Behavioral Differences Become More Useful When We Can Understand Them
People do not experience the same workplace in the same way.
Some prefer to decide quickly.
Others want more information before committing.
Some process ideas through conversation.
Others need time to reflect.
Some naturally challenge assumptions.
Others focus first on maintaining cooperation.
Some are energized by change.
Others look for continuity and predictability.
None of these differences automatically indicates greater competence, intelligence, leadership potential, or performance.
They are preferences and behavioral tendencies that can influence how people interpret situations and interact with one another.
When these differences remain invisible, teams may misinterpret them.
Directness may be interpreted as insensitivity.
Reflection may be interpreted as disengagement.
Questioning may be interpreted as resistance.
Enthusiasm may be interpreted as lack of depth.
Caution may be interpreted as unwillingness to change.
The purpose of behavioral assessment is not to decide which style is better.
It is to create greater awareness of differences and help individuals develop more flexibility in how they work with them.
Cristiane uses DISC and MBTI as developmental instruments within a broader conversation about the person, the team, and the organizational context.
The assessment generates information.
The debrief creates understanding.
Application turns understanding into development.
Benefits
Awareness of one’s own behavior becomes more valuable in an environment where people feel safe to ask, to disagree, to admit uncertainty, to talk about difficulties and to learn from mistakes. For that reason, the individual reading also considers the relationships and the context in which those behaviors appear.
The instruments are used as resources for broadening the understanding of preferences and patterns, without reducing human complexity to profiles or labels. The purpose is to develop awareness and widen the range of choices each person has about how to communicate, collaborate, lead and respond to different situations.
DISC and MBTI Do Not Measure the Same Thing
DISC and MBTI should not be treated as interchangeable assessments.
They provide different lenses.
DISC
DISC provides a framework for exploring observable behavioral tendencies and interaction patterns through four broad dimensions:
- Dominance
- Influence
- Steadiness
- Conscientiousness
Depending on the DISC instrument used, the report may explore areas such as communication, pace, priorities, interpersonal tendencies, and behavioral responses to the environment.
Its practical value is often found in creating accessible language for discussing how people approach tasks, relationships, communication, and work situations.
MBTI
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator explores personality preferences across four preference pairs:
- Extraversion — Introversion
- Sensing — Intuition
- Thinking — Feeling
- Judging — Perceiving
These preferences describe different ways people may tend to direct attention, take in information, make decisions, and approach the external world.
MBTI does not determine capability.
It does not tell us whether someone will succeed in a role.
And it should not be interpreted as a fixed description of everything a person is.
The purpose is to increase awareness of preferences while recognizing that people are complex, adaptable, and capable of behaving outside those preferences when situations require it.
MBTI Step II
Step II provides additional nuance within the four MBTI preference pairs through 20 facets.
This is particularly useful because two people with the same four-letter type can still differ meaningfully in how those preferences are expressed.
Instead of stopping at a type label, Step II allows a more detailed conversation about individual variation.
The purpose is not greater categorization.
It is greater differentiation.
From Profile to Self-Awareness
An assessment becomes useful when people move beyond:
“This is my type.”
toward:
- “How does this preference appear in my behavior?”
- “When does it help me?”
- “When might it limit me?”
- “How might someone with a different preference interpret my behavior?”
- “What do I need to flex when the situation requires something different from what comes naturally?”
- “What am I treating as a personality difference when the real issue may be role clarity, trust, culture, capability, or process?”
That last question is particularly important.
Not every team problem is a personality problem.
Poor communication may come from unclear roles.
Conflict may come from competing priorities.
Silence may come from low psychological safety.
Slow decisions may come from governance.
Poor performance may come from capability gaps or an ineffective operating system.
Behavioral assessments provide one source of information.
They should not replace organizational diagnosis.
The Process
Context & Assessment Selection
The process begins by understanding why the assessment is being considered.
Cristiane examines the objective:
Is this for self-awareness?
Leadership development?
Executive coaching?
Team development?
Communication?
Conflict?
Career reflection?
Understanding the purpose comes before selecting the instrument.
DISC and MBTI are not automatically appropriate for every organizational question.
The assessment is chosen according to what the client or team actually needs to understand.
Assessment Administration
Participants complete the selected assessment individually.
Instructions emphasize that there are no better or worse types and that the purpose is development rather than judgment.
Confidentiality and appropriate use of results are established before the assessment begins.
Individual Interpretation
Participants receive a facilitated interpretation of their results.
The purpose is not simply to read the report.
Cristiane helps each participant examine:
- what resonates
- what does not
- how preferences appear in real situations
- communication patterns
- decision-making tendencies
- relationships
- leadership behaviors
- areas where adaptation may already be occurring
- situations in which greater flexibility may be useful
For MBTI, the interpretation process also respects the principle of best-fit type: the individual remains an active participant in understanding and verifying their own type rather than simply being assigned a label.
