Built to Serve: How HopeSource Equips Its Staff to Show Up for the Community
HopeSource’s mission is to equip, encourage, and empower others because hope changes everything. By investing in our internal culture through tools like CASTLE, DISC, and Driving Forces, we equip ourselves to work together more effectively, encourage each other to show up fully and authentically, and empower one another, our clients, and our community with our unique strengths and gifts.
Every day, people in crisis walk through HopeSource’s doors needing to be met with compassion, empathy, and intention. While our clients are our primary focus, our incredible staff who walk through those same doors every day to serve their community need compassion, empathy, and intention to show up for their colleagues in the same way.
People are incredibly complex, which means working effectively with others requires more than just our best intentions. At HopeSource, we prioritize using tools and frameworks that help us understand and appreciate those around us and equip us to adapt to one another to become more effective.
Several years ago, HopeSource realized we needed tools to give us a shared language for understanding one another and for living out our CASTLE values. We adopted a tool called DISC that provides a framework for understanding human behavior. It provides a baseline for describing behavior without judging that behavior. As humans, we tend to bring our own biases, lenses, and value judgments to different behaviors, while the DISC model helps us become more empathetic toward one another. We might observe the same behavior as someone else does, yet describe it entirely differently, giving way to the tendency of attributing others’ behavior to their character and attributing our behavior to our circumstances.
DISC measures four dimensions of human behavior: Dominance, how we respond to problems and challenges; Influence, how we influence people and contacts; Steadiness, how we respond to the pace and consistency of our environment; and Compliance, how we respond to procedures and constraints.
At HopeSource, DISC helps us to uphold our CASTLE values in the way we intended: Courage, Authenticity, Service, Truthfulness, Love, and Effectiveness. DISC helps us recognize and appreciate our own style (authenticity and truthfulness), recognize and appreciate the style of the people around us (courage and love), and adapt our behavior to more effectively serve those around us – our colleagues as well as our clients (effectiveness and service).
Working in tandem with DISC are the Driving Forces – a model for understanding what drives us individually to show up in the world. Are you more motivated to help specific people for a specific purpose or help any person for any reason? Are you driven by beauty or function? Collective decision-making, or personal autonomy? Understanding our unique “whys” helps us approach the work in front of us wholeheartedly.
When we use CASTLE, DISC, and Driving Forces as intended, we are better able to understand and appreciate ourselves and others, adapt our approach to honor those qualities, work better as a team, solve problems faster, and stay focused on our mission.