Why I Love Everything DiSC Work of Leaders® .

Since the Assess for Success Virtual Summit begins today and I’m a featured speaker tomorrow, I thought it might be a good day to write a love letter for Everything DiSC Work of Leaders®. Everything DiSC and Wiley have so many great assessments, but I have to admit that I have a soft spot for Work of Leaders.

Here’s are a few of the reasons I love it:

Leadership Best Practices

When you open up your profile report, you not only get information about your DiSC style, but you also get to see how your natural tendencies fall on 18 different leadership best practices. These best practices are organized into three steps of the leadership process (Vision, Alignment, and Execution), then into three different drivers for each step, and finally into two behavioral continua for each driver.

For example, Vision is split into exploration, boldness, and testing assumptions as the drivers. In Exploration, the behavioral continua or best practices are Remaining Open and Prioritizing the Big Picture.

The profile report not only discusses why the steps, drivers, and behaviors are important for leaders, but offers personalized information about your spot on the behavioral continua for all 18 behaviors. This includes what you’re probably doing well on and where you might need to adjust your behavior to be a better leader.

Individual Leader Suggestions

Want to know how you can improve as a leader? Work of Leaders has you covered! In addition to all of the information discussed above, the profile report also highlights three strengths and three challenges that leaders may have based on the assessment. With each leadership challenge are tips for improvement, a couple of short case examples of changing behavior, and questions to provoke a plan to adapt.

The personalized suggestions for improving leadership behaviors are virtually a mini-coaching session. With just the information from the report, a leader could walk away with concrete steps for improving their leadership and be able to put them into practice immediately.

Everything DiSC Compatibility

I love this about all of Everything DiSC’s assessments: they all work together. You could have some people in the organization take Workplace, some Management, and some Work of Leaders and all of the reports speak the same language. Not only that, but you can create those incredible Comparison Reports across assessments. (Just foreshadowing that there will be a Comparison Report love letter at some point too, because they are great!)

Everything DiSC just works so seamlessly throughout an organization or business. And with all of the various assessments, it’s easy to start in one spot (Workplace or Work of Leaders) and then pick up another (Productive Conflict) and another (the new Agile EQ) at different points in time. The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team powered by Everything DiSC also fits right in.

The benefit here is that you have a ready-made solution with a common language that you can build from.

Why I Love Everything DiSC Work of Leaders

All o f the above are reasons why I love Everything DiSC as a coach and consultant. The assessment, profile report, and seamless integration with all the other fantastic Everything DiSC products offer so much benefit.

As I started writing this post, I had a moment where I considered the tone of the post. As a writer, being able to write to an audience is important and I wondered whether the tone was too informal, too non-business-like. And it probably is, but I’m using it because the reason why I love Everything DiSC Work of Leaders the most is a personal one.

I Saw Myself As a Leader

As an introvert, highly creative individual, and someone who often likes to work independently, I’m probably not the poster child for “leader.” Despite having been in leadership roles on and off professionally and personally throughout my life, no one has ever sat me down and said, “Melissa, you are a leader. Here are your leadership strengths. Here’s what you do well as a leader.” Instead, I heard about all of the ways I wasn’t a leader. And none of them was ever a surprise to me, because I’m always my harshest critic.

Now, I fully accept that there are people out there who jump out of the womb knowing that they are a leader. I am not one of them. Add in criticism about leadership behaviors that was often about who I was personally, and I didn’t see myself as a leader. Support roles, of course. Behind the scenes work, definitely. A leader? I wasn’t one of those. I like who I am, thank you very much. I don’t want to change who I am to be a leader.

But, opening up that Work of Leaders profile report, I saw someone who was a leader. I saw the strengths that I have an introvert and creative that I use when I lead. And that’s powerful. For those of us who don’t fit all of those preconceived notions of what a leader is, it’s powerful to see that we can, and do, lead.

Everything DiSC Work of Leaders saw me as a leader. Through it, I saw myself as a leader.

Am I a perfect leader? Nope. But that’s the case for all of us. We all have strengths and challenges as leaders. I love that the profile report gives me suggestions for improving on the challenges that fit with who I am. I love that I could immediately use those suggestions. But, most of all, I loved that it helped me reclaim seeing myself as a leader, because I am.