Unorthodox concepts in HR : Part 6 – Two plus two personality profiling

In this post, we will continue our exploration of Unorthodox concepts in Human Resources/People Management. Here we are exploring concepts that are unlikely to be found in ‘respectable’ text books (and also not taught in ‘premier’ business schools) but are very much real in the paradoxical world of people management (See ‘The attrition principle’,  'In the valley of attrition' , 'Sublimation of vision statements' , 'Computer-controlled Manager Empowerment' and ‘Training the Victim’ for the previous posts in this series).

Personality profiling is an evergreen business. Human beings find other human beings difficult to understand. And, those who bother to think about it, find themselves to be even more difficult to understand!  So, if there is a 'scientific-looking tool' that can enable us to map (fix!) ourselves and others into some sort of  'neat categories' with 'precise-looking' characteristics and consequences, it reduces our (existential) anxiety and gives us a feeling of being in control. 

Now, there are all kinds of personality profiling tools. Almost everyone would claim that their tool is the best (and an unadulterated blessing to mankind) and that the other tools are so seriously flawed that they can corrupt young (and old) minds and even souls! Though the validity and  usefulness of these tools are doubtful, personality profiling tools can provide amusement and a pleasant diversion from the unpleasant realities of work! Since, I have always aspired to be some sort of a 'Corporate Court Jester' (see 'OD Managers and Court Jesters' for details), how can I resist the temptation to jump into the business of personality profiling - at least for comic relief?!

My preference is for tools that are more like 'straws in the wind' - simple ones that can give an indication regarding the direction of the wind (personality). One option to make this kind of tools work is to leverage the following phenomenon: when we give people an ambiguous question, people will project their own meanings into it and hence their answers would reveal quite a bit about their personality. Actually, this is similar to what happens in a human process lab where an unstructured situation is deliberately created so that participants will project their 'here and now' reality into it (say, in their attempts to structure the situation) which in turn can serve as a mirror for the underlying feelings and thoughts. All this led to the creation of the 'two plus two' personality profiling tool.

So, what is this '2 + 2' personality profiling tool? 

• 2+2 profiling aims to highlight some aspects of the occupational personality of the individuals concerned based on how they will answer the question ‘What is two plus two?’

• 2+2 profile is more of a ‘caricature’ and it is not intended to a ‘portrait’ of the individual

• 2+2 profiling is intended to be a joke (with a grain of truth)

• 2+2 profiling won’t work on people who have a mathematical approach to life (See ‘A mathematical approach to HR’ for details).

Since this is a 'caricature' of the personality(and not a portrait), directly asking the question "What is two plus two' won't work. If we want to get an interesting answer, we have to ask people to answer the question "What is two plus two?'  in such a way that it reflects some prominent aspect of their occupational personality. However, considering the fact that we are better at making caricatures of others as compared to making caricatures of ourselves (and that many of us are likely to have an overly positive image of ourselves), it might be even better to ask  people to indicate how different members of their team are likely to answer this question in a way that it reflects the most prominent aspects of occupational personality of those team members.

Now, let us look at some of the possible answers. Of course, many more are possible!

• Why do want to know? Why are you asking me? Who told you that I know the answer? What will you do with this information?

• Before we can answer this question, we need to have a detailed discussion on 'What is addition?'

• The answer can be 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 or 22 depending on the organization culture!

• Both the 2s are my family friends. Let me tell you long stories about my last 4 meetings with them. By the way, since both of them are family friends, it won’t be proper for me to add them!

• What do you want the answer to be? You can choose the answer you like and I can help you to convince others that it is the right answer

Is there anything at all that you can infer from the answers about the people involved?

Can you think of any modifications to the tool that can make it more effective in bringing out the personality characteristics?  

What about possible applications for the tool? For example, can we do some sort of a team building activity using this tool? This could involve asking the team members to write down different answers to the above question so as to highlight key personality characteristics of themselves and of each of the other team members. Then each person can look at the various answers that others have written to highlight his/her personality characteristics and try to infer what could be the underlying personality characteristics. May be, they will learn something useful about themselves or at least about perceptions others have about them!.

