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Is anyone familiar with the correlation between Deloitte's "Business Chemistry" behavioural profile and the DISC model?

My organisation has employed Deloitte as business and implementation consultants on a large project. I'm not involved in the project myself, but some of my colleagues are and my desk is near one of the local staff sub-project teams so I hear bits and pieces of what is going on.

For the current phase of the project, all the local team members and senior management for the division that the project falls under, had to do what Deloitte calls a "Business Chemistry" analysis. The Business Chemistry types are Driver, Guardian, Pioneer and Integrator. In talking to one of my colleagues it sounded an awful lot like DISC with a slightly different spin (no doubt for copyright).

I've done a google search to see if I could locate anything that has done a correlation between the two but came up blank, so was interested to find out if anyone has other information.

One thing that I was interested to note, was that in my division projects always involve the same people over and over again. Needless to say all those people are on the current local project team. According to the Business Chemistry types, they are all bar one "Pioneers" and the one is a "Integrator". They were folks I'd figured to be high Is and high Ss. Occasionally the projects involve the odd high D but I've never identified a C (or in Deloitte terms a Guardian).

So now I know why I'm never involved in a divisonal project - I'm a high C :)

mrreliable's picture

I've seen several different types of personality profiles that share the same concept. They'll name them differently to maintain a proprietary characteristic. There will be some differences in methods and definitions, but they all boil down to study and categorizing personality types.

I've found that studying DISC profiles has helped me a lot in dealing with people, especially communication. However, one drawback I see is that people tend to put themselves and other people in boxes, such as, "I'm a high C, so now I know why I'm never involved in a divisional project." Or something like, "I'm a high D, therefore I act this way," as if a personality profile is the be all end all, the controlling factor for everything. IMHO, a personality profile should be used as a tool, not as a restriction. How about, "I'm a high C, so I need to change my approach to such-and-such if I want to be involved in a divisional project."

lindagc's picture

Mrreliable you are correct in that people do have a tendency to put themselves and others into boxes.

My admittedly flippant comment about the divisional project teams was more an observation on the sameness of the teams both in personnel and in behavioural type. Even without the "validation" of the Business Chemistry categories, it has been easy to observe that the regular team members all share certain communication styles and other behaviours. A case of like attracting like shall we say. It seems to make for a cohesive team, but it also makes for rather bland and predictable project outcomes because the inputs and approaches are always the same.