The Danger of "Personality" Assessments
I must admit, I've always loved completing personality-type assessments. I think they can be fun, and, much like horoscopes, I enjoy assessing how well they describe me without necessarily buying into the whole thing. However, although I love them in a social environment, they can have "less than the desired" results, shall we say, in work situations.
Case in point: First of all, I am an Introvert (with a capital I). I have never even come close to the middle of any scale that claims to assess introversion/extroversion, let alone on the E side of the scale. Yet, it frequently shocks people (who haven't been paying attention) when they discover I'm a card-carrying Introvert. For example, my last year as a member of a drum and bugle corps, I was the drum major. However, I hated being in the public eye, so I worked around it. First, I begged the staff to give me an all-black uniform so it would be easier for the audience to not notice me (they refused, so I wore Wayfarers while conducting Carmina Burana all season as an act of defiance) . Then, I approached it as a job: I wasn't a Drum Major; I was a baritone player who happened to be conducting the corps because they needed somebody to do it.
Now, when I joined the customer support staff at LexisNexis after graduating from law school, it started out as an almost perfect job: I could just sit in my cubicle for eight hours a day and just do my job. Although my job required me to talk to people, I could handle it because 1) they were initiating the contact, 2) they were asking me for help, and 3) I had no idea who they were, they had no idea who I was; it was (for the most part) totally anonymous. After a while working there, I began to move up the ladder, and after a couple a years, I had moved up to the position of Consultant, which basically meant I had a lot more responsibility, and leadership opportunities, than just answering the phone.
At about this time, during a Team-Building Day, my team leader thought it would be fun to have us all do a Myers-Briggs assessment. Most of the team fell where you would expect them: Those who enjoyed talking and were busy moving up the ladder were on the Extrovert side, and those who liked where they were and didn't want to get involved very much were on the Introvert side. Except for me. We all stood on a piece of tape that had been stretched across the floor to represent the scale based on how we scored, I was at the very end of the Introvert side. Most of the people were shocked, although my team leader claimed (and I believe her) that she knew that's where I would end up. Some of the other scales also held various surprises from other team members, but none were greater than mine.
Flash forward a few more years: I'm growing very tired of taking calls all day long, and the company has rewarded me for my successes and positive attitude by giving me several opportunities outside of the phones. I spent nine months as an editor for the lexis.com online Knowledge Base (my first experience with HTML), which had me completely out of the phones; on three separate occasions, I was tapped to act as Team Leader for extended periods of time for my own and other teams while their team leaders were absent. I was given opportunities to mentor others, to work with product development, to work on new projects, all of which took me out of the phones for brief periods of time. But all they did was deepen my frustration. Everytime they took me out of the phones, especially for something fun or cool, the more painful it was to go back. And even though I didn't let it effect my customer interactions, those who were paying attention could tell I was no longer enjoying my time there.
That's when they made their mistake. I had been contemplating getting my Master's in Library Science, but I had mainly been looking at completely online programs. Then, one day, I discovered a training session in my schedule called WorkSmart (or something like that). The aim of the class was clearly to make its participants realize that they liked doing their jobs, indeed, that they enjoyed them, and it was supposed to empower us to think differently about the parts we didn't like so we could better enjoy the parts we liked. In the beginning of the class, we were all given a set of 40 cards that had action verbs on them (one on a card), like "organizing", "planning", "sharing", etc., and we were tasked with finding the ten verbs we "liked" the most. After we had our ten cards, we were to turn them over and reveal a "type" for each verb. Each verb was labeled as being associated with either People, Ideas, Things, or Data (and they were color-coded to help sort them). Most of the people in the class had predominantly (i.e., at least five) People cards; I was the only one (out of 20) who didn't have a single People card in my ten. And I could tell something was wrong right away, because when I revealed my cards (predominantly Things, with some Ideas and Data thrown in), the facilitators both stopped smiling and temporarily froze before trying to hide their reactions and moving on.
The final step of this process was to examine special lists of occupations and professions that linked up to the cards you had. For example, near the top of the People lists, not surprisingly, was Customer Support Representative. Other jobs near the top of that and the Ideas and Data lists were also jobs that LexisNexis offered (at times, not necessarily at that time). Clearly, we were supposed to realize that we loved doing customer support, and even if we wanted to do something else, LexisNexis might have an opening for that position sometime down the road if we just stick it out. That was for the People, Ideas, and Data people; at the very top of the Things list was Librarian. And that's when I knew. I didn't know I would be going to Wayne State, but I knew that I couldn't just do it online as a part-time thing. I needed to get out and just go do it.
