Your Hidden Personality

A few months ago, I heard a story so crazy that I had to call the source directly to hear it for myself.

Marie-Louise: Yeah, absolutely, I'm happy to tell you, and I'll just sort of talk and make a synopsis of what happened.

Her name is Marie-Louise. She's a lawyer.

Marie-Louise: So to set the stage, I was working in a capacity as general counsel for a multinational company, and we had just been acquired.

They were merging with another firm, so she was already nervous. Who were they going to keep? Who would get fired? There was a big executive retreat to figure it out. Right before the retreat, everyone on Marie-Louise's team was asked to take a personality test. She showed up for the meeting and the new bosses...

Marie-Louise: They wanted to broadcast who was who. And they'd made T-shirts with our personality types, and we had to wear them.

Sounds like summer camp. Summer camp from hell, because one of the senior execs told everyone who didn't match his personality type:

Marie-Louise: "Don't worry, you won't be fired, but you'll slowly be weeded out." And then he laughed and lots of others on their team laughed as well, but it was completely apparent that it wasn't a joke.

People got fired… for having the wrong personality.

I'm Adam Grant and this is WorkLife, my podcast with TED. I'm an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck. In this show, I take you to some truly unusual places where they've mastered something I wish everyone knew about work.

Today: personality. What you might not know about yours—and why it's more flexible than you think. Thanks to Warby Parker for sponsoring this episode.

(This is the transcript of episode 4, with sources linked. If you’re thinking about gathering a podcast club—it’s like a book club, only for podcasts—you can find discussion questions at the bottom.)

OK, it's ridiculous to fire someone for having the wrong personality, but here's the thing: at some point in your life, you probably fired yourself for having the wrong personality. What I mean is, we opt out of entire career paths, saying things like, "I'm not outgoing enough to be in sales" and "I just don't have the patience to study to be a lawyer or a doctor." We decide not to pursue jobs that feel like a stretch for our personalities. We close the door on opportunities and on ourselves. Personality is the set of tendencies you carry with you, how friendly, assertive, hardworking, curious and anxious you might be from one situation to another. There are way too many traits to cover them all in this episode, so I'm going to zoom in on one key trait as an example throughout: introversion-extraversion. Of all of the major personality traits, it's the most widely studied and the most visible. We can see signs of it at an early age.

Susan: I remember thinking about this stuff when I was four years old, at a day camp.

Meet Susan Cain.

Susan: And I remember us all being gathered around to sing that song, "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands." You know that one? And I remember thinking, I was happy five minutes ago, when I was hanging out with my friend over there, and I'm not happy now and I don't know why they're making us sing this song. I feel so ridiculous.

Susan didn't know the word at the time, but decades later she discovered she was an introvert. A light bulb went off. She dove headfirst into the science. Eventually, she started a prototypically introverted project: writing a book about introverts.

Susan: I felt like I was working on an odd project that was hard to talk about at dinner parties.

Adam: Well, it also makes it hard to go to dinner parties.

Susan's book, Quiet, ignited a national conversation about the neglected role of introverts in work and life. She learned that, like all the major traits, introversion-extraversion has roots in your physiology, your brain chemistry.

Susan: Scientists have done longitudinal studies where they follow people throughout their lives, and they've started with babies as young as four days old. And they give sugar water to these babies to suck on. And the thing is that sugar water is a form of stimulation, just the way going to a noisy party would be. And so what you find is that the babies who salivate more in response to the sugar water -- suggesting they have a more activating kind of nervous system that reacts more to all the inputs coming in -- those same babies are somewhat more likely, as they grow older, to be more introverted. So those same babies when they're two years old and you put them in a playgroup of kids who they've never seen before, they're more likely to react to that scenario by freezing up and letting their nervous systems settle down as they take in all the new inputs coming at them. And it continues this way throughout their lives.

It wasn't until her early 30s that Susan finally took a personality test.

