Do you hire people like you? Oxford Professional Consulting

Finally the staffing penny dropped

Recently I realised two obvious things:

I keep hiring people who are like me when I need people who are the opposite, the ones who do well what I do badly.
I need to develop completely different thinking styles for specific contexts.

The penny dropped when I realised I wasn’t leveraging my own DISC profile. I’ve been helping clients for years to use DISC Profiling for more effective communication but I wasn’t using it myself in one large area of my own work.

Immediate lesson

When I saw my first DISC Profile, more than 10 years ago, I did learn one lesson immediately. It was this: when really under stress, I easily demotivated my team by being over-demanding. The graph showed it so clearly that suddenly things fell into place and I immediately remembered a couple of occasions when I had done just that, with disastrous consequences.

The awareness made me change and I learnt to moderate that tendency.

It could be an eye-opener

It could be an eye-opener for you too. And wouldn’t it be helpful:

To know the strengths and weaknesses of all your new hires?
Of all your current team?
To know how they react under stress?
And how each one is best motivated?

Other insights

Of course I learnt more from doing my DISC Profile, things I’ve used over the years. One of the most useful is how to change my style to get through to people who are different from me. It helps me when talking to clients and colleagues. But also when there’s a stalemate it helps work out another approach.