Small business owners and leaders often have a hard time truly understanding their employees. Employee behavior, motivators and emotional intelligence can be hard to assess and quantify. Being able to comprehend the different things that influence employee behavior is critical to business success, employee retention and team performance optimization. There are data driven assessments, backed by modern behavioral science, that help businesses understand how their people show up.
In this blog, we talk about how Red Clover uses DISC, Driving Forces and EQ assessments to support teams in meeting their full potential.
What are DISC, Driving Forces and EQ Assessments?
At Red Clover, we use a powerful combination of tools to help individuals and teams understand themselves and each other more deeply. These assessments uncover behavioral tendencies, motivational drivers, and emotional competencies, creating a holistic view of how people show up and succeed at work.
DISC Assessment
The DISC assessment reveals how people behave and communicate in the workplace. It measures four core behavioral styles – Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Compliance – and helps individuals understand their natural approach to tasks, people, pace, and procedures. With DISC, teams learn how to communicate more effectively, reduce conflict, and build stronger working relationships.
Driving Forces Assessment
Where DISC explains behavior, Driving Forces digs into why people take action. Based on 12 key motivators, this assessment explores the values and internal drivers that energize individuals at work. Understanding what motivates your team leads to better role alignment, stronger engagement, and more meaningful collaboration.
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Assessment
The EQ assessment measures a person’s ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions, both their own and others’. It evaluates five dimensions of emotional intelligence, including self-awareness, self-regulation, and social awareness. High EQ contributes to better leadership, improved decision-making, and stronger interpersonal dynamics across your organization.
How Do These Assessments Benefit Your Business?
Like any tool, behavioral assessments are all about how you use them. There are a number of businesses who integrate DISC and other assessment tools in their onboarding or leadership development programs. But, they don’t use them properly. There are a significant number of our outsourced HR clients who have informed us that their entire workforce has DISC assessments on file, but they’ve never worked with a certified consultant to interpret and understand their results.
A combination of assessment results and a thorough, one-on-one discussion about what the report tells the individual is an essential piece of using DISC, Driving Forces and EQ assessments properly. The reports we use through our value partnership with TTI Success Insights include a number of practical, actionable insights the employee can use immediately after their assessment review. And these discussions only happen with our team of certified consultants, so you know you and your team are engaging with skilled professionals.
Understanding your teams’ behavior, their motivators, and their ability to manage their emotions is critical to getting the best results from them. Not only are DISC, Driving Forces and EQ assessments valuable as individual, stand alone assessments, they are valuable as integrated tools. Red Clover has the capability to merge individual reports into comprehensive, thought-provoking team reports to facilitate conversation and develop organizational language around the why and how of team behaviors. The majority of issues we have with our colleagues is due to differences in communication, and through team debriefs, we can shine a light on those differences and highlight ways we can achieve balance and better communication across the team and across the organization as a whole.
A Case Study in Using DISC to Enhance Team Performance
The leader of a Partnerships team for a premiere PEO reached out about enhancing team work and cooperation among the different business units within the Partnerships group. They had ambitious targets to meet, and the Director of Partnerships was committed to coalescing her team around those goals through an interactive, two-day partnerships event. As a team that had recently grown rapidly, demonstrating the business’s investment in their partnerships program, they needed data about their communication and motivators to enhance their work together so they could achieve their audacious goals as a cohesive business unit.
First, each member of the Partnerships team completed an individual Trimetrix DISC, Driving Forces and EQ assessment. Although we prefer to do individual debriefs with each participant, time and budget limited our ability to have one-on-one time with everyone. It’s critical that participants understand what their individual report tells them before we integrate it into a larger team report. So, instead, we scheduled smaller virtual group debriefs to review individual reports. Luckily, this was a team that generally worked well together, and all came willing to engage with me as the facilitator, but also engage with each other as they affirmed what their reports told them.
Then, as part of their “palooza” event, I spent a morning facilitating a group debrief, based on the integrated reports tool we have access to as a value partner to TTI Success Insights. We didn’t just present the data and let it sit there. We interpreted the different datasets to help each team member understand the value they bring and how they can better work with people who may behave differently from them or who may have different motivations in their role. We encourage engagement and questions and guide discussions around what they’re seeing and reading in the group report.
We applied the theory behind these assessments to real-life situations they were encountering as a team. We devised actionable strategies they could implement to enhance their team performance, thus meeting their objectives, and increasing business performance overall. And we identified ways we could integrate these assessments into their ongoing recruitment and onboarding initiatives, so that even new members of the team could speak the same language as participants in the session.
Anecdotally, we received overwhelmingly positive feedback. When the formal evaluation of the session came through, the session received high marks across the board. We continue to work with the Partnerships team to see how we can use our subject matter expertise in behavioral assessments to not only enhance their business but their partner and client businesses.
Ready to Optimize Team Performance?
DISC, Driving Forces and EQ assessments are an amazing tool, backed by data, to better understand your workforce and optimize their performance. By assessing their behavior, motivators, and emotional intelligence, you unlock true understanding of how your teams show up at work. Working with certified consultants to interpret the results is critical to ensuring you are getting the most value of the investment in these behavioral assessments, interpreting the data correctly, and taking advantage of all the tools available throughout the comprehensive assessment results.
And you don’t need to be engaged with Red Clover as an outsourced HR client to reap the benefits of these assessments and the individual and group debriefs. Our team of certified consultants is ready to work with your organization and provide half day to full day trainings to optimize your team using these scientifically proven assessments and results. Reach out if you’re ready to get the most of our team through proven behavioral assessments and a dynamic, interactive and engaging team session.
