The ENTJ that never was

Spend a big enough chunk of your life inside corporate entities and you will have done every personality and team building quiz known to man.

With team building exercises, the intention is not enough. The execution is what matters.

Myers-Briggs? Of course.

Colours? Yup. Animals? Yup. The one that goes like your ‘house’ is this, but you are ‘ascending’ to the other thing, a bit like a corporate version of Mercury Rising? Yup. That too.

The way it goes is… you have a corporate retreat, offsite or team building exercise and part of the activity set includes exercises that start with you doing the assessment… a little talk about what the assessment means… and then exercises focused on whatever it is that’s top of mind for your management. Better collaboration in the team, more effective sales strategies, smoother communication across geographies and time zones. You name it. The personality type quiz is wheeled out to help ‘frame a constructive and collaborative dialogue’.

I am sure these tools are useful. I am sure they can be, rather. But I am also sure that I could write a book on how not to implement them. And frankly, I don’t know which methodology is better than the others. In my experience, they are all deployed in an identical way that makes them as ineffective as each other.

I once asked this very question actually, when I was senior enough to not be ignored (because I have asked it in the past and you can imagine what happened… I was told to eat my proverbial vegetables and be quiet). And the answer I got when I could not be ignored was: “We picked the one Hannah from HR was trained in, to save money.”

Right.

And how did Hannah from HR choose the methodology she was trained in?

Her last employer had some leftover learning credits and she fancied a few afternoons out of the office.

And, look… this may be part of the reason why those things are not implemented well. That the implementation is sort of half-hearted or random. And either it falls on someone who knows the organisation but doesn’t have the authority to cut through what may come next, or someone external who may have the authority but doesn’t have the context. So no matter which methodology you choose… you end up treating it as a one-off exercise ‘for the offsite’. Virtue-signalling at worst, naively hoping it will be enough or it will start a ripple effect by osmosis at best.

Whatever the intent, when you roll out these tools for an offsite, no matter which one you go for… the following three things happen every time without fail.

Step one: that ain’t me, guv

When you use one of those approaches, usually people are sent some pre-read material and a questionnaire to fill out before you all troop into a team building exercise, offsite or equivalent.

Normal people flick through it all on Sunday night before the offsite. There is usually one weirdo (that is invariably me) who will have methodology issues with the whole thing. And I find it most interesting that in all the years of raising those questions I have never been told anything other than ‘yeah, yeah, we know’.

And the issue is this: as you read through the questions, there is an inevitable emotional hierarchy emerging. Even though all the questions are calibrated to allow you to express your truths about your communication preferences and whatnot… first of all, you are boxed into a set of multiple choice questions that 99% of the time (for me at least) don’t come close to how I would react in the situation described and you are also simultaneously inevitably drawn to an entirely artificial but very strong sense of what the ‘better’ answers are.

Not the right ones.

But the better ones.

Because of course the trainer tells you all profiles are equally valid, but then when describing them there is always one that feels like a winner. Either because they call it something that sounds like it could eat your group (like why are they eagles and we are badgers?) or because of the language used to describe them… inevitably one profile is Gryffindor and everyone wants to be at the cool table.

So everyone knows there is a winning profile here and the answers to get to that are screaming at you while filling out the questionnaire.

What a way to start the exercise.

So somewhere between the formulaic answers and the urge to ‘win’ this thing, people end up with a profile that invariably doesn’t feel like themselves. I have done a few dozen of these and every time when the trainer hands out the profiles at the start of the offsite and people flick to their ‘grade’ so to speak… there will be about half of the room shaking their heads in disbelief at their own assessments, about half not bothering to even read their profiles because they’ve seen this show before, and then Eager Evan shouting loudly, “Oh my god, this is so accurate” while bouncing gently on his seat.

Step two: Lord of the Flies

Weirdly, the next thing that happens is that the assessments don’t feel true when they apply to us, but somehow fit like a glove when it comes to our colleagues. That’s where the trainer usually heaves a sigh of relief as everyone is leaning in and warming up and cracking jokes about how “Oh my god, Nigel, that is so you!”.

