TBM 440: The Problem With Putting People in Boxes

Personality and “strength” tests at work have never sat right with me. Sure, they became fodder for some fun discussions and had that occasional “wow, how right!” horoscope vibe. But they rarely seemed to help with day-to-day work, and they never replaced the hard work of truly getting to know people, including how they interact with others and how different contexts bring out different versions of them.

When building a team, we tend to adopt the sports-team metaphor: find the right people for the right positions. Or, slightly more generously, ask, “How do we bring out the best in this person?” or “How can we get these people with different strengths and weaknesses to do great things?”

Though phrases like “culture fit” acknowledge, at least in theory, that someone might be highly successful in one culture and struggle in another, in practice they often downplay the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the culture itself. The culture gets translated into a set of seemingly context-free strengths: decisive, collaborative, high ownership, low ego, fast-moving, intellectually honest. In short: the way we already are becomes “good,” and then we attach big, admirable words to it. The focus then shifts to figuring out how the individual will “fit.”

Even when we know better, we often take the easy way out when describing other individuals. “Oh, they’re a strategist.” “They’re a people person.” “They have high conscientiousness.” “They’re low in agreeableness.” “They’re very analytical.” The label is convenient because it compresses a lot of complexity into something easy to remember and repeat.

This post is about “types,” cultural norms, and why we should focus much more on how people show up in different contexts than on forming theories around the buckets people fall into.

Types And Other Boxes (At Work)

Most personality frameworks attempt to describe relatively stable tendencies. But what you actually care about at work is more like: “What will this person do in this specific kind of situation, with these incentives, norms, power dynamics, and constraints?”

“What type of person are you?” is the wrong, but convenient, question. A better, but harder, question is: “Under what conditions do you behave differently, and what distinctions are you making that cause you to switch modes?”

Take two people who rank high in conscientiousness and low in neuroticism on the Big Five personality test. They are tasked with figuring out the meeting cadence for the company.

One says, “We’re wasting too much time coordinating. Let’s set a standard cadence, put it on everyone’s calendar, and adjust it in a month.”

The other says, “A company-wide meeting cadence is hard to undo and affects everyone differently. Let’s understand where coordination is actually breaking down before imposing a new default.”

Both responses are perfectly compatible with being conscientious and emotionally stable. They have the same personality traits, based on the model. What differs is how they interpret the decision. How reversible is it? What evidence is required? Who has the legitimate authority to decide? What counts as an acceptable experiment?

High conscientiousness and high agreeableness could plausibly produce either:

“This is chaotic. We need a clear daily cadence, but we should involve everyone in shaping it so people feel heard and can commit to it.”

or:

“A recurring meeting is a significant organizational commitment. We should diagnose the problem carefully and get broad consent before imposing a new default.”

Same broad traits. Very different behavior.

The discussion here extends beyond personality. The same issue shows up in strengths frameworks, skills frameworks, leadership competencies, communication styles, and other models, frameworks, and systems that try to describe people in relatively stable terms. Knowing that someone is “strategic,” “collaborative,” “decisive,” or strong at influencing tells you something. But it still leaves open the harder question: under what conditions does that strength show up, fail to show up, become overused, or look very different?

And don’t get me started on “growth mindset,” a phrase I’ve heard bandied about by people with remarkably fixed ideas about what good thinking, good behavior, and good leadership are supposed to look like.

A Personal Example

I’ll use myself as an example. Over the years, I’ve taken everything from Myers-Briggs and DiSC to StrengthsFinder and more empirically grounded trait assessments like the Big Five.

In most situations, I put a high premium on co-designing the solution with other people. I like getting perspectives on the table, making sure people feel some ownership, and then moving. I’m not especially interested in consensus for its own sake; I still have a bias toward action. But I generally want the action to feel like something we shaped together rather than something that was simply imposed.

In a different kind of situation, though, I can change modes very quickly.

If I perceive someone as abusing their power or influence, generalizing about a group of people, dismissing someone’s experience, or treating another person as if their perspective doesn’t matter, I jump into defender mode. I become much more direct, much more willing to confront, and much less concerned with preserving harmony or being seen as agreeable.

