Discovering how people see me

A couple of week's ago we had a team day in work that included a session using the "Insights Discovery" colour toolkit. It's another one of those profiling tools that reaches various conclusions about personality based off a questionnaire. As part of the day we were given several cards each, which we could either keep, give to a colleague, or hand back to the people running the course. 

The cards all had a characteristic on them and we were supposed to keep the ones we felt applied to us, and redistribute the others. We all started with 12 cards. I gave six away and was given another eight. This is the selection I ended up with.

The six I kept were:

• Encourages structure and order (well, I try)
• Gives and receives trust
• Quickly gets to the root of the problem
• Rapid reasoning
• Imaginative problem-solver, and
• Identifies the possibilities in every situation

Some of them I strongly identified with, but I'll admit some of them I kept more because I would like to be like that.

The eight I was given reflect how my colleagues see me - or at least what they have seen so far. We have only been working together for a couple of months.

The cards my colleagues gave me were:

• Can facilitate resolution of interpersonal conflict between others
• Good situational analysis
• Will find ways to work more effectively (I call this tactical laziness; other people call it ergonomics - that's an idea for a future blog-post!)
• Realistic and systematic
• Sees adversity as just another opportunity 
• Knows the importance of detail within the process
• Gets the job done and done right (too right!)
• Brings boundless energy to any situation (this was surely a joke)

These are all fairly nice things to be told. I'm aware this sort of thing is not far off from those horoscopes that use vague compliments to make you feel positively about what they are telling you. We are almost always more likely to accept a compliment as a true statement about ourselves. 

Later I got given a detailed profile of my personality based on the answers I had given to the quiz. Strangely, there wasn't much overlap between the cards and the profile. In fact, some of it was in direct contrast - apparently I am likely to delay making a decision until I am in full possession of all the facts rather than deploy rapid reasoning. But from the perspective of living in my head, once I have those facts I reach a conclusion quickly. 

The only sour note of the whole exercise was that someone in my team handed the card saying 'Good sense of humour' back in to the facilitator. I felt mildly offended that they didn't give it to me. But maybe that's telling me something that I really ought to know...

The five dimensions of personality

Time for a business psychology post...

Last month I was asked to present my ‘top tips’ on supporting change, based on my experience managing a network of healthcare professionals. My first tip was to understand that in a complex system, the real complexity is the people working in that system.

One of the things I realised when doing my MSc in Business Psychology is that psychology can be a reductive science. (Particularly if you go down the route of explaining every action by analysing brain activity.) So it’s no surprise to find that generally all human personality is often reduced to five dimensions – usually called the ‘Big Five’. Some people advocate even fewer, and some split some of the five up into other streams.

But for the purposes of understanding people in a work environment, the ‘Big Five’ are all you need. There is also a handy acronym to remember them by – OCEAN.

The five letters of OCEAN represent

• Openness to Experience
• Conscientiousness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism (emotionality)

All five of these personality dimensions are continua. We all display greater or lesser aspects of them. The assumption is that as most people grow up, they stabilise in places on the various continua. If they were cautious children they will be cautious adults and display less openness to new experiences or curiosity about the world. Personally I think it’s a mistake to assume that people will always act a certain way. Some people seem to compartmentalise their lives and exhibit very different approaches in work to outside work. They may be very risk averse in work and compensate for that with risky behaviour in their hobbies and pursuits. 

There is no real right or wrong place to be on the continua, but people who operate on the extremes are more difficult to function with in work.

For example, people who are extremely open to new ideas and curious about trying new things can be great at innovation and fixing systemic problems. However, they can get distracted. They often leave projects half-completed. They can go down research rabbit holes. And they are often susceptible to sales pitches and latch on to magic bullets that will solve all their problems.

At the other end of that continua are the joyless jobsworths who were told how to do a job a certain way on day one of their employment and will retire 45 years later doing the same job the same way. It’s really easy to spot those people. Just ask them why they do something the way they do it. If the answer is “We’ve always done it this way”, then they have low levels of openness.

Conscientiousness is often seen as a good trait in a co-worker or employee, because, obviously, nobody wants to be working with reckless people who don’t care about anything.  However, overly conscientious people can become obsessed with procedure, to the point where they are paralysed into inaction for fear of doing something wrong.