Susan: I took the test, and I felt like the scales had fallen from my eyes. It was such a moment of epiphany! But after that, every time a friend would come over to my house, the first thing they had to do was take the test and then we would sit around and talk about it.

Adam: Wait, back up. You invited friends over to take personality tests and then talk about your results?

Susan: Well, I don't know, I mean they were good friends.

Adam: What was it about your introversion-extraversion results in particular that resonated with you?

Susan: It explained so much about why I felt so comfortable and alive and activated in some situations and why I felt so intensely uncomfortable in others. I was a Wall Street lawyer at the time and I was spending half of my work life sitting in my office drafting documents, which is actually a pretty intense intellectual exercise, and I really liked doing it. And then I was spending the other half sitting at boardroom tables, often with 10, 15 people assembled around the table, and they were often kind of intimidating types, feeling the sense of having to overcome an innate discomfort. And I hadn't ever been able to put my finger on what explained that until I came across this language.

Most people think about introversion-extraversion as where you get your energy, like extraverts get it from people, introverts get it from being alone. But when Susan studied the science, she learned that wasn't quite right.

Susan: Everybody, whether you're an introvert or an extravert, draws energy from other people and I think that we don't make enough distinction between how many people and in what kind of setting. There ends up being this idea, oh, introverts are antisocial, and I always say, it's not that, it's just differently social.

When you meet someone new, introversion-extraversion is often the very first thing you notice. You can even pick up clues in a split second, before they've said a word.

Adam: Hey Allison?

Allison: Yeah?

Allison is my wife.

Adam: What are you doing?

Allison: Googling you.

Adam: What did you find?

Allison: Just you in the middle of a speech, or with your mouth hanging open.

It's always interesting to see how the people closest to you perceive you personality. Early on, Allison saw me a little differently than she does now.

Adam: When you first met me, did you think I was an introvert or an extravert?

Allison: An extravert.

Adam: Why?

Allison: Because you're loud, like physically loud.

Adam: Wait, what are you talking about?

Allison: And clunky. Uncoordinated. Everything you do is --

Adam: Uncoordinated? I was a junior Olympic springboard diver. That's all about coordination.

Allison: No, that's totally different. Just because you can do a somersault in the air doesn't mean you can quietly open the refrigerator.

Allison: Everything you do is noisy.

Adam: Why do you think that makes me an extravert though?

Allison: Because no introvert could ever live with themselves being that noisy.

Adam: It's true. So I believe you that I'm noisy.

Allison: You are.

Adam: But I don't think that makes me an extravert. I think if I were really an extravert, you'd be complaining about all the wild parties that I was throwing.

Allison: That may be true, but you do like more outgoing things than I do.

Adam: That's because you're more introverted than I am.

Allison: Right.

You can laugh about these kinds of differences with family and friends, but they can be pretty awkward in your job. To work well with other people, you need to understand their personalities and they need to understand yours. That requires a common vocabulary, a language for talking about personality that everyone speaks. Enter personality tests. They give us that language, which is why so many companies love them. Of all the workplaces I've visited, there's one where personality tests seem to be indispensable. It's called Bain & Company, a hugely successful management consulting firm. They hire smart people to help fix other companies' problems. Mitt Romney is a former CEO there and recently Glassdoor named them the best place to work in all of America. The leaders at Bain think personality is pretty important, so important, in fact, that before new hires even learn how to do their jobs, they learn about themselves. And I want to see how.

We're in a giant ballroom in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. 150 of Bain's newest hires are here for training.

Sierra: My name is Sierra Stewart.

Sierra is a team leader at Bain.

Sierra: I'm here in Cape Cod, acting as a trainer at our associate consultant training session. I have a team of six students here with me that are from all around the world and they met a couple of days ago, and so it's pretty easy for any little mismatch in personality type to bubble to the surface pretty quickly.

Mismatch in personality is exactly what Bain is trying to help people plan for and deal with so they can work effectively together instead of spiraling into personal conflicts.

