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Is It Time to Ditch the DISC?

You’ve probably completed a few personality assessments as part of job interviews over the years. I’ve never particularly enjoyed them.

There’s something unsettling about answering a series of questions, knowing that somewhere on the other side, someone will be interpreting your answers and deciding what kind of person you are, before you’ve even met. Am I assertive enough? Collaborative enough? Adaptable enough? The right sort of leader?

And then comes the presentation of the results. A colourful chart. A personality profile. An explanation of how you supposedly think, communicate, make decisions and relate to other people.

I’ve sat through these conversations with the peculiar sensation that the person across the table believes they’ve gained some profound insight into who I am. That they understand me. Except I haven’t felt understood at all. In fact, sometimes I’ve felt rather less understood than before we started.

Because instead of being curious about me, the person sitting opposite seems more interested in explaining me to myself.

And there’s something particularly disconcerting about that when the person doing the explaining also has the power to decide whether you get the job.

Which Version of Me Are You Measuring?

There’s another thing I’ve always found strange about these assessments: Which version of me am I supposed to be answering for?

Because I don’t respond to the world in precisely the same way in every situation. As a father, I draw on patience, tenderness and the instinct to protect.

As a friend, I listen, support, laugh and sometimes simply sit alongside someone who needs me.

As a manager, I’ve had to make difficult decisions, establish boundaries and hold people accountable.

As a practice owner, I’ve had to take risks, negotiate, lead through uncertainty and occasionally make decisions that kept me awake at night.

As an employee, I’ve sometimes needed to exercise diplomacy, compromise and restraint.

And as an advocate, I’ve learned that there are moments when being agreeable is considerably less important than being willing to speak up.

Which of those is my personality? All of them. They’re different threads in the same tapestry. None is a disguise. None is necessarily more authentic than another. They’re different expressions of who I am, shaped by relationships, responsibilities, experiences and circumstances.

So when a personality questionnaire asks whether I’m assertive, agreeable, cautious, collaborative or comfortable challenging authority, my answer is often: It depends.

Who am I with? What am I responsible for? What’s at stake? What does this moment require of me?

Yet somewhere in the scoring process, that complexity is compressed into a profile. A colour. A category. A behavioural archetype. And then someone sits across from me and explains who I am. I find that rather reductive.

Not because personality is meaningless or because we have no enduring characteristics. Of course we do. But because human beings are considerably more complicated than the categories we create to describe them.

There is an enormous difference between describing someone’s behavioural tendencies and understanding the person behind them.

The Seduction of a Simple Answer

I can understand why personality frameworks have become so popular in veterinary management.

Leading people is hard. People are wonderfully complicated, occasionally frustrating and rarely as predictable as we’d like. We work in stressful environments, with difficult decisions, competing priorities and teams of people who don’t always think or communicate in the same way.

Along comes a framework that promises to make all of this easier.

Perhaps you’re a Driver. Perhaps your colleague is an Influencer. Perhaps the practice manager is a Steadiness type and the head nurse is all about Conscientiousness.

Suddenly, everything makes sense. Well, apparently.

There are workshops, charts, reports and management courses. An entire industry devoted to teaching us to recognise personality styles. And some people genuinely find them useful.

Perhaps a framework gives colleagues permission to discuss their different communication preferences. Perhaps it encourages managers to recognise that not everyone approaches problems in the same way. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

But there is a point at which a helpful conversation starter can become something much more consequential. When a personality profile begins influencing recruitment. Promotion. Leadership development. Performance management. Or the judgement that someone simply isn’t the right fit.

At that point, we’re no longer just discussing how people prefer to communicate. We’re deciding which kinds of people we consider professionally desirable.

And that deserves considerably more scrutiny.

An Uncomfortable Piece of History

Here’s something that might make your next workplace personality workshop feel a little different. The history of personality testing in employment isn’t quite as innocent as the colourful charts might suggest.

Some early personality inventories emerged from efforts to identify psychological maladjustment. During the First World War, the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet was developed to screen soldiers for vulnerability to psychological breakdown.

