Personality Profiling - MBTI & DISC

Using personality profiles may tell us how people will probably respond to their environment. It will also help with the individual’s development, choice of job role and their best fit within the environment.

One of the greatest benefits in using profiling is that of development and team working.

Personality profiling is designed to help you to better know yourself, as well as provide you with insight on how you can grow yourself.

The principle is not new. In fact, it is rooted in ancient history and was developed in modern psychology.

Empedocles, a Greek philosopher in 444 BC, talked about four elements – earth, air, fire, and water. He recognized that people were different and behaved in a way that was influence by these four elements.

Then, in 400 BC, Hippocrates developed the theory that each of us are affected by four internal fluids and identified them as choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholy.

In 1921, Carl Jung developed this even further and identified that an individual’s behavior can be looked at in four distinct categories, which he identified as thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuition.

This began to help identify and categorize human behaviors and Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isobel Myers developed this further during World War II, creating the Myers Briggs Type Indicator – MBTI.

Meantime in 1928, Dr. William Marston identified his DISC theory, which was published in his book, Emotions of Normal People. His DISC theory identified that, while each of us is a combination of all four of these categories, we can connect our personality to style in varying degrees in these four areas: dominant, influencing, steady, and compliant.

People are complex. Everyone we encounter is motivated differently, communicates differently, and views tasks and relationships differently.

Behaviour has reasons, not causes – and if we understand the reasons why, we become increasingly empowered.

Both DISC and MBTI are assessment tools that provide insight into personality and behavior. Both are widely respected and used by individuals, organizations, institutions and corporations worldwide. There are, however, a few notable differences between DISC and MBTI:

The DISC assessment is shorter in length than MBTI (typically 24-30 questions for DISC versus up to 90 questions for most MBTI tests).

MBTI sorts individuals into 16 four-letter types:

• Extraversion (E)/ Introversion (I) 
• Sensing (S)/ Intuition (I
• Thinking (T)/ Feeling (F
• Judging (J)/ Perceiving (P).

DISC focuses primarily on four dominant behavioral types:

• Dominance
• Influence
• Steadiness
• Conscientiousness

MBTI assumes that personality is fixed and unlikely to change, while DISC is more open to the possibility that different situations and environments might bring out different behavioral traits in an individual.

MBTI is largely an indicator of how people think internally. DISC measures how personality translates to external behavior.