Sierra: The way we staff teams at Bain, we typically have anywhere from maybe five to seven people on a team, and so the impact of that on us is that you're pretty regularly kicking off work with a new set of people you've never worked with before, and so figuring out how to understand them is really important and you have to do it pretty quickly.

Bain uses several different personality tools. One of them is an immensely popular survey called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, MBTI for short.

(Disclaimer: I have some issues with this tool—to the point that I publicly broke up with the MBTI and declared that if she wants me back, she needs to change too. If you’re looking for a personality assessment with rigorous evidence behind it, try the Hogan Personality Inventory or the HEXACO Personality Inventory.)

Conley: It is a tool that gives you insight into four dimensions of your personality.

This is Conley Zani. She used to work at Bain. During her time there, she found herself drawing on the MBTI regularly to make sense of colleagues who worked differently and to recognize some of her own blind spots. Now Conley helps new recruits at Bain figure out what their personality scores might reveal about them.

Conley: How you are energized, how you see the world and process information, how you make decisions, and last but not least, your lifestyle or work style. You can be right down the middle. Some of you might be right in the middle on all of them and that doesn't mean you don't have a personality. It just literally means you've answered as many things one way as another. All right? It's all a spectrum and, again, it's all good.

But we've all been in situations where personalities clash. Conley's goal is to help people become aware of their differences and appreciate them. To do that, all you need is a Coke can.

Conley: When you get to your seat, get out a piece of paper and tell me about this object.

That's what the Bain recruits are looking at right now, a can of Coca-Cola. Conley has asked them to write down what they see.

Conley: Some of you in the room probably have a list that looks a little like, "It's a Coke can. It's red. It's aluminum. Cylindrical. 12 fluid ounces. White script letters."

So far, so good. But not everyone stops at red aluminum.

Conley: But you guys have things like "diabetes" on your list. And "Christmas time" and "polar bears" and "you mix it with rum and it's awesome." Right? Is anybody willing to just read their list? Shout it out real fast?

Conley: Yeah, sugar, energy, capitalism and USA. We're all looking at the exact same thing and I say, "Tell me about this," and we go off in different directions.

When you work closely with someone, it's critical to understand that you might be looking at the same thing but seeing it completely differently. That's an upside of personality tests. They can help you see your blind spots. But they have a downside too.

Merve: There's something very comforting, I think, about saying, "I am an extravert, I am a thinker." I think it's tremendously seductive because it gives you such an easy language for self-definition and by extension for self-cultivation.

This is Merve Emre, an English professor at McGill University in Montreal. She's writing a book about personality and she finds that for some people, discovering their traits can be like a spiritual awakening. Why? Why are people so attached to it to the point of almost religious zeal?

Merve: I think you're not wrong at all to draw the parallel between religion and types, technique of self, or language of self. And I think it's really the simplicity of it, the promise of taking human relationships and human encounters that are so fraught and boiling it down to something as easy as, "I am something and you are something else and that's why we interact the way that we do. I don't think we should underestimate the power that has over people's sense of self.

At the beginning of her career, Merve had to take a personality test.

Merve: There was a woman who came in and debriefed us on what our results were, and after that at work, our type was often used to try to anticipate how we might function in certain group settings. But I was really excited by it and I remember going up to the woman who had debriefed us afterwards and talking to her a little bit more about it. And she said, "You know, you're the real sort of CEO type. I see great things in your future."

Adam: Fortune-teller!

Merve: Right, right, I mean, yes, everything but the orb.

A personality test doesn't explain why you are the way you are. It just describes what your traits are. You want to know your traits so you can work better with others, but there are times when your success and your happiness depends on stretching beyond your traits. More on that after the break.

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When I was in college, my roommate tried to talk me into taking a class on personality. I said it was a waste of time. I wasn't interested in studying why people are stuck the way they are. I care about how psychology can improve people's lives.

Brian: Oh, it makes me giddy.

And so does this guy. Brian Little is a wildly popular personality psychology professor, now at the University of Cambridge. I ended up taking his class after all and he was so compelling that I decided to become a psychologist too.