Extraversion and introversion aren’t exactly a continua. Introverts can do what extraverts do; it just takes more mental effort. Extraverts don’t get worn out by people as quickly. You can easily spot extraverts and introverts because the extraverts want everyone to go out to the pub after work, while the introverts just want to quietly slope off home. (There's a topical point to be made here about party-keen extraverts being more likely to have an office wine fridge filled by sloping off to the off-licence with a suitcase to buy booze.)

Extraverts are energised by people, so are often regarded as enthusiastic and keen, geeing up the team and pulling everyone forward on a project. Those are all good things. But in my experience, because extraverts are energised by people, they tend to do work in meetings and task groups but not between meetings. They can be very productive in the group environment, often banging out plans and strategies in a short time.

In contrast, introverts find it hard to make decisions in meetings. They often want more time to consider things and weigh up options, backed up by research. Typically, they will go back to their desk and start actioning the list of things that need doing, which they will bring to the next meeting. A good team will have both types of people in and a good manager will recognise that they need to feed the extraverts with group time and protect the happiness of the introverts by giving them space.

Agreeableness is an interesting continuum, and one that I feel has capacity for people to be at different points on the continuum depending on context. Generally, agreeable people are much nicer to work with. They make the team environment more pleasant. However, it’s possible to be too nice and this can impact on productivity directly, with too much social chatter and concern about non-work conversations, and indirectly if people are seeking a consensus before making progress. Sometimes movement happens when a person with a lower level of agreeability decides to take initiative even though a few noses will be put out of joint. 

Another way that highly agreeable people can cause problems is through enabling toxic behaviour. I have some experience of people with high levels of agreeability whose main role in a team seems to be smoothing feathers ruffled by more disagreeable members of the team. This prevents confrontation and means that the more disagreeable person is never held to account for their actions that are upsetting people, so they continue to function in the same way. In the long term that poisons relationships.

Finally, neuroticism is about how deeply a person feels emotions, not necessarily how much they express them. Some people display flashes of anger, then very quickly regain an emotional equilibrium and move on. Other people don’t express emotion and internalise a large amount of stress and resentment. There is some debate whether neuroticism should really be in the Big Five, because it seems more liable to fluctuation than the other dimensions.

It’s also the only dimension where lower levels are considered more beneficial in a work environment. Generally, people who are overly emotional and get very stressed over every issue they face are not easy to work with. However, I would be wary of people who never express emotion. They may seem like unflappable bastions of resilience, but it might just be a case that they don’t express emotion because they don’t feel things like empathy and compassion.

There are loads of different activities that can help reveal people’s tendencies on the Big Five continua. If you have ever sat through an ice-breaker that will designate you as an animal, or a cartoon character, or assign you a colour, you have probably been profiled in some way. It’s then up to the managers to observe the outcomes of those activities and tailor their approach to fit. Although, the ability to do that successfully, is, of course, dependent on where the managers themselve are situated on the various continua!

Breaking out of the Birkman box

I have been sorting out my files at work, shredding confidential stuff like the original interview notes from all the interviews that I’ve done over the years. I have a blue recycling bag with the equivalent of about four to five reams of paper stacked in it. In a way it’s profound – my career reduced to recycling. (I made someone mist up when I said that today. Oops.) 

 However, I also went through my personal file, shredding all my staff reviews and old holiday forms and stuff. It was interesting to rediscover documents relating to the previous massive restructuring, with details of the ‘new structure’. Now it’s all fallen over just two years later, the letter I wrote in protest at the changes seemed almost prescient. But I shredded it, so you’ll have to take my word on that. 

 I also shredded my Birkman profile. Birkman has been the bane of many people’s existence in my workplace. The previous CEO believed in it with the kind of passion people usually reserve for veganism or voodoo. 

Apparently Birkman was the sum of all wisdom and defined you in elemental terms. I always had my doubts about that. True there were some helpful things I learned from it, as I’ve learned from all such pop-psych exercises. 

I learned, for example, that when I’m stressed I will exhibit pessimistic, critical behaviour and will want to ‘break social conventions’ (which I presume in a Christian organisation means calling someone who’s being an f-wit an f-wit instead of smiling and giving them the more Christian benefit of the doubt). 

It also noted that I am ‘selectively sociable’, i.e. I only seek out the opinions of a few people who I respect and whose opinions I value. And that has been pretty true, although since having it pointed out to me I have tried to seek out opinions from a wider circle of people. This helps me to make sure I don’t just go to the people who are going to say what I want to hear. 

But what I really hated about Birkman is the way it became an excuse in our organisation, particularly by colour-coding people according to their preferred working styles. 

I’m not disputing the definitions. My ‘blue’ profile is correct – I like to know why; I like strategising; I enjoy being left to self-prioritise my work; I hate micro-management; I thrive when I can ask questions; I like to be asked my opinion. 

The problem is when other people – particularly those marked ‘red’; the “action” people – use their Birkman profile to justify behaving a certain way. ‘I’m red. I like things done now. I don’t want you to raise questions. I just want you to do it. And do it the way I tell you, not a better way.’ 

What I’ve noticed is that a Birkman ‘blue’, such as myself, will look at their profile and a ‘red’s’ profile and say ‘Oh, they’re red. I’d better modify the way I work to enable us to work better together.’ But generally (and note this is generally) a ‘red’ will look at their profile and say ‘This is how people had better act if they want me to respond’, but then never think to modify their behaviour to benefit their co-workers who have been colour-coded differently. 

Now you can call that whatever you want: leadership, clarity of focus, goal-focussed, or whatever. But ultimately it can become just a way of justifying ignorant bullying. ‘I want it my way and screw you and your needs’ would be another way of describing it. 

And that was the weakness of Birkman, as far as I could see. It didn’t actually deal with defective and unhelpful personality traits. It just quantified them and in the process justified them. So, if you wanted to behave like an utter cock, then you could, because that’s how your Birkman profile said you would behave. And who are you to go against the mighty pseudoscience that is Birkman? 

So, shredding my Birkman profile today was cathartic. Hurrah. The labelling menace that is the coloured boxes will no longer dominate my destiny. 

Mind you, I can be as guilty of mis-using Birkman as anyone. In terms of working preferences I have a very low “outdoor” score. That’s why I don’t bother drawing the curtains if I’m first into the office and have never wanted a seat next to window. I’d be happy in a bunker, or at least happier than most. 

It’s also probably why I hate gardening and camping and can’t really be bothered with long walks in the country. So, if you ever wondered why my garden is over-run with Triffids, now you know. It’s all in my Birkman profile.

This explains Big Brother

Food for thought from Scott Adams:

"My hypothesis for today is that a person’s need for social interaction is inversely related to the quality of his or her imagination. In other words, if you have an excellent imagination, you might enjoy people, but you’re equally happy to be alone with your thoughts for large stretches. To put it bluntly, you fascinate yourself.

A key part of my hypothesis is the assumption that people have widely different powers of imagination. This seems likely. People are all over the map for every other mental ability. Whatever is happening inside the mind of the person with the worst imagination on earth is clearly very different from what’s happening in the mind of the most creative.

Presumably, if you have no imagination whatsoever, you need to get all of your stimulation from the environment, mostly from other people, or at least TV shows about other people. You wouldn’t want to be alone with your thoughts for more than two minutes because your thoughts would bore the living piss out of you."

Scott poses the question: "Do you have an unusually good imagination? If so, do you enjoy being alone more than most people?"

And that does fascinate me. Because for a long time I thought I had difficulty making friends, until I took a Birkman profiling test which showed I was 'selectively sociable' ie I only look to a few people for approval/support. I did another psych test which revealed I was an introvert with extrovert characteristics. So I can get up and speak to a room full of people - but that doesn't make me an extrovert. I recharge my batteries by spending my downtime by myself.

Which presumably is why I can spend hours writing a story in a universe I'm making up off the top of my head and not feel tired, but twenty minutes into my work day in a crowded office and I become Lethargico, the Sloth Superhero.

And it also explains why people who I can only charitably describe as dullards buy Closer magazine*, care about whether D-list celebrities have tan lines, worry over Posh Spice's weight, and will watch the imminent new series of Big Brother.

*it even has the word 'loser' in the title. I mean, come on...