To sort of pick up where I left off last Tuesday, railing against overly broad classifications that some people use to avoid doing any work to improve themselves, I’ve recently encountered another system of categorization that rankles. This one comes with more caveats, though, because I think the tools it provides for communication are more useful, but I will add that I’m even thinking about this at all because I saw it used poorly and in a way that stifled communication rather than fostered it. I think this might have something to do with the group that was discussing it, whose examples provided me with the minor frustration required to develop my normally casual disregard for this stuff into a blog post, but any system used to sort people or apply labels based on supposedly innate traits will be easily turned toward ill ends by someone with an agenda. This one, though, rather than playing out in the sphere of popular culture or online quizzes disguised as methods of determining interpersonal compatibility, is sanctioned by many workplaces the world over. This one is called “Predictive Index” and that’s an evaluation tool that even some of the experienced people who advocate for and administer the system won’t praise without a few caveats of their own.

Essentially, this system ranks you based on your answers to some questions, sorting you into a series of buckets in four different categories. You essentially go through the quiz twice, once to describe yourself and then again to describe the person you believe you’re supposed to be for work. While its sorting you into your buckets, it also claims to evaluate you for emotional versus logical thinking and whether you work better doing one task to completion (a serial tasker) or swapping between multiple things (a multitasker). It also includes a bunch of descriptions of your behavior and inclinations that read a lot like horoscopes: lofty and praiseworthy enough to make you want to apply them to yourself but broad enough that lots of different people could see themselves underneath their umbrella. The caveats I’ve heard about the system, from someone who used to work for the company that produced it, are that these descriptions and the larger category you get sorted into are not reliable and should be ignored. That got mentioned during the presentation I saw today and it left me wondering why, if more than fifty percent of the report that’s included when someone does this survey, the whole survey isn’t just considered rubbish as well. After all, if they’re going to pad the whole thing out with a bunch of bunk, who’s to say the whole thing isn’t also garbage?

Part of what set me on edge during this meeting, that was supposed to be about getting training that’s given to people usually after they’re hired into a management position (the entire series of classes is delivered with the caveat, in this case, that getting this training doesn’t guarantee a management position since this is a management “interest” course), was the suggestion that a person’s survey results don’t ever change. As someone who has changed pretty significantly in the last several years, I find that hard to believe, especially because this is supposed to capture your innate personality, beyond all layers of artifice, because you’re describing yourself by selecting words from a long list and anyone with a decent understanding of nuance can paint an incredibly rosy picture of themselves based on either current societal values or the standards they believe support the values of the company hiring them. I mean, I absolutely described the person I thought my employer would want to hire, based on the resume I’d submitted and the interview I’d done, and while the description provided at the end absolutely fits me, it also completely misses the mark on almost all accounts as well. I mean, it says I’m an incredibly high-level multi-tasker and I absolutely am not. I do one thing at a time. Sure, I’ve got a lot of things to do most days and I tend to keep a lot of irons in the fire, but I absolutely don’t swap between them.

What was most frustrating of all was finding out just how much this thing has influenced the behavior of the people giving this presentation. Like I said at the top, this sort of thing can provide people with tools to use when communicating with each other, with a common language they can use to bridge what often feels like insurmountable gaps. When you take it beyond that, though, when it stops being a tool and starts being a description or a mold to trap people in, then it limits conversations because you’re telling someone of course they can’t do this thing. They’re clearly not suited for it. It says it right there on the paper, after all, so why should they even try? Better to let someone whose box fits the task better be the one to do it. The whole thing just smacked of bad management and people who have no experience leading a group trying to find a way to work together not by building mutual respect and cooperation, but by stuffing everyone into a mold and then throwing problems at those molds until they find a compatible one. If I didn’t already have incredibly low expectations for this whole series (based on the very first class I went to, no less, which was coincidentally run by the same people as this one), I’d have left the class feeling disappointed and like I’d lost faith in the presenters.

It’s staggering, just how willing people are to force themselves and the people around them into narrow little pigeonholes for the sake of what they claim to be the best results for everyone involved. I can’t stand it and, the more I learn in this series of “classes”, the more I’m starting to wonder just what most managers have been taught. And what they’re doing since it seems like my company has not set them up for success.