These ideas subsequently found their way into industrial psychology. Employers became interested in identifying workers considered unstable, troublesome or poorly adjusted. And by the 1930s and 1940s, some personnel-management literature was explicitly promoting personality tests as a way to identify workers thought likely to challenge management or sympathise with trade unions.

Psychologist Michael Zickar documented this history in a paper with the rather extraordinary title Using Personality Inventories to Identify Thugs and Agitators. Yes. Really.

Think about the assumptions behind that. A worker questions an unfair policy. A colleague challenges the way management treats staff. An employee advocates for better working conditions. Rather than examining the concerns being raised, perhaps we should examine the personality of the person raising them.

Maybe they’re difficult. Maybe they’re poorly adjusted. Maybe we should have screened them out before employing them.

Systemic issues were being individualised, and the tests weaponised.

Now, I’m certainly not suggesting that DISC was created to suppress unionisation, or that every modern personality assessment is designed to identify troublemakers. That would be historically inaccurate.

But this history reveals something worth remembering. Organisations have long been interested in identifying the kinds of people who will fit comfortably within their existing structures. And they’ve sometimes used the language of psychology to legitimise those preferences.

When we turn dissent into a personality problem, we no longer have to examine what the person is dissenting against.

When Bias Gets a Colour Chart

Imagine you’re recruiting a vet. You have two capable candidates. One is confident, outgoing, quick to build rapport and comfortable with spontaneous conversation. The other is quieter, thoughtful, perhaps more direct and less interested in the social performance of an interview.

Both could be excellent clinicians. But one feels like a better fit. You can imagine them joining the team. You can picture them chatting comfortably in the staffroom. The other leaves you slightly uncertain. Maybe they’re not quite a team player. Maybe they’d struggle with clients. Maybe they don’t have that elusive quality we call leadership potential.

Now introduce a personality assessment. One candidate scores highly in characteristics you already associate with your ideal employee. The other doesn’t.

Suddenly, that vague feeling has acquired a graph. The assessment appears to confirm what you suspected. And that can feel reassuringly objective.

But have you actually learned which candidate will perform better? Or have you simply found a more sophisticated way to validate the assumptions you brought into the interview? A bias doesn’t stop being a bias because someone gives it a score.

That doesn’t mean every personality measure is scientifically worthless. Some well-researched personality constructs have demonstrated relationships with job performance. But those relationships are often modest, and commercial personality typologies vary considerably in their scientific foundations and appropriate uses.

Importantly, DISC-style behavioural frameworks should not automatically be treated as equivalent to validated personnel-selection instruments.

Even when a tool reliably measures a characteristic, there is another question we need to ask. Why does that characteristic matter for this job?

If someone prefers working independently, does that mean they cannot collaborate effectively?

If someone is introverted, does that make them less capable of leading?

If someone dislikes unexpected change, does that mean they cannot adapt when circumstances require it?

If someone is uncomfortable challenging authority, does that mean they lack integrity?

And if someone is very comfortable challenging authority, does that make them a difficult employee? Or perhaps an exceptionally valuable one?

Context matters. Capability matters. The environment matters.

Yet all too easily, personality becomes shorthand for competence.

What About Neurodivergence?

This is where my unease becomes something more serious.

Imagine being an autistic applicant completing a personality assessment. You’re asked whether you enjoy socialising. Whether you find it easy to read other people’s emotions. Whether you adapt comfortably to unexpected situations. Whether you’re naturally persuasive. Whether you enjoy working in groups.

You answer honestly.

Perhaps you interpret the questions more literally than the person who designed them. Perhaps you have different social preferences. Perhaps unpredictable environments impose a greater cognitive or sensory load. Perhaps you’ve spent years masking your differences so that other people feel comfortable around you. Or perhaps you’ve decided you’re no longer willing to.

The assessment produces a profile. And someone uses it to make assumptions about your suitability for employment. Not your clinical knowledge. Not your diagnostic reasoning. Not your compassion. Not your technical capabilities. Not your ability to identify risks, solve problems or contribute meaningfully to a team.

Your personality.

