Thank Goodness the Weatherman Told Me It Was Raining, Or I Wouldn't Have Known

Preface and disclaimer: I tend to approach mass-market self-help and management psychology books with great skepticism. I want to know if there have been multiple well-designed, double-blind, objective, empirical studies conducted by serious researchers at well-regarded institutions and published in respectable journals showing that this theory you are selling has any actual value, or if it’s just a bunch of buzzwords and pseudo-scientific nonsense strung together to sell hardbacks to the gullible.

So many popular and often-referenced “exciting new approaches” to whatever-it-is have been thoroughly, comprehensively, monumentally debunked by legitimate investigators who, through carefully controlled experiments, determined that they are nothing but fluff and noise. I don’t care how smart it sounds, or how intuitively appealing it is, if it doesn’t cause something useful to come out of the end of the pipe, please don’t waste my time with it. The first thing I do when somebody tells me about a fresh, thrilling idea that will “change my life” (yeah, sure) is go online to find out what grown-up inquiries have been made against this assertion, and 8 times out of 10 someone at a university has already proven that it’s a load of ill-conceived, poorly constructed, blithering gibberish.

So when I was given the assignment of reading CliftonStrengths, you must understand that I approached it with a high degree of cynicism, fully expecting to find it to be the usual silly and illogical quackery packaged as revolutionary business insight. So imagine my surprise when I found myself in agreement with much of what the introduction had to say!

One of the funny things about me is that I emerged from the womb with a fully formed personality. I often hear people say things like, “I just want to figure out who I am and what I want,” and I cannot relate to that at all. When somebody tells me, “I want to take a year off to find myself,” I am confused. HOW CAN YOU NOT KNOW WHO YOU ARE?

I have never had the slightest doubt about who I was or what I wanted. From my earliest recollections, I had very specific desires. I wanted to fly. I wanted to skydive. I wanted to sail. I wanted to ride motorcycles. I wanted to travel. I wanted to scuba dive. And most of all, I wanted to write. I have never not wanted to be a novelist. I have never not wanted to be a pilot. None of that has ever changed.

So I took the evaluation, and the results were pretty much spot-on. This didn’t surprise me much; no one is better equipped to be a personality-type identifier than Gallup, the master of polling. They correctly pegged me as being intellectual and analytical, a strategic thinker interested in context, and a “maximizer,” which I took in the spirit of taking a first draft through 47 revisions until it was as good as it could possibly be.

All of that is accurate. Where I remain skeptical, however, is in the application of this information in a real-world context.

Do you know what I’d love to see? A serious research study in which one group of businesses has their employees take this test, and then takes vigorous, assertive action based on the results. The second group of businesses would have their employees take this test, but then would take no particular action based on the results. And the third business (the control group) would not take this test. The researchers would follow all three groups of businesses for several years and see if any trends emerged.

It would be interesting to see what the results were after, say, five years. I have a hypothesis: the first two groups would show a brief bump in employee engagement, simply because management seemed to be taking an interest in their well-being, but it would soon fade back to the normal, pre-test levels. But all three of the groups would show roughly the same overall average performance, when corrected for fluctuations in the economy. I also predict that the mangers in group one would express a strong, unshakeable belief that their performance had improved based on the test and the actions they took following the test, and that they would refuse to accept the statistical reality that it had made no difference, even when confronted with the hard data proving it. “I know we got better, I don’t care what the numbers say!” is something they would be likely to sputter in defense of their program when handed charts and graphs demonstrating that the gains were negligible or negative.

I mean, come on. In the history of business, has anybody’s boss ever really taken someone out of their present position and put them in a different, better position where that person could more effectively use their strengths?

“Fred, I know we hired you to be an engineer in the Gaskets and Seals department, but we’re going to reassign you as a public-relations expert with the Marketing team, because that’s where your survey results say your talents would be best utilized.”

“Janet, we hired you as a real-estate attorney, but we actually found that you would be better suited in Events Planning.”

I rather doubt it.

No, this is probably just yet another in a long, long chain of efforts by managers and supervisors to get people to do the same jobs, but to work harder for the same compensation.

At any rate, I already know what my ideal career is.

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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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