Any ideas/suggestions?

Influence of 'early career experiences'

What has been the impact of your 'early-career experiences' on you? For the purpose of this discussion, let us define 'early-career experiences' as 'experiences during the 'most impressionable part' of one's career and this would imply (for many people) experiences during the first few years of one's career/the experiences during one's first job. So please take a couple of minutes to think about your 'early-career experiences'. What do you remember about them? Do you think that they have impacted you in any significant manner? If yes, what has been the nature of the impact?

The importance of early life experiences on the psychological/behavioral development of a person is well known. But considering that one is usually much older when one starts working, can a similar phenomena occur - in the domain of one's basic assumptions about organizational life/work/career? In an earlier post (see HR professionals and Multiple Personality Disorder), I had speculated that 'traumatic' early career experiences might contribute to the development of some sort of a 'Multiple Personality Disorder' among HR professionals - especially among young MBAs in HR.

While I have been thinking about this issue for quite some time, the 'trigger' for this post came recently in the form of a discussion in an e-group that I am part of. This e-group consists mainly of my ex-colleagues from an organization in which I had worked a long time ago. We were discussing issues like"the reasons for the existence of strong bonds among us even though most of us had left the organization a long time ago"; "why do we often talk about the 'great experience' that we have had in that organization" etc. Now, there were multiple factors (at multiple) levels involved in the situation. I felt that one of the key factors involved (apart from the factors related to the organization context, nature of work, nature of inter-dependencies in the group etc.) was the profile of the members of the group/organization at that stage - most of us were at an 'impressionable stage' in our careers!.

It was the first job for many of us and I felt that it 'shaped' our definitions of 'what is good' in an organization/workplace context (i.e. the tacit/subconscious definitions of 'good' boss, 'good' team member, 'good' team, 'good' employer, 'good' learning opportunities and even that of 'good' work). Since other organizations (that we joined later in our career) are unlikely to provide environments that exactly match these definitions, the work experiences in them are likely to be perceived as falling short of 'the good old days'. I think that this is similar to the phenomena in which the traditional way of cooking in India (cooking with fire/heating food from the outside) influenced our definition of 'good taste'. This in turn made it difficult for a product like the microwave oven (that heat up food uniformly) to become popular in India* (other than for reheating the food) - till a new generation brought up on a more 'microwave-friendly' definition of 'good taste' became consumers.

So my hypothesis is that early career experiences can have a significant impact on our careers by influencing our basic workplace preferences and attitudes. Of course, there are other factors (like personality related factors) that can also influence our workplace preferences and attitudes. It would also be interesting to examine if the impact/influence of early career experiences reduces as one progresses in one's career (and gains more experiences/data points).

Any observations/comments?

*Note: I am not saying that this is the only factor that possibly worked against the popularity of microwave ovens. There could be many other contributing factors. For example, from a psychological point of view - fire has many important associations (i.e. fire symbolizes a number of things). It is a symbol of purity - for fire is considered to purify everything. Hence cooking food in fire can symbolize purification of food. Fire is also supposed to symbolize 'illumination', 'inner light' , 'holiness' etc.. It is interesting to note that in many of the cultures across the world there are myths related to 'theft of fire' (e.g. according to Greek mythology, Prometheus [whose name means 'foresight'] stole fire [which was available only to the gods at that time] from Zeus and gave it to the mankind). As I have said earlier (please see Myth and truth : 'So true that it can't be real'), myths often embody great truths.

Now let us come back to microwave ovens. From the above discussion, it can be seen that 'microwave-cooking' might have been at a disadvantage as compared to 'fire-cooking' because of the symbolic significance of fire. This argument becomes stronger if we compare microwave ovens to washing machines. As compared to microwave ovens, washing machines became popular in India much faster. One of the reasons for this could be that a washing machine is a more or less 'straight forward automation of an essentially mechanical process' (i.e. washing). So washing machines did not have to fight some of the above 'psychological battles' that microwave ovens had to fight! Anyway, since I am not an expert in marketing (or in microwave ovens/washing machines for that matter) let me not push this point any further !

