What are the four DISC personality types?
Here are the four DISC personality types and a brief description of each one:
D or Dominant: The dominant person is direct, forceful, strong-willed and proactive.
I or Inspiring: Inspiring: The inspiring person is enthusiastic, outgoing, ideas-oriented, and fun.
S or Supportive: Supportive: The supportive person is patient, diplomatic, flexible, and empathetic.
C or Conscientious: Conscientious: The conscientious person is detailed, accurate, thorough, and precise
What are the general characteristics of the Conscientious person?
A person with a conscientious personality is detailed, accurate, thorough, and structured. They like detail and analysis and value logic-based decisions. Maintaining high standards of quality and accuracy are key to this personality type. In fact, they hold themselves and others to standards that are exceedingly difficult to meet. If you want a job done thoroughly and well, give it to a conscientious person.
What are their strengths?
Conscientious people have many strengths including:
- Attention to detail: They are good at getting into the nitty gritty of a project.
- Quality control: They are hard-wired to do things very well and ensure that others do things well too.
- Building structure: Conscientious people value structure and bring order to chaos.
- Being logical: Conscientious people are not interested in your feelings on a topic. They are not interested in enthusiastic customer testimonials. They are interested in the facts.
- Being deliberate and methodical: When giving out assignments to others, they provide clear direction and procedures. They solve problems from a pragmatic, cautious point of view.
- Analyzing data: Conscientious people are comfortable analyzing large amounts of data and drawing meaningful conclusions from it.
- Avoiding risk: Because the Conscientious person approaches life from a perspective of caution, they work to avoid risk. They want others to be safe, emotionally and physically. They want the organization to be safe too.
What are their weaknesses?
Like every personality type, Conscientious people have areas of weakness including:
- Being oversensitive to criticism: Conscientious people pride themselves on being highly competent. When their competence is questioned, they seek to defend themselves. They also take criticism personally.
- Seeing perfect solutions rather than practical ones: They are wired to complete projects to a level ‘10’ and find it extremely hard to be content with a level ‘8’ result. But, sometimes level 8 is more than good enough.
- Judging others: Conscientious people hold themselves and others to extremely high standards. a It is hard for them not to judge others who don’t live up to their standards of excellence.
- Over-complicating processes: Because they are very detailed perfectionists, their solutions can become overly complex and confusing.
- Micromanagement: Conscientious people have a strong drive to do things well. They are afraid that the sloppy work of others may reflect negatively on them.
- Avoiding or resisting people who don’t share their desire for order and process.
What are their greatest fears?
A Conscientious person’s greatest fear is to be accused of incompetence. They pride themselves on competence, and the thought of someone thinking of them doing sloppy work is very distressing to them.
What is the perfect role for a Conscientious person?
The perfect role for a conscientious person is one that involves working with data and processes. They love data because it is predictable, logical and unemotional. People on the other hand are difficult, irrational, and emotional! A Conscientious person can be steamrolled by people who engage in emotional displays. They’re not sure how to respond because the behaviour seems so irrational to them.
What to expect when working with a Conscientious person
- They Appear distant or detached. Conscientious people warm up slowly. They are careful in interpersonal relationships and take time to develop trust.
- Respecting rules and conventional ways of doing things is always top of mind for them. They respect rules and expect that others will respect their rules as well. When their rules are not respected, they may take it personally.
- They always do jobs thoroughly and completely. Their motto is “measure twice, cut once.” Better to do it right than have to redo it in the future.
- Vigorously defend themselves when criticized. Because they pride themselves on competence, they will often flare when their competence is questioned.
- Distance themselves from co-workers who don’t value structure and organization, or who respond too emotionally to situations.
- Care deeply about doing high-quality work.
How do you be effective with a Conscientious person?
- Show respect for their rules.
- Pay attention to the details. Talk about specifics and avoid broad generalizations. They want to get into the details; details are what matter to them.
- Back up your plans and ideas with well-researched data.
- Be careful with criticism. If you must engage in criticism with a Conscientious person, have specific examples and data to back up your concerns. They will demand it.
- Dial back the emotion. Conscientious people don’t respond well to displays of emotion. Instead, engage in rational discussion based on data.
- Give them adequate time and resources to do a proper, thorough job. They don’t like to be rushed, because rushing a project causes mistakes to happen. And their greatest fear is that the mistakes will be blamed on them. And that their competence will be questioned.
Summary of the Conscientious personality type
- Detail-oriented
- Cautious
- Accurate
- Systematic and precise
- Analytical
- Realistic
- Unemotional
- Task-focussed
- Naturally focussed on what’s wrong, not what’s right
For them to be more effective they need to:
- Focus on workable solutions, not perfect ones
- Avoid pointing out why an idea won’t work
- Make decisions more quickly, even when they don’t have all the available data to back it up
- Let go of trying to control the behaviour of other people
- Be careful not to judge others, but to assume positive intent
- Rest and relax. They hold themselves to very high standards
