D-I-S-C assessment and Flight Instruction

AggieMike88

AggieMike88

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The original "I don't know it all" of aviation.
One of the "arts" of an instructor is adapting how you teach to the way the student learns.

One way to determine how find out how a person is "wired" is by asking them to take a personality assessment such as D-I-S-C.

Has anyone here used an assessment (D-I-S-C or some other) with a prospective flight student? If you haven't yet, would you?

We have used them at the auto salvage yard to good success. So I am thinking that it would work well for flight instruction.
 
Never heard of DISC. Then again, outside of PPL, I’ve never gotten any real ground training from my instructor. Both Part 91 IFR and ME were essentially “you’re doing great. You won’t have any problems with your checkride. Oh, if you get time tonight, read over the chapter on...”
 
Velocity173 said:
Never heard of DISC.
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The DISC Personality Test is a tool used by millions of people to help them understand their communication styles and improve teamwork. Each of us is uniquely designed. We all have different strengths and weaknesses. We think, work and respond differently to challenges. But most of us probably haven’t given much thought to our communication style. Yet understanding why we do what we do is central to our success. The DISC Personality Test is a self-assessment that offers a proven and accurate summary of your communication style.

How Does It Work?

The DISC Personality Test uses a quadrant graph, placing you somewhere within four distinct personality types.

  • (D) Decisive: Direct and forceful. Overcomes opposition to win.
  • (I) Interactive: Sociable and lively. Shapes the environment through persuasion.
  • (S) Stabilizing: Calm and cooperative. Works within present conditions to complete tasks.
  • (C) Cautious: Private and detailed. Focused on quality and accuracy.
It's easy to use and administer. You'll simply answer a series of questions as honestly as possible, and the results are delivered in a detailed report.

Why Teams, Individuals and Families Need DISC

The DISC Personality Test will give you a picture of your communication style, how you work, and how you relate to others. Those around you will also understand how you operate and how they can better relate with you. You'll recognize your strengths and weaknesses, preferred surroundings and how you respond to rules. Discover what causes you stress and why you respond to conflict in certain ways. Learn how to adapt to enjoy healthier relationships with others. You'll also grasp how you solve problems and what motivates you in order to help you increase performance and personal achievement.
 
The assessment's I have taken also provide insight in how I need to relate to the other "letters". My natural style is such that I can quickly get to the intuitive correct answer and can become frustrated when others aren't reacting as fast as I can. So I know when I am working with a high "S" and "C", I need to slow my roll and feed out information in a more regulated pace.

My thinking about this is that knowing myself and knowing the student in this context, I could be a better instructor by knowing from day zero how they learn. Versus trying to figuring out over the next batch of lessons.
 
Never heard of DISC either, but from your short description it sounds a lot like the kind of thing that, no matter how the results come out, tells you positive about yourself that resonates at some level with everybody, like horoscopes also do. "Oh, yeah, I *am* totally sociable and lively!" There's no quadrant that says "Combative" or "Will not listen to reason", etc. So I am skeptical. But then again, I am an "INTJ", so I am the cold-hearted scientist type. :)
 
AggieMike88 said:
One of the "arts" of an instructor is adapting how you teach to the way the student learns.

One way to determine how find out how a person is "wired" is by asking them to take a personality assessment such as D-I-S-C.

Has anyone here used an assessment (D-I-S-C or some other) with a prospective flight student? If you haven't yet, would you?

We have used them at the auto salvage yard to good success. So I am thinking that it would work well for flight instruction.
Click to expand...
I'm not a flight instructor, but I am a professor and private music instructor (20 and 30 years, respectively). I'm always open to new ideas such as a personality assessment, but I haven't ever had need of one. Maybe in the first few years of teaching, it might have helped.
 
I did DISC recently and thought it was an interesting exercise, I could see it being a useful tool for an instructor to have in the bag.
 
I'm a Leo and enjoy long walks on the beach.
 
For the discussion, we can include any flavor of assessment, not just DISC.
 
I did the DISC at a previous company years ago, and something similar where I work now (colors instead of letters). Some guys use it, but most seem to only use it to tell others how to deal with them, rather than how they interact with others. ;)

I think being aware of the differences that exist and how to generally identify some trait markers can be useful if you realize that communication just isn't happening the way you'd like.
 
I think a good instructor can come up with the same conclusions as the DISC after the first flight lesson.
 
I just took the online one at 123test.com. so did my wife. We are like total opposites.

It also indicated I am un-teachable :)
 
Velocity173 said:
I think a good instructor can come up with the same conclusions as the DISC after the first flight lesson.
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If the instructor is aware of the different communication, interaction, and learning styles, they can probably figure out a student quickly, but it almost certainly takes more than one or two lessons.

Keep in mind that the test doesn't put people into one category, but diagnoses a mix. You'll have one dominant trait and one secondary trait, plus a mix of the other two.

