a series of chapters and posts that will complete a comprehensive vision of leadership styles based on behavioral profiles. You will gain self-awareness, understand where it comes from, how it works, and what you can learn from it to improve your effectiveness as a leader, becoming a multidimensional leader, full of resources to inspire and positively influence your environments.

The Origin

In 1928, Dr. William Moulton Marston published “Emotions of Normal People,” leaving behind the  DISC theory as a legacy, which later became a widely spread methodology and predictive diagnostic tool for human behavior, ideal for non-clinical environments.

Marston’s original model can be better understood in terms of favorability and power in the individual-environment relationship. Marston proposed that based on this relationship, people expressed their emotions through four primary responses. These four primary responses correspond to how the individual consistently perceives the environment and how they feel about it. The first axis would correspond to how we perceive the environment: favorable or unfavorable, and the second axis corresponds to how the person simultaneously feels about the environment, more powerful or less powerful.

Weighing how a person self-perceives based on these two variables, Marston proposed that their emotional demonstration would be expressed through the four predictable factors of behavior referred to in the DISC model.

More than 80 years have passed since Marston brought us this theory, which would become a methodology and from which a diagnostic tool derived, now reaching a fourth generation thanks to the technological advances we have today, making it an effective, valid, and safe resource for understanding and predicting human behavior, something very valuable in multiple fields.

DISC and its Relationship with Leadership

Leadership is nothing more than our ability to inspire and positively influence our environments. And in this ever-changing world, what works for you as a leader today may not work tomorrow.

This model will provide you with a powerful vocabulary and resources to use in resolving the most recurrent conflicts that a leader must take on. Think of it as 8 strategic resources to be a more situational leader and make sense of what it really means to “lead.”

Many times we are very sure of how our personal characteristics positively impact, but we are not always aware of how those same characteristics negatively impact and hinder our effectiveness as leaders. Knowing our style allows us to recognize our strengths and weaknesses, and knowing others gives us more options to lead others as they need to be led.

Are you ready? You must be able to go all the way! As Master Yoda says: “Do or do not, there is no try.”

To start, let’s advance on the variation of the DISC model from where these 8 styles or dimensions of leadership come according to our behavioral profile.

If we go back to Marston’s initial model, we have four factors that combine with each other, and this combination is our behavioral profile. It is logical to think that among them there are certain types of combinations that are more frequent, recurring, and related, due to being in contiguous quadrants, with consonant and coherent orientations and priorities.

As you can see, in the shaded areas you can observe the 4 quadrants, but in the transition of gradients, we have a series of combinations that are represented very well in the following table.

Well, now that you have a visual framework of each of them, you already know that each profile will have behavioral characteristics, strengths, and possible weaknesses.Now in this journey, the next step is to understand each of those characteristics and as leaders, what we can learn from each style and when to use it.

So welcome to this path of self-discovery! We will start to know each of them next Friday, and the first one will be.

Before moving on to see the styles

Do you want to know how this continues? Stay tuned!