Brian: The study of personality helps bring together two passions of mine from the very beginning, one with the sciences and the other the arts and humanities. And to be able to study neurons and narratives in the morning and the afternoon to me was quite intoxicating.

Neurons and narratives, the biological stuff and the stories we tell ourselves, they both influence our personality. But so does the situation we're in. Studies have shown that personality, at least for some of us, shifts depending on the circumstance. For some people, being adaptable is one of their traits. It's called self-monitoring.

Brian: High self-monitors are able to flex themselves to the demands of the situation. When they're at a funeral, they act funereal. When they're at a party, they act party. They're different people in different situations, what I sometimes call stand-up chameleons. They change color to suit the context.

A low self-monitor is the opposite.

Brian: He knows what he wants, he knows what he feels and he isn't going to bend himself to the situation if it calls for different behavior. Why should he?

It's not just at parties. Self-monitoring can affect every part of our lives.

Brian: High self-monitors, when they eat steak, will taste it first to see what it's like before putting salt on. Whereas low self-monitors, they know, they like salt, they don't like salt and they go ahead and they do whatever they feel without testing it out first.

Adam: I guess the first thing that I was puzzled by in that study was that people put salt on steak, which was new to me, but I think one of the first things that self-monitoring did for me was it opened up this idea that maybe my personality isn't fixed. If I discover that I have a set of personality traits, like I'm an introvert, or I'm highly agreeable, am I stuck with those traits?

Brian: No. To simply say I'm an introvert or I'm agreeable misses the fact that in many situations you may not be. I think that people have to be careful that once they diagnose themselves or something like that, that they don't see it as something from which they can't escape. We have far more degrees of freedom to shape our lives than those strong "trait is your destiny" positions would encourage us to believe. I think there are fates beyond traits.

In the workplace, the evidence shows that high self-monitors are more effective on average. They get higher performance reviews and get promoted more often. They're better at getting ahead and getting along. The time they spend adapting allows them to overcome obstacles and obstinate people. Self-monitoring is all about assessing the situation and adapting, and the good news is that many of us underestimate our adaptability. Remember Susan Cain, who wrote the book "Quiet"?

Susan: Hi, my name is Susan and I'm an introvert. When I was in 8th grade, we were studying "Macbeth." I don't think the teacher knew that I was kind of shy. She called me up to the front of the room to improvise a scene where I was going to play Lady Macbeth and my friend Rob was going to play Macbeth. And that was the kind of thing that really triggered my shyness, and so I stood up in front of the room and couldn't say a word, couldn't think, and so I just stood there gaping, and then a minute later just sat back down and that was that, and I just felt incredibly ashamed and humiliated by this. And after that my fear of public speaking was intensified really for the next few decades.

Earlier, Susan mentioned that introverts aren't antisocial, they're differently social. Psychologists tested this by texting people throughout the day to ask them how they were feeling at that moment and what they were doing. It turned out that everyone was more energized during their more social moments, even the introverts. Introverts just get overloaded more easily. Bright lights are brighter, loud sounds are louder and loud people are a lot more annoying. Overload was a big concern for Susan, because when she finished writing her book, she knew she would have to overcome her middle school fear of talking in front of big groups.

Susan: When you have a fear-inducing or horrifying thing happen to you, it gets encoded into your amygdala in your brain, and so for the rest of your life, every time you encounter a situation like that, your amygdala is sending you the signal, "Get the hell out of here." So I set out on what I called my year of speaking dangerously. And I was drawing on what I knew from the psychological research, which is if you're afraid of anything, the thing to do is to expose yourself to the thing you fear in very small and manageable doses. I remember feeling incredibly raw and exposed, and it was just incredibly unnatural.

Adam: So she had to figure out how to adapt. She had gotten to know Brian Little during her deep dive into the science of introversion. She ended up drawing on his theory of acting out of character.