A study published in PLOS ONE in 2026 examined the performance of autistic and neurotypical adults across several commonly used employee selection methods, including personality inventories.

The researchers found differences disadvantaging autistic participants across the methods examined.

There were limitations to the study, but it raised a question that should concern every employer using psychological assessments in recruitment.

What if the supposedly objective tools we use to select people are systematically disadvantaging some of the people we’re trying to include?

And the implications extend beyond autism. Consider ADHD. Chronic illness. Disability. Cultural differences in communication, confidence and self-promotion.

Even the language in which a person has learned to describe themselves.

Are we measuring professional capacity? Or are we measuring how comfortably someone conforms to a particular set of behavioural expectations?

As a deaf vet, I know how easily communication differences can be mistaken for communication deficiencies.

Put me in a noisy meeting with multiple people talking over each other, and my ability to participate changes dramatically. Put me in an accessible environment with appropriate communication practices, and much of that barrier disappears.

Same person. Same skills. Same professional capability. Different environment.

Yet imagine an assessment interpreting my responses about group communication, spontaneous interaction or social confidence without understanding any of that context. We create the barrier, measure the struggle, and then call it a personality trait.

And sometimes we use that judgement to decide who gets an opportunity.

When Culture Fit Really Means Familiarity

I’ve written before about the hidden curriculum in veterinary medicine. The unwritten rules we absorb about professionalism, competence, authority and belonging.

What a good veterinarian is supposed to look like. How a leader should behave. How much confidence is expected. How we should respond to criticism. When we’re allowed to challenge decisions. And when we’re expected to remain quiet.

These assumptions are rarely written into a job description. But they can have an enormous influence on careers. Personality assessment can become another way of formalising them.

We start with an idea of the perfect team member. Positive. Adaptable. Sociable. Confident. A good communicator. A natural leader. A great culture fit. Who could possibly object to any of those things?

Except that each one contains assumptions. What does positive mean? Never raising concerns?

What does adaptable mean? Accepting last-minute roster changes without complaint?

What does good communication mean? Being verbally confident in a busy staff meeting?

What does being a team player mean? Participating in every social activity?

And what does culture fit mean? Sharing the organisation’s values? Or simply making the people already there feel comfortable?

Because those are very different things. I suspect many organisations don’t set out to exclude people who are different.

They simply keep selecting people who feel familiar.

Someone who communicates like us. Thinks like us. Responds like us. Understands our unwritten rules. Someone we immediately recognise as one of our own. And over time, that preference becomes self-reinforcing.

We recruit people who resemble our existing leaders. We promote people who demonstrate the characteristics we’ve learned to associate with leadership. We describe people who behave differently as lacking potential.

And then we congratulate ourselves on having built a strong culture.

A culture that can only accommodate people who resemble those already inside it isn’t necessarily strong. It may simply be narrow.

Perhaps the Difficult Person Has a Point

Think about the person in your workplace who keeps asking why. Why do we do it this way? Why isn’t that meeting accessible? Why can’t we change the roster? Why is that policy necessary? Why are we expecting everyone to work in precisely the same way? Why are we so resistant to doing something differently?

Perhaps they’re uncomfortable to manage. Perhaps they don’t fit neatly into your preferred leadership framework. Perhaps they challenge assumptions that nobody has questioned for years.

And perhaps they’re right.

One of the most dangerous things an organisation can do is confuse discomfort with dysfunction. A person who challenges authority isn’t necessarily insubordinate. A person who questions a process isn’t necessarily inflexible. A person who communicates directly isn’t necessarily unkind. A person who prefers routine isn’t necessarily incapable of adapting. A person who doesn’t participate in workplace social activities isn’t necessarily disengaged.

Yet we have developed an extraordinary vocabulary for describing people whose behaviour doesn’t match our expectations. Too quiet. Too outspoken. Too sensitive. Too rigid. Too emotional. Not emotional enough. Not a natural fit. Not leadership material.

It’s all very Goldilocks, isn’t it?

Sometimes these descriptions tell us something useful about an individual’s behaviour. But sometimes they tell us considerably more about the organisation making the judgement.

