DISCover the secret to success
David Wilkinson reveals the secrets of optimizing your business by utilising personalities.
Photos: Marinette Potgieter
MBOMBELA – Knowing how to work with different personality types, including your own, could prove essential in any business. You could sell the solution to load-shedding to the president, but if you don’t know how to sell it to a specific personality, you can kiss the deal goodbye.
This was the general message of American business coach, Mr David Wilkinson at a business optimisation workshop held at Emnotweni Arena on Wednesday.
The overarching purpose of the workshop was to help companies generate more revenue by understanding personality types and how each one prefers to do business.
Wilkinson touched on four points: identifying who you are as a business individual, how to market and lead a company, how to identify and market felt needs, and to decrease conflict within the business.
“Knowing how to work with personalities will allow you to attract clients easily,” he said. “You are selling to a person. You only need to know how to work with that individual. You don’t have to change who you are as a person but only temporarily morph to suit the context. Essentially you need to wear a mask to fit the situation. When you go home and relax, you can be yourself again.”
He identified four main personality types in business: the dominator, the influencer, the steady and the cautious, or the “DISC” personalities. “When I’m presenting a lecture, I’m an ‘I’, or influencer, and when I’m at home I’m an ‘S’, or steady. In a business you will probably find each personality to be present. That means you need to know how to work with them in order to optimise their, or your, own perfor-mance.”
Ms Melany van der Merwe, co-owner of Melco Property Management, testified to Wilkinson’s DISC personality theory and how it has catapulted her business.
Wilkinson has lived in a number of cities in South Africa, including Mbombela and White River, for seven years before moving to Chicago. He still visits the Lowveld four times a year – mostly to do business but also because he has fallen in love with the area. He owns Global Equipping Centre in Mbombela and Chicago, as well as a non-profit organisation, 10m Vision.