HR professionals and Multiple Personality Disorder

Encyclopedia Britannica defines multiple personality disorder as follows:

'Dissociative identity disorder, formerly called multiple personality disorder is a rare mental disorder in which two or more independent and distinct personality systems develop in the same individual. Each of these personalities may alternately inhabit the person's conscious awareness to the exclusion of the others. Usually the various personalities differ markedly from one another in outlook, temperament, and body language.'

I have noticed a similar phenomenon among HR professionals. The difference is mainly that it is fairly common (and not 'rare' as the above definition says). It is more commonly seen among those HR professionals who have taken their behavioral science education seriously. I talking about those folks who (even after working for many years in HR) still remember the behavioral science theories/principles that they have learned. Though a college degree per se might not have any direct impact on the level of knowledge of a person, it is often observed that having a MBA/MA in HR/behavioral science makes one more prone to this disorder. Of course, the most severely affected are those who have a pursued doctoral level studies and then (for some 'strange' reason) started working in internal HR.

The behavioral manifestation of this disorder is something like this:

During most of their time in office 'Personality 1' (let us call it P1, the dominant personality) is in operation. This involves carrying out their job related activities in a manner that does not reflect application of behavioral science theories/principles in any significant way.

Once in a while another personality (let us call it P2) surfaces. When this happens the HR professional gathers other HR professionals in the team, gets into a meeting room and talks about behavioral science principles/theories and their implications for HR practices. It can lead to discussions such as 'does our performance management system reflect principles of distributive justice' , 'do the models that are used in our leadership training programs have empirical validity' etc. This makes everyone feel nice and also enable them to feel that they are 'superior' to those who have 'wandered into HR without any behavioral science background'.

True to the nature of the disorder, P2 vanishes as soon as one gets back to day-to-day HR work and P1 takes over. Of course there are other avenues for P2 to surface including HR conferences, seminars etc. By the way, blogs might also provide an opportunity for P2 to surface !!!

There could be many more personalities (P3, P4,....,Pn) involved and some of them could even be placed in the continuum between P1 and P2. One such personality involves identification and implementation of 'best practices'.

Now let us go back to Britannica and look at the causes of this disorder. Britannica says

'Dissociative identity disorder is widely viewed as resulting from dissociative mental processes—i.e., the splitting off from conscious awareness and control of thoughts, feelings, memories, and other mental components in response to situations that are painful, disturbing, or somehow unacceptable to the person experiencing them. The failure to form a distinct personality can thus be seen as a way of coping with or escaping from inner conflict.'


I think that this more or less holds good in the case of HR professionals also. If we analyse the day-to-day activities performed by HR professionals in most of the companies, we would find that many of these activities do not require any great amount of behavioral science knowledge (at least in the way they are 'usually' carried out). This might be true even for senior positions. If we take out the hype, many of these activities might get reduced to 'getting forms filled-up'. Of course 'facilitation' is required, 'alignment' as to be maintained, the target population includes senior leaders, and the form filling is enabled by fancy IT systems (i.e. the 'form filling' happens online supported by an automated work flow and the system also enables monitoring, collation/aggregation and even built-in budgets). While this is useful work, this could create 'painful, disturbing, or unacceptable' situations (mentioned above) for the the HR professional who wants to 'make a big difference/contribution' by leveraging his/her behavioral science training. Again, similar to the 'painful early childhood experiences' that lead to the development of personality disorders, 'painful early career experiences' could contribute to the development of 'personality disorders in HR professionals'. Most obvious case is that of an HR MBA, who after taking up an HR job (often with unrealistic expectations) finds that his/her attempts to bring behavioral science knowledge into day-to-day work meets with inertia, indifference, resistance and even ridicule.

Similar to that in the case of multiple personality disorder, the treatment for 'HR personality disorder' should also involve integrating the disparate personalities back into a single and unified personality. Of course, this 'integration' itself is a complex topic (that require a much more elaborate discussion than what is possible here). Again, as in the case of treating multiple personality disorder, it is an important step to make the personalities aware of one another. That is exactly the purpose of this post!!!

Related Links : See related posts here, here, here and here