Can DISC explain why some couples, like my wife Leah and me, have stayed married for 36 years? Or why other couples “throw in the towel” long before “death do us part?”

I didn’t pick my wife based on her DISC profile — in fact, I didn’t know beans about DISC when I first met her. I just really liked being around her. However having learned to read DISC styles has helped us stay together.

Our marriage has had its ups and downs. There were many times over the past 36 years that I was ready to call it quits and so was she.

DISC is a personality style system. It’s a tool that’s been around for nearly 90 years and has gone through constant refinements. In DISC we measure four aspects of the human personality. We then look at the relationship of those aspects and  establish both a Natural more permanent style and an Adapted situational style.

In order for DISC styles to be helpful in making a marriage work, the interface of the two partners styles needs to be managed by them. This is easier for some styles to do than others — regardless it can be learned. For a marriage to work, often the responses need to be “Oh, its their personality style that is causing them to…”

I think one partner will tend to compromise more than the other. Certain styles are more happy to bend.

In a society that values Drive and Achievement, there may be a tendency to partner for maximum achievement. In my opinion, this tends to partner two high Drives. Unless Drivers are very self-aware, this is often a prescription for disaster.

The four aspects of DISC are Drive, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance.

DRIVE: That voice inside my head saying “I’ve got to make it”, “I can do it”, “I’m the one who can make this happen”, “It’s all about me”. Drive is about putting my ego on the line, if I fail I am hard on myself. The Drive voice inside my head talks tough to myself.

Under pressure Drivers tend to push people, rather than lead and they become impatient.

INFLUENCE: My ability to communicate with others in a way they like to be communicated with. Influence is about my flexible communication style. Influence is my ability to measure the effect of my communication on others — on the fly — and my ability to adjust to get my message through.

Under pressure Influencers become all heart over head and rely too heavily on verbal ability.

STEADINESS: My desire to stay for extended periods of time on one physical location. Steadiness is the desire for less movement and more stability. It is my desire for routines.

Steadies under stress resist change and internalize feelings when they should be discussing them.

COMPLIANCE: My belief in the value and importance of rules. My comfort in following the rules.

When feeling pressure Compliants experience analysis paralysis and avoid controversy.

Let’s play a game of What If: What if you were minding your own business, going through the first stages of hiring salespeople, and a real-life angel—wings and all—floated down from heaven and applied for a job? Would you administer a sales personality test, or would you give that angel a job right away?

I know, you’re probably thinking how completely unrealistic this scenario is. There’s no way any real angels would respond to any earthly sales recruiting efforts.  Even if they did, just thinking about giving them a sales personality test would be an insult. It makes a very good point, though. Most people who think about angels at all think about them favorably. If you know you’re dealing with an angel, you believe that everything this angel does will be right—even perfect. That’s the “halo effect.”

Moving from the literal to the figurative, the halo effect—and its opposite, the halo error—are psychological tendencies that everyone is subject to. They can be significant factors in the “gut feeling” method of making a sales hire.  Studies have shown that the intuitive method of hiring salespeople is often based on some subconscious response to visual cues received before an applicant has even said a word.

Once  hiring managers have seen a candidate, they form judgments based on physical appearances and they make up their mind on a subconscious level.  They may not even be aware that they are doing this, but they will slant the interview toward the perceived strengths or weaknesses of the candidate to get the result that they had already decided on.

So much for so-called objectivity.

For this reason, savvy companies rely on the sales personality test to supply true objectivity when building a sales team. When you consider the stressful nature of relying on your own judgment to evaluate and hire salespeople, using a sales personality test as a tool for narrowing the field to the most likely candidates will actually take some of the burden off of your shoulders. Once you have more information—better, scientifically based information, you know you’re dealing with the best prospects. Therefore, the interview process is more authentic.

After all, gut feelings are often based on emotional responses, and we all know that emotion should not be a factor in the sales hiring process. A sales personality test takes the hiring process out of the realm of emotion to one based on logic. Strengths and weaknesses of candidates are revealed, and suitable prospects can be selected to continue to the next level. If you are a course member of the Advanced Hiring System, you have all the details you need to be able to conduct and analyze a sales personality test to bring you the best results possible.

Admittedly, there are some managers out there who have all the confidence in the world in their intuition when it comes to sales hiring. A few of them actually claim a 60% rate of success, and many others boast that they have a 50% success rate. Hmm . . . seems like they could save themselves some time and just flip a coin; the results would be the same.