High
D's Are Not Jerks.
Certainly, of all the
jerks in
the world, particularly the
world of management, a higher percentage of jerks are high D's. It's
often easy to make fun of High D's (and
Mike and Mark are both High D's), because it plays into a lot of biases
about management, and because High D's don't care anyway.
We do this when we're
presenting, training, and consulting as this
keeps things light. Too often though, it's too easy to move from high
D's are sometimes jerks to high D's are always jerks. We think we've
overdone it and we want to correct the misapprehension. It's also fair
to say that we could
make fun of high I's as frivolous partiers, make fun of high S's as
dithering softies, and we could make fun of high C's as frozen
perfectionists.
High D's are short and
direct,
and sometimes blunt, but being blunt
doesn't inherently make you a jerk. High D's - like High C's - don't
think about people first, they think about the work. From an I's or
S's point of view it comes across as jerkiness, but it doesn't make it
inherently so. A high D told us recently that it doesn't make her blunt
or rude to not include your name in an email or to leave off signing an
email 'very respectfully', she's just being concise. No offense
intended.
Why is this important?
As we
mentioned in a cast recently,
often directs mistakenly think their bosses are high D's. Bosses are
often short, direct and give orders, but that's often because they are
the
boss, not because they are a high D. On the receiving end, if you
don't know a lot about DISC, it's easy to draw the conclusion
they are a high D and easy to make them a jerk. Both assumptions
could be wrong, and when our assumptions are leading us wrong, causing
us to label, we increase our risk.
What does this mean?
What should
you do? Firstly, be cautious.
Review the casts
on DiSC to ensure your
understanding.
Secondly, watch your
vocabulary.
Avoid calling high D's jerks. Don't
make the leap quite so easily. Being aware of someone's preferences
is not a license to label. We don't use the phrase 'High D', 'High I',
'High S' and 'High C' as a label, but rather as a guide to
understanding other people's tendencies.
Jerk, however, is a
label. Just
like frivolous partier, dithering
softy, and frozen perfectionist. And don't get confused when a high D
says he is proud of being a jerk. They don't mean it, and they
shouldn't be using a label, even on themselves.
Start in a position of
respect,
not with a label.
Upcoming
Conferences
We often get asked publicly and privately where the next conference is or when we're coming back to a town near you. We're working on a method of making the upcoming conference information more available, but in the meantime here's the plan for the rest of 2010. These depend on us being able to make the necessary arrangements with travel and hotels and so on, so we reserve the right to change our plans :-) In the table below EMC stands for our Effective Manager Conference, and ECC for our Effective Communications Conference. Dates in parenthesis are tentative.
|
May
June
June
July
Aug
Sept
Oct
Oct
Nov
Dec
|
11th
(8/9/10)
(21/22)
(21/22 or 27/78)
(3/4 or 10/11)
(14/15 or 21/22)
(5/6 or 12/13)
(12/13 or 19/20)
(9/10 or 16/17)
(1/2 or 8/9)
|
San
Antonio
Denver
London, UK
Boston
Seattle
Washington,
DC
Silicon
Valley
Dallas
Chicago
New
York
|
EMC
EMC
EMC
+ ECC
EMC
+ ECC
EMC
+ ECC
EMC
EMC
EMC
+ ECC
EMC
EMC
|
We hope you can join us
at one
of these locations. If you've got any
questions about the conferences, what happens, what you can expect to
learn or you'd like to tell others about an experience you've already
had at a conference, please add a comment to this post.
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