I had to take the DISC test as part of "team building" once. It scored me at 27% D, 27% I, around 22% S, and around 24% C, which wasn't very accurate. I don't know if there are different versions of the test, but I thought the methodology was lacking in the one I took.


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Never heard of DISC but it sounds about as useful as Myers Briggs or other such nonsense. I've gone through those sort of assessments at various employers usually during a leadership training course or change management. One of the ones we did at the airline assigned each participant an animal type. I believe they were owl, panther, peacock, and dolphin. They wanted us to learn how to understand our own type and the type of others and how they all interrelate, etc. I forget what I scored on Myers Briggs but I believe I ended up as an owl on the one system but I forget exactly what it means. Maybe that I like Hooters? Maybe I'm a winged predator that hunts at night? Scary! Who knows? It's funny that some con man will sit down and develop a new way of looking at personalities and relationships and then try to sell it to organizations. I wonder how many of these schemes have cycled through corporate America over the years and if they've had any real positive effect. The I think in the end the only one that really benefits is the person selling the system. Heck, I'm still trying to figure out the whole moving cheese nonsense which was another course I sat through. When I buy cheese, it doesn't sit around long enough for someone to move it and if someone tried they'd lose an arm. But that's probably just the owl in me speaking. Now my employer wants to teach us all about something called ADKAR which supposedly helps you to ignore the bitter underlying taste of cyanide in the kool-aid. At least I think that's what it is all about. I'm not really certain. But as long as I get my cheese back, I guess having some kool-aid to go with it isn't a bad idea.
 
I have used DISC and a similar model that substitutes “Drivers, Analytics, Expressive, and Amiables.” Useful but not definitive.

With training and practice you can tell someone else’s personal style after a few minutes of interaction and that’s more practical than having them complete the worksheet. As a manager, I find it much more useful than Myers-Briggs.
 
kath said:
Never heard of DISC either . . . But then again, I am an "INTJ", so I am the cold-hearted scientist type. :)
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Me, too and me, too. Came out way high on the T scale when I did it early in my (technical) career.
 
Never heard of it, and no, wouldn't use it. I don't even like all that FAA DECIDE stuff and whatever else they want students to use and know.
 
Feng Shui of personality? Just enough merit to give it creibility, but not enough to be actionable.
 
I’ve done DISC, I’ve done Meyers-Briggs (the real licensed long form one and not the shortened free online one), and at least two others for various training at companies over the years.

Not a single bit of that information helped any of us. We already knew who the personality types were in our companies unless the person was hired yesterday.

And when a personality type was placed in the wrong job role for their personality type, it was painfully obvious, but they weren’t moved to a new job doing something else the day after the companies spent hundreds of thousands of dollars pretending those tests were important to running the place.

As the owner of your company, Mike, did you learn a personality type of one of your staff was a bad fit for their job and immediately reassign them?

I’ve seen them used pre-hire and that has pitfalls too.

I believe more than one airline uses a test like one of these also. They don’t use a commonly known one outside of aviation because there’s another problem with these...

After you’ve taken about three of the same one, you can manipulate the results of the test. I can push the results around on Meyers-Briggs, pretty easily.
 
AggieMike88 said:
No.
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That’s kinda the problem with most of these things that get sold to companies by psychologists. The psychologists don’t really get any leadership buy-in to make any specific use of the information tests like the DISC provide. They just sell it as a way to enlighten staff.

Which, it does. And then we all walk around joking that the new salesperson is an INTJ and won’t sell a damned thing, ever, but they’ll create lovely PowerPoints for the sales staff that sell stuff.

Meanwhile the boss doesn’t even attend the course (hey at least you did) and has no idea why that bright person’s sales numbers always suck compared to their ENFP counterparts.

Or whatever. I just picked stereotypes... :)

I suddenly feel the need to review my old Malcolm Baldridge Total Quality Management books from 20 years ago... not!

I’ve never seen any company really apply anything they learned from any of these psych systems or really internalize them.

They say that Google does stuff like this in their hiring process along with massive amounts of puzzles and quizzes, but talking to various representatives of Google for business support over the last however many years, the staff doesn’t seem to a) be able to think their way past internal silo problems at the company, and b) isn’t empowered to, anyway. So much for all those puzzles.

Just getting to the right person at Google to get anything done is an act of flailing yourself against a brick wall, most of the time.

You’d think with a company chock full of people who can figure out hundreds of puzzles and pass a bunch of psych tests to even get hired, they’d be quite a bit better at troubleshooting their own hideous internal silos and processes to help a customer out.

The stuff just doesn’t translate well into corporate heads and cultures, even if it is good information to know about oneself personally.

It’s “Go learn all this interesting stuff about how you work”, and then immediately, “Get back to your desk and do your job title which you just learned is a horrible fit for your personality traits.”

LOL.

By far the best corporate training I ever went to was titled, “Mistakes technical personnel make when transitioning to a leadership role.”

THAT class was directly applicable to my job and the job title right after that job. “Network Operations Center Manager”.
 
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