After a long summer break from class, I have once again returned to my “management interested course” and I am just as underwhelmed by it as usual. I’m still going to participate in it and put in an honest, good-faith effort since I want to one day do some kind of management stuff, but it is difficult not to look at the course I’m taking and the classes I’ve sit through with the jaded eye of someone who has watched management make mistake after mistake once the person who’d historically held the reigns passed away. Most of those mistakes were largely harmless and the rest are eased by the number of competent people involved who are able to negate–or at least reduce–any potential harm that might be done. Plus, they’re infrequent enough that the company I work for is still doing great. It’s really not a bad place to work most of the time, even as miserable as I can sometimes get when the stress piles on and I’m struggling to continue working at all, but it is undeniable that there is a huge amount of survivorship bias clouding the judgment of large swathes of the upper administration here, almost all of which becomes nakedly visible during these courses as one VP after another presents something they’re supposedly an expert in. That said, there are a few who clearly know what they’re talking about and while I might take issue with their presentations for other reasons, there’s no denying that the person presenting the current bastardization of the “7 habits of highly effective people” self-help/philosophy course knows his stuff.
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Breaking People To Fit The Mold
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.
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