Bottom line: Because of this assessment, they lost me. I was empowered to to cut all ties and step out on my own. I'm still friends with several people who work there (including my old team leader), but, although I have no idea whats next in store for me, it was one of the smartest decisions I ever made.
Case in point: First of all, I am an Introvert (with a capital I). I have never even come close to the middle of any scale that claims to assess introversion/extroversion, let alone on the E side of the scale. Yet, it frequently shocks people (who haven't been paying attention) when they discover I'm a card-carrying Introvert. For example, my last year as a member of a drum and bugle corps, I was the drum major. However, I hated being in the public eye, so I worked around it. First, I begged the staff to give me an all-black uniform so it would be easier for the audience to not notice me (they refused, so I wore Wayfarers while conducting Carmina Burana all season as an act of defiance) . Then, I approached it as a job: I wasn't a Drum Major; I was a baritone player who happened to be conducting the corps because they needed somebody to do it.
Now, when I joined the customer support staff at LexisNexis after graduating from law school, it started out as an almost perfect job: I could just sit in my cubicle for eight hours a day and just do my job. Although my job required me to talk to people, I could handle it because 1) they were initiating the contact, 2) they were asking me for help, and 3) I had no idea who they were, they had no idea who I was; it was (for the most part) totally anonymous. After a while working there, I began to move up the ladder, and after a couple a years, I had moved up to the position of Consultant, which basically meant I had a lot more responsibility, and leadership opportunities, than just answering the phone.
At about this time, during a Team-Building Day, my team leader thought it would be fun to have us all do a Myers-Briggs assessment. Most of the team fell where you would expect them: Those who enjoyed talking and were busy moving up the ladder were on the Extrovert side, and those who liked where they were and didn't want to get involved very much were on the Introvert side. Except for me. We all stood on a piece of tape that had been stretched across the floor to represent the scale based on how we scored, I was at the very end of the Introvert side. Most of the people were shocked, although my team leader claimed (and I believe her) that she knew that's where I would end up. Some of the other scales also held various surprises from other team members, but none were greater than mine.
Flash forward a few more years: I'm growing very tired of taking calls all day long, and the company has rewarded me for my successes and positive attitude by giving me several opportunities outside of the phones. I spent nine months as an editor for the lexis.com online Knowledge Base (my first experience with HTML), which had me completely out of the phones; on three separate occasions, I was tapped to act as Team Leader for extended periods of time for my own and other teams while their team leaders were absent. I was given opportunities to mentor others, to work with product development, to work on new projects, all of which took me out of the phones for brief periods of time. But all they did was deepen my frustration. Everytime they took me out of the phones, especially for something fun or cool, the more painful it was to go back. And even though I didn't let it effect my customer interactions, those who were paying attention could tell I was no longer enjoying my time there.
That's when they made their mistake. I had been contemplating getting my Master's in Library Science, but I had mainly been looking at completely online programs. Then, one day, I discovered a training session in my schedule called WorkSmart (or something like that). The aim of the class was clearly to make its participants realize that they liked doing their jobs, indeed, that they enjoyed them, and it was supposed to empower us to think differently about the parts we didn't like so we could better enjoy the parts we liked. In the beginning of the class, we were all given a set of 40 cards that had action verbs on them (one on a card), like "organizing", "planning", "sharing", etc., and we were tasked with finding the ten verbs we "liked" the most. After we had our ten cards, we were to turn them over and reveal a "type" for each verb. Each verb was labeled as being associated with either People, Ideas, Things, or Data (and they were color-coded to help sort them). Most of the people in the class had predominantly (i.e., at least five) People cards; I was the only one (out of 20) who didn't have a single People card in my ten. And I could tell something was wrong right away, because when I revealed my cards (predominantly Things, with some Ideas and Data thrown in), the facilitators both stopped smiling and temporarily froze before trying to hide their reactions and moving on.
The final step of this process was to examine special lists of occupations and professions that linked up to the cards you had. For example, near the top of the People lists, not surprisingly, was Customer Support Representative. Other jobs near the top of that and the Ideas and Data lists were also jobs that LexisNexis offered (at times, not necessarily at that time). Clearly, we were supposed to realize that we loved doing customer support, and even if we wanted to do something else, LexisNexis might have an opening for that position sometime down the road if we just stick it out. That was for the People, Ideas, and Data people; at the very top of the Things list was Librarian. And that's when I knew. I didn't know I would be going to Wayne State, but I knew that I couldn't just do it online as a part-time thing. I needed to get out and just go do it.
Bottom line: Because of this assessment, they lost me. I was empowered to to cut all ties and step out on my own. I'm still friends with several people who work there (including my old team leader), but, although I have no idea whats next in store for me, it was one of the smartest decisions I ever made.
posted by Dan Baker at 5:43 PM
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