Brian: Acting out of character is where you engage in action that runs counter to your disposition, and I think there are many reasons why we do that, but the two that are most prevalent, I believe, are that we do it out of professionalism and we do it out of love. So it's a call to stand up. Lean in. Be what you may be afraid to admit could be disingenuous but isn't disingenuous.

Acting out of character often feels inauthentic, but that feeling doesn't hold you back when you're pursuing a passion.

Susan: If I do get butterflies, let's say, before I speak, what I will always tell myself is, OK, there's at least one person in this audience who has a child who is suffering because their introversion is misunderstood, or who has a marriage that's not doing as well as it could because they don't understand the differences between their temperaments, and if I can reach just one person and make that life better, then it's worth all the butterflies in the world. We'll all do almost anything for our passions. Right? Whether they're other people or ideas or whatever, it's almost the definition of a passion, that you're so consumed by it and you love it so much, you'll do almost anything in its service, including taking the stage, which now, by the way, I do all the time and I don't even think twice about it.

Adam: Are you just a raging extravert now?

Susan: Oh God, no, not at all. Still on any given day, I would so much rather be in my office or in a cafe with my laptop sitting around thinking about ideas or listening to great music. That's really my sweet spot.

For Susan, that sweet spot is way over on the introverted end of the spectrum. In the US, about a quarter of the population is the opposite, on the extraverted end, which is where about half of all leaders and managers are.

But many people are somewhere in the middle. They're ambiverts, equally comfortable being the center of attention and being in the background. I've found that ambiverts actually make more effective leaders and more productive salespeople. They strike a balance of talking and listening.

Adapting is easy when you're in the middle on a trait. It takes more work if you're on the extreme, like Susan. The goal is not to change your personality. It's to expand your comfort zone. And that means sometimes you need to recharge. Brian Little encourages us all to find our restorative niches, places you can go or projects you can do to reorient. For Susan, it's sitting in a coffee shop or listening to music, so she works well with people who give her that space.

Susan: That's what coworkers should be doing with each other, right? It should be that everybody understands who the other is, you can kind of joke around about it and accommodate each other, and then it all becomes no big deal. And that way everybody's getting their restorative niches, because I think we'll gladly grant each other those niches once we understand why they're needed.

So how can you make that happen in your job? As weird as it might sound, it can actually help to talk about personality with your colleagues. To find out how to have that conversation, I went back to Bain, the management consulting firm with the Coke can exercise. They have a creative way of making personality useful when a team comes together.

Or: We are doing a new project every few months with a new team and so the ability to get a new team up to speed very quickly and kind of get over the initial hurdles of working styles is extremely important.

Or Skolnik is a principal at Bain. When he kicks off a new project, he gives everyone a sheet of paper.

Or: Just a one-page overview of working with me, and actually it's written by people who have formerly worked with me.

He asks his colleagues to describe his personality and the most effective ways to work with him. Think of it as an operating manual, kind of like the one in the glove compartment of your car—only for a human instead.

Or: And pretty much everyone at least has something that they've written to say, "Here is my preferences, what I do well, what I don't do well, what I'm working on, just so you know when you start working with me.

Adam: I think it's brilliant to do that and I'm kind of stunned that every manager on earth doesn't do it. Those are things you would learn in six months of working with you anyway. Why would I not want to know them on day one? Do you ever see things on there that you don't like?

Or: I do.

Adam: And what do you do? Are you like, "Nah, I'm going to edit that out," or what?

Or: No. The truth is something I do that might be annoying to one team member is actually the best part about working with me to another team member. So I think, again, it's all about just saying, let's have a conversation about it to figure out how we can be most productive.

We can all have that discussion, not just to accelerate collaboration in new teams but to understand our current teams better. But if you're not aware that your traits are flexible, they can become shackles. So often, we chain ourselves to who we were at summer camp or how we failed in middle school. I think personality should be more of an anchor. It gives you the freedom to pursue new possibilities without drifting too far away from your place. Your personality matters, but your ability to adