PROFILING EXERCISE

Anyone who’s worked in any kind of office for a while will have done some sort of personality assessment at one point or other. I think the idea is that people end up communicating better with each other, working and understanding their colleagues more fluently.

I feel like I’ve done this a lot. There was Myers-Briggs, a system which divides everyone into one of sixteen personality types. My memory of that afternoon is standing at one end of the room with the introverts, wondering what in the world was wrong with needing to carefully plan a shopping list, as opposed to the prevailing ‘Just wing it’ attitude of my colleagues.

Then there was Lion, Otter, Beaver, Retriever - a questionnaire that acts like a sorting hat, putting you in with either the alphas, the socialisers, the hard-workers or the faithfuls. I longed so much to be an otter (creative, fun, social) that I did the test twice. Golden Retriever every time.

Enneagram’s popular too. I think there are nine categories, though I always get confused about the numbers. I came out of that one as a ‘creative with an analytic wing’ which I remember thinking to be a good summary. I quite like the idea of being driven by the idea of being able to build something but never getting past the planning stage. Though, that does explain why I’ve never written any of these books I keep going on about.

So to today’s. Or rather, the survey I barrelled through on the last afternoon before the Easter holidays. This one’s called DISC, and I think the idea is that you end up with lots of statistics about whether your personal need is to be ‘Dominating’ (No thanks), ‘Influencing’ (No), ‘Steady’ (Perhaps), or ‘Correct’ (Yes). I tumbled out of it as a ‘Precisionist’  a systematic thinker, requiring accuracy, who doesn’t like confrontation and needs a stable environment. 

We get to ‘discuss’ it all in workgroups on Monday. I hope it’s useful, and not just a big labelling debate. But then, I would wouldn’t I.