So from the outside, those two versions of me might look inconsistent: collaborative and accommodating in one setting, aggressive and confrontational in another. If someone assigned me Big Five personality traits based purely on my behavior in those two situations, they might come away with very different profiles. But internally, the behavior is connected. In the first case, I’m trying to create shared ownership. In the second, I’m reacting to what I perceive as someone using power in a way that makes shared ownership impossible.

In fact, I even received feedback that I was “polarizing.” This stung. After a lot of soul-searching, I realized that I was showing up very differently in certain situations. The feedback wasn’t wrong: my behavior could be polarizing. But it was also internally consistent. Certain situations pushed me into a much more forceful, aggressive defender mode, while in others I was highly collaborative and accommodating.

“That’s Just How Things Work Around Here”

There’s a strange asymmetry here.

Organizational norms are themselves the accumulated byproduct, or sediment, of people’s behavior. Behavior shapes the rivulets and channels water passes through. But once those behaviors become established, they often get depersonalized into “that’s just how things work around here.” The norms become part of the environment, seemingly detached from any particular individual.

Anyone who benefits from those norms, or contributes to them unconsciously, gets to point to the channels as if they were simply features of the landscape. “That’s the way water flows!”

The person adapting to that environment, however, is treated very individually. They need to read the room, adjust their style, develop better judgment, learn the context-appropriate form of “executive presence,” or learn how to operate in the culture. The behavior that created the context becomes invisible, while the behavior required to adapt to it becomes a personal competency and burden.

Various academic and scientific traditions address this head-on:

• Institutionalization (Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, Lynne Zucker): repeated human practices can eventually become taken-for-granted features of social reality.

• Organizational culture (Edgar Schein, Joanne Martin): assumptions and ways of working can become so embedded that people experience them as simply “how things are done.”

• Privilege and social dominance (Jim Sidanius, Felicia Pratto): dominant groups and their ways of operating can become treated as the unmarked, “normal” case.

The burden does not fall evenly. It often falls most heavily on people who are underrepresented twice over: underrepresented in the immediate environment they are trying to navigate and underrepresented more broadly in the profession or industry. They may have fewer people around them whose default ways of speaking, leading, disagreeing, or making decisions resemble their own. So they are asked to do more of the adapting while having less power to define what counts as normal in the first place.

Courage!

The dynamic shows up when leaders throw around words like courage, discipline, “bias to action,” or ownership. These sound like relatively context-free virtues. Who wants to argue against any of those things?

But in practice, organizations don’t reward courage, discipline, action, or ownership in the abstract. They reward particular expressions of them. In one company, courage might mean challenging the CEO in a meeting. In another, the exact same behavior might register as disrespect, poor judgment, or an inability to read the room. In one company, ownership might mean making the decision and moving without waiting for permission. In another, doing that might get you feedback that you failed to bring people along.

Courage becomes speaking up in this particular way. Ownership becomes taking charge in this particular way. Discipline becomes persisting in this particular way. Bias to action becomes moving at this particular speed, with this particular amount of consultation.

If that particular expression maps neatly to how you already behave, it becomes very easy to experience the virtue and your preferred expression of the virtue as the same thing. Now someone new shows up. We think we are evaluating whether someone possesses a virtue, but we may actually be evaluating whether their expression of that virtue is culturally legible to us.

Conclusion

If we actually want to work better with people, it isn’t enough to understand personality, skills, or values in the abstract, yours or theirs. We have to understand how those things show up in distinct contexts and how the context we’re operating in changes what gets expressed.

It helps to understand your own or someone else’s general tendencies. But for team building, it may be even more useful to understand the contextual factors that bring out different versions of that core.

• What kinds of situations cause you or them to switch modes?

• What are you or they noticing in those situations that someone else might not notice?

• What assumptions are you or they making about risk, authority, fairness, reversibility, or responsibility?

The goal isn’t to abandon the idea that people have relatively stable tendencies. It’s to understand that those tendencies are expressed through context. Knowing your own or someone else’s “type” may tell you something about a center of gravity or area of inertia. Knowing the conditions that pull you or them away from that center may tell you much more about what it will actually be like to work together.