Sometimes the atmosphere is collegiate. In my experience, on one occasion, it completely descended into division and tension as people who were grouped with their ‘fellow eagles’ or whatever it was became properly competitive and downright aggressive (verbally, let’s not go crazy) towards their colleagues who were owls or whatever.

Now… that part is normal.

Decades worth of studies show that once people are grouped, they develop in-group loyalty and out-group scepticism (if not outright aggression) in terrifyingly short times. Even if the groupings are random and the subjects know it.

In a now famous experiment from 1970, Henry Tajfel divided a group of teenagers on the basis of whether they preferred a painting by Klee versus a painting by Kandinsky. And then sat back and watched Lord of the Flies revisited. I exaggerate of course. He didn’t sit back. He conducted definitive experiments for our understanding of inter-group discrimination. So, it is absolutely normal and predictable that, once you group people… and they become us over here and you over there… division emerges. And that division is on steroids when you make it clear that the division is not random but based on who you really are as a person. Isn’t that what the science behind the questionnaires was meant to show us?

So.

The division and tension is normal. But surely… it is the opposite of the desired effect, no?

Step three: it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, and then it’s just fun you can’t see

This quote is attributed to the American musician James Hetfield, and he must have been to one of those corporate retreats, as he’s right on the money.

By the time the groups are created and the exercises start, everyone is having fun.

You get to play with the people who are like you… you get to call out everything you don’t like about Sharon from Accounts when you are doing the ‘bridge building’ stuff in a ‘it’s not me, it’s the science’ way.

You get to go and stand at different ends of the room and play with Lego, and on one famous occasion (OK, not famous, but those of us in the room won’t be forgetting it in a hurry) you get to watch the trainer tell your CEO that he has a profile so unusual as to warrant a mention as he exhibits traits often seen in geniuses and psychopaths.

And of course your CEO hears ‘genius’ and everyone else in the room nods knowingly: definitely psychopath.

The tensions disappear in the fun. Or they become the fun.

Then you break for lunch. Some people have some calls to make or a quick meeting to go to before coming back. And when you come back, the Lego is packed away and the hopscotch shapes on the floor that were meant to visually allow your group to see how people preferred to communicate with each other by standing in different squares… that’s all gone. The tape has been peeled off the rug. The tables are back in the centre of the room.

The party is over. You get some reflections and take-aways. The CEO makes some tepid remark about how valuable it all was and how we will all work differently from now on and of course we all go to the pub… and the next day we are all drowning in emails and Sharon from Accounts is still annoying and nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all. The needle returns to the start of the song and we all sing along like before. (I still remember every line to that song… do you ever wonder what percentage of your brain is taken up by song lyrics? Seriously now. I don’t know my own phone number but a Del Amitri song from 1990? No problem.)

And so I ask: would it have been better to not do it at all?

And I answer: no. It would have been better to do it properly.

Do it properly or don’t do it at all.

The exercise of thoughtfully looking at yourself, challenging your own self-perception of who you are at work, what you are like to work with, how you can show up differently and how your colleagues can get the best out of you, is a genuinely useful process for both the person and the team. The honest and open synthesis of a mosaic of people who are motivated differently, communicate differently and have different preferences into a highly performing whole is a process that has immense value.

Neither of those things can be reduced to tools, but they can both be aided by them.

The problem is… the actual process rarely happens. The tools are all we get. And then… as you were. The needle returns to the start of the song and we all sing along like before.

And in this context, I say don’t bother. Just don’t bother. Give us the day off and put the money behind the bar.

The intention is not enough. The execution is what matters. And the only way to do this thing well is to spend time and let it take time. This isn’t an activity for a single afternoon. This is a leadership posture and a culture and an actively curated dialogue at work that needs to take time.

You need to spend the time. Take the time. Do it right. Or don’t do it at all.

#LedaWrites

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.

She is a recovering banker, lapsed academic and long-term resident of the banking ecosystem. 

Leda is also a published author – her first book, Bankers Like Us: Dispatches from an Industry in Transition, is available to order here.

All opinions are her own. You can’t have them – but you are welcome to debate and comment!

Follow Leda on X @LedaGlyptis and LinkedIn.