The National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) recognizes that strong team development is essential for fostering a successful work environment. Organizations who dedicate time and resources to enhancing their teams often experience increased trust, improved communication, and increased productivity and NACHC members identified this as need at health centers now more than ever.

In 2021, NACHC developed a team development training pilot that utilized DiSC – an assessment tool used to help improve teamwork, communication, and productivity. Completing a DiSC Assessment is a way to uncover communication, processing, and decision-making styles across your team. This pilot was funded through a grant provided by Johnson & Johnson, as a part of their “Our Race to Health Equity” initiative.

One example of this effort took place at the Lowell Community Health Center (Lowell). Their Chief Strategy & Finance Officer, Brenda Rodriguez, MBA leveraged DiSC in the name of health system transformation to advance culture change within their health center. The results were transformative internally and are beginning to show externally. Lowell leadership determined that, in order to meet their health system transformation goals, they first needed to focus internally and reorient the ways in which staff interact with one another and they used DiSC for this process.

To showcase how DiSC can work in a health center setting, read this case study conducted by Transform Health in order to understand some of the findings at the Lowell Community Health Center.

The four basic tenets to leveraging DiSC at your health center:

1. Obtain buy-in at the C-Suite level of your health center first, and then socialize the concepts with influential staff to gain momentum and advance culture change.
2. Interview the facilitator who conducts your DiSC Assessment and then manage that relationship for cultural goodness-of-fit longer term.
3. Once you have your DiSC Assessment results enlist champion(s) to continue the applied learnings in the workplace.
4. Build DiSC into your current and onboarding structure to ensure successful implementation.

DiSC is not a one-stop-shop solution – but it is a powerful, affordable tool that can open doors for leadership and staff who desire new ways of problem-solving, understanding each other, and decision-making. Read the case study for more details.

Contact Us

If you would like to learn more or work with Transform Health, please contact Heather Bates at heather@transformhc.com.