And before we embed those judgements in a personality assessment, perhaps we should examine whose definition of normality we’re using.

An Awkward Question for Veterinary Management

There is something slightly ironic about all of this. Veterinary medicine prides itself on evidence-based practice.

We expect clinicians to justify diagnostic choices. Treatment protocols. Drug selection. Clinical interventions. We question study design. We examine limitations. We ask whether an intervention actually works.

Yet when it comes to management, we can be remarkably enthusiastic about embracing the latest branded framework.

A leadership course. A behavioural assessment. A personality profile. A new way of identifying high-performing teams.

And perhaps some of these tools are genuinely useful. But where is the scrutiny? What does the tool actually measure? How reliably? Does it predict performance in the role for which it’s being used? Does it add anything beyond a structured interview, a practical assessment or a meaningful conversation?

Has anyone examined the potential impact on disabled or neurodivergent applicants?

And what safeguards prevent a personality profile from becoming a label that follows someone through their career?

These are questions employers should be asking management consultants and leadership providers. Not because those providers necessarily have bad intentions. But because good intentions don’t guarantee good outcomes. And popularity is not evidence of effectiveness.

We should be at least as curious about the evidence behind our management practices as we are about the evidence behind our clinical ones.

Especially when people’s careers, opportunities and livelihoods are at stake.

What If We Actually Got to Know People?

How well do leaders actually know the people they lead? Could you describe what motivates each member of your team? Their strengths? Their ambitions? What gives them energy? What exhausts them? How they prefer to communicate? What they need to do their best work?

And, importantly, have you asked them? Or have you simply assumed you know?

There’s a subtle but important distinction between understanding someone and believing you understand them. The first requires curiosity. The second can sometimes prevent it.

And I think that’s what unsettled me most about those interviews years ago.

Someone had a report that purported to explain my personality.

And rather than inviting me to explore whether its observations were meaningful, the conversation felt as though the conclusions had already been reached.

I was being explained to myself.

But the report didn’t know me as a father. Or a friend. Or a practice owner. Or an employee. Or an advocate.

It didn’t know the experiences that had shaped me. The compromises I’d made. The battles I’d chosen. The situations in which I’d learned to be patient, assertive, cautious, compassionate or uncompromising.

It couldn’t know which behaviours reflected my preferences and which reflected the demands of the environment.

And it certainly couldn’t capture all the different threads that make up the tapestry of who I am.

Perhaps that sounds like a lot to expect from a questionnaire. It is. Which is precisely my point.

So, Is It Time to Ditch the DISC?

I don’t think every personality assessment is worthless.

Nor do I think everyone who finds value in DISC, or another behavioural framework, is misguided.

If these tools encourage people to communicate more openly, recognise differences and become curious about one another, there may be something useful in that.

But that is a very different proposition from using them to determine someone’s professional suitability. And it is very different from allowing a personality profile to become a substitute for genuinely understanding a person.

Veterinary medicine already has a workforce problem. We struggle with recruitment and retention. We lose talented people to burnout.

We have colleagues masking disability and neurodivergence because they don’t know whether disclosure will be safe.

We have experienced professionals whose needs change over the course of their careers.

And we have people who spend enormous amounts of energy trying to appear like the kind of person their organisation considers employable.

Do we really need another system that risks rewarding people for resembling an idealised professional personality? Or do we need to become better at recognising capability in all its different forms?

Because excellence doesn’t come in one colour. Compassion doesn’t belong to one personality type. Leadership doesn’t require one communication style. And professional competence has never depended on how comfortably someone fits into a quadrant.

Perhaps it’s time to stop asking whether people have the right personality for our workplaces. And start asking whether our workplaces are designed to bring out the best in different people. Because that is what inclusive leadership should be about.

Not reducing the complexity of human beings until they fit inside a framework. But building organisations capable of recognising and supporting that complexity.

So yes, perhaps it is time to ditch the DISC.

Or at least ditch the notion that it can tell us who someone really is.

Because understanding people matters far too much to reduce them to a colour.

And belonging should never depend on fitting inside someone else’s box.