Linking Behavioral Styles of Leaders to Organizational Success: Using the DISC Model to Grow Behavioral Awareness

Organizational success is directly related to the ability of leaders to influence followers in support of strategic goals. Leaders utilize interpersonal skills to communicate goals, brainstorm actions, create collaboration, and move followers in desired directions. Successful leaders must be astute at recognizing key characteristics in followers, characteristics that may help or hinder meeting performance expectations. Hence, the ability to generalize and predict behaviors was paramount to leaders adapting to the work environment. Ultimately, leaders who use DISC systems to predict and influence the behavior of followers were more effective when the leaders can generalize distribution data to groups of followers as they recruit, hire, set work expectations and provide training. This article provides a meta-review of organizational initiatives in which DISC assessments were used as tools for leaders. The article includes a distribution study of 100 respondents in leadership development programs intended to aid leaders in predicting follower populations and behaviors.