Team Pattern Exploration
When working with teams, individual results may be considered collectively to identify patterns relevant to how the group works.
Questions may include:
Where do we have similar preferences?
Where do we bring different perspectives?
Which voices may naturally dominate a discussion?
Which perspectives may be overlooked?
How do we approach decisions?
How do we respond to change?
How do we communicate disagreement?
Where might behavioral differences be contributing to misunderstanding?
The objective is not to create an ideal team profile.
It is to understand the team that actually exists and increase its capacity to work across differences.
Application Workshop
The team translates awareness into practical agreements.
Depending on the engagement, the workshop may address:
- communication
- meetings
- feedback
- conflict
- decision-making
- collaboration
- leadership
- change
- delegation
- problem-solving
- team norms
The emphasis is on behavior.
Knowing a profile without changing the quality of interaction has limited organizational value.
Integration
When assessments are part of a larger coaching, mentoring, culture, leadership, or team-development engagement, the insights are integrated into the broader work.
The assessment remains one source of information among several.
The Cristiane Barreto Difference
Cristiane does not treat behavioral assessments as standalone answers.
She uses them as structured starting points for deeper inquiry.
Her background in Social Psychology, organizational behavior, leadership, culture, strategy, group dynamics, behavioral sciences, and more than 20 years of organizational experience allows assessment results to be interpreted within a broader human and organizational context.
This distinction matters.
A profile may help explain a preference.
It cannot explain an entire person.
It may illuminate an interaction.
It cannot diagnose an entire team.
And it can create useful hypotheses.
It should not become a shortcut for making assumptions about capability, potential, or performance.
Cristiane therefore works from three levels:
Individual
What do I understand about my preferences and behavioral patterns?
Relational
How might my way of communicating and interacting affect people who operate differently?
Systemic
Which challenges actually belong to individual differences, and which may originate in culture, structure, leadership, roles, processes, or organizational conditions?
This broader perspective helps prevent personality frameworks from becoming labels and turns them into developmental conversations.
Certified Assessment Practice
Certified application and interpretation of DISC and MBTI, including MBTI Step II, within their appropriate developmental purposes.
20+ Years of Organizational Experience
More than two decades working with professionals, leaders, teams, and organizations in the United States and Brazil.
Social Psychology + Organizational Behavior
Assessment interpretation is integrated with an understanding of group dynamics, context, relationships, leadership, and organizational systems.
Individual + Team Development
Assessments may be applied in individual development, leadership, mentoring, coaching, or team contexts depending on the objective.
Multilingual Delivery — EN | PT | ES
Assessments, debriefs, and facilitated sessions can be delivered in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, according to instrument availability and participant needs.
Intellectual Foundations
Cristiane’s approach to behavioral assessment is informed not only by the instruments themselves, but by established thinking in psychology, organizational behavior, leadership, and team development.
Carl Gustav Jung
Psychological types and individual differences in orientation and mental preferences.
Jung’s theory of psychological types provided an important conceptual foundation from which Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Cook Briggs later developed the MBTI framework.
Isabel Briggs Myers & Katharine Cook Briggs
Development of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a framework for making differences in psychological preferences more understandable and practically useful.
William Moulton Marston
Early theoretical work on behavioral and emotional responses associated with the intellectual history from which later DISC models developed.
Modern DISC instruments, however, should be understood according to the specific methodology and research of the assessment being administered rather than assumed to be identical to Marston’s original theory.
Amy Edmondson — Harvard Business School
Psychological safety, learning, team effectiveness, speaking up, and the conditions that enable people to work constructively across interpersonal differences.
Her work is particularly relevant because behavioral awareness alone is insufficient if team members do not feel able to ask questions, disagree, acknowledge uncertainty, or discuss mistakes openly.
Edgar Schein
Organizational culture, interpersonal processes, helping relationships, and the importance of inquiry in understanding people and organizations.
Schein’s work reinforces the principle that interpretation should begin with curiosity rather than assumptions about another person.
Chris Argyris
Learning, defensive routines, reasoning, and the difference between what people say guides their behavior and the theories actually visible in action.
His work offers an important complement to behavioral assessment: self-description should always be examined alongside behavior and context.
Daniel Goleman
Emotional intelligence, self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and the role of emotional and social capabilities in leadership.
Behavioral profiles can generate insight, but effective leadership also requires the capacity to recognize and regulate responses in real interpersonal situations.
The Five Axes Framework
Cristiane integrates behavioral assessment into a broader organizational perspective:
- Identity
- How do I understand myself, my preferences, and the way I tend to operate?
- Positioning
- How do I communicate my contribution and adapt my behavior to the context?
- People
- How do my preferences influence communication, relationships, leadership, and collaboration?
- Operations
- How do behavioral differences affect the way work, decisions, meetings, and interactions occur?
- Results
- Which behaviors are helping produce the outcomes I want, and which may need to evolve?
The objective is not to discover a label.
It is to develop greater awareness and a wider range of choices about how to act.