A few months ago, I wrote an article 'A Different Way to Look at DISC personalities'. 

That article was first written about 7 years ago. The original title was 'Slipping a DISC'. However, I chose to soften the title and massage some of the words. In hindsight, I am not sure why I softened the words or the title. I erred. This article contains an effort to fix my error and remove any confusion around my views of personality assessments. 

I avoid the use of personality assessments such as DISC, Myers Briggs, etc. because I have found them constrained by the viewpoint ‘personality is set and cannot be changed’. I disagree with that fully. I recognize personality rarely changes. On the other hand, I believe personality is a matter of choice.

The problem is, people rarely choose to adjust and improve their personality.

With leaders in mind...

I embrace the 1912 wisdom of Charles F. Haanel,

“Your personality is made up of countless individual characteristics, peculiarities, habits and traits of character; these are the result of your former method of thinking, but they have nothing to do with the real “I”.”

With Canadian leaders in mind...

I embrace the 2012 wisdom of Joe MacInnis,

"All the leaders I've met, worked with, and read about have had one thing in common. Along the way to becoming practitioners and masters of leadership, they transformed their character."

Combining these pieces of wisdom, I believe the most successful leaders are the ones who have, with much effort, changed their personalities. And, that's what we should focus on in Canada. We should help our leaders make adjustments to their personalities so they have a better chance of accomplishing their desires and goals.

I avoid personality assessments like DISC [which parodied] because they:

• address symptoms of inflexible behaviour rather than the cause of it [which I will call Stagnant Personality Disorder]
• they miss the mark of taking talent to task
• they stereotype people too narrowly [people are multi-dimensional]
• they don’t go far enough celebrating and using innate talents
• they promote mediocrity and creation of artificial middle-ground over celebration of highly-valuable, natural-differences

And worst of all, they make learning and self-development boring, not interesting, and not fun.

I know these views are strong and non-standard. I have reached them because I have seen too many DISC and other personality assessments sitting forgotten and unused on their owners’ shelves. [including my own shelf]

Conversely, I have seen talents assessments, aimed at helping people develop performance strength, provide enjoyable self-development experiences and very positive results.