Taste the rainbow

Life is like a bag of skittles, you kinda know what you're gonna get.

Sunday was a weird day.

There are so many things ingrained in me from repetition. I’ve been conditioned to check a phone, one I no longer own, every couple of hours. A phantom vibration from expected text messages and emails I won’t get. The actual stressor is gone, but the stress lingers on.

Sunday, it was the most pronounced. My spider-sense was tingling all day. Today is Sunday, you have to get ready for work tomorrow. You have to make sure everything is lined up -

• All your hotels booked?

• Got your clothes packed?

• Am I going to need an oil change on this trip (I got them roughly once a month)?

• What do I have to deal with this week?

• What are my pressure points?

A cloud casting a wide shadow over an entire day. And that’s if I got no phone calls or text messages.

Adrianne and I were watching season 2 of Shadow and Bone this Sunday. We had to pause to let the dog pack outside because they had an urgent need to let the world know they were alive. As they barked at some invisible threat, I instinctively tensed. We’re wasting time.

I love spending time outside with my dogs. I love watching TV with my wife. My work brain was telling me that I can’t have both because my downtime is limited. I have to be ready for work. Yes, I don’t have a job right now, but this is how I’ve spent almost every day off for decades. Tense about the next day. The return to work.

I am sure it will take some time to break out of these habits. I’m not sure where it falls on the spectrum of trauma, but it feels like I’ve escaped an abusive relationship and broken a damaging addiction cold turkey. The working world did provide me with a structure and a stability that I did not take for granted.

I read a puff piece on a retirement company’s website about the 5 Emotional Stages of Retirement. I think I’m somewhere between realization and the honeymoon phase. I’ve looked forward to a day like this, a respite from the work, for most of my life. I am free from the day to day stress. The reality of the situation hasn’t sunk in. Despite retirement leading to a 20% reduction in depression, retirement can trigger a range of other emotions.

Depression after retirement is also common. It’s estimated that almost one-third of retirees in the United States develop symptoms of depression at this stage of life.

Anxiety, anger and a detrimental impact on interpersonal relationships can also spring from voluntarily not working. There’s a few factors here, mine being a sabbatical being most impactful, that modify both my emotional process and my stressors. Still, the resources have helped me develop a plan to make this time period fruitful and to keep myself out of common pitfalls.

It also got me thinking about the commonalities of the human experience and the dangers of reducing individuals to those shared traits. I’ve been subjected to countless personality tests in my working career. Myers-Briggs, Pace Pallet, Team Relate, Work Love Languages, Enneagram and so many more that weren’t impactful enough to stick with me.

Despite [Myers-Briggs] popularity, it has been widely regarded as pseudoscience by the scientific community. The test attempts to assign a value to each of four categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving.

They all have one thing in common, they reduce a person into a category. It’s life hacks for ineffective managers. This person checks these boxes so here’s how you should communicate with them! Here’s a boilerplate motivation for this person! The assessments are newspaper astrology. Vague, generally positive affirmation. Anyone can find themselves in those words, can rationalize those traits. And, well, sure this is a little more like you because you gave identifiers to your thought process.

Theoretically, these tests are a tool. Another way to impact your management. Read this blurb to understand how you can be more impactful! This is what matters to this person, so if you find yourself struggling, try this one simple trick!

For a lot of leaders, it becomes reductive. A way to automate human interaction. Another way to segregate. To abdicate the responsibility to learn about that person, their motivations and their desires. What is actually effective communication for that person.

The exercise could just be a fun activity. A neat way to find common ground with people. A bridge builder. See, we are all just people! But, I’ve been in meetings about these personality tests. I’ve spoken to supervisors and co-workers about how to apply this knowledge at our job. How to use it as a tool to manage.

And as I read those standard issue statements, all I can think of is the parts that don’t define me. Where the lines blur between categories. And how I’ve never used any of that knowledge to impact change in a person. I’ve never asked a person if they are an introvert or an extrovert. I’ve never asked a direct report what their work love language is when I’m trying to find their motivation. I didn’t need to know their color, I needed to know them.

• What are you looking to get out of this job?

• What do you feel your challenges in this job are?

• What do you feel like you do well?

• What would you like to know better?

• What do you need from me?

I needed to know the person. We needed trust. Communication. Integrity. Discipline. It would be easy to say I got this right every time. Or even most of the time. I feel like I would have been a decent hitter in MLB with my stats.

But the payoff is worth it. You’re able to help people find a better path forward. People find more value in the job they are doing. The work environment is also healthier, people communicate better and issues are reported before they become bigger ones.

But the reductive nature of these tests spreads its tentacles far wider than that. Stereotyping is an insidious side effect of any of these results. People being reduced to their commonalities strips them of their differences subconsciously.

Stereotypes can often lead to prejudices—which are formed opinions about a person that are not based on actual experience or reason and could lead to favoring one person or group against another.

Now, hold on, this is ridiculous. I can hear the thought forming. A work personality test is so far removed from a systemic barrier… “You’re reaching!” “This is taking it a little too far.”

“Personality tests are by and large constructed to be ableist, to be racist, to be sexist, and to be classist,” says the disability justice advocate Lydia XZ Brown. “That’s what happens when you have a test … based on norms devised from college-educated straight white men with no known disabilities. Personality tests are useful for individual people sometimes on journeys of self-discovery. But when they’re used to make decisions by other people affecting someone’s life, they become dangerous tools.”

Any of these companies that administer these tests will give you statistics on what job roles suit what result. It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Executives are extroverts (95% self-identify that way) even though there’s evidence that introverts are better CEOs. Most of the statistics from these companies come from internal data. Typically it is flawed and lacks actual peer review. But it feels right when it checks the box the way you expected the box to be checked. So it creates an almost dogmatic philosophy on best hiring decisions.

It may lead to homogeny in leadership. I’ve talked with people in multiple industries about how to change diversity in their companies. About what they look for in a leader. We often look for indicators of individual success and rarely for indicators of mutual success. People that will check all the boxes, when we need people who check the right boxes.

There are a lot of factors that go into making you you. Genetics, cultural upbringing, socioeconomic and systemic factors. People who could lead a different way are never given that opportunity because we have data founded on a history of success by a certain type of person. And those traits became the only traits. I’ve got a lot to say about that, and I will, but for now I’ll remind you.

People are people. Most of them are trying to do their best. Not everyone is worth the time investment, but if you can take the time to get to know the person at least you’ll know if that investment is worth it. And you’ll start to see the individual and not the personality test.

I’m an ambivert by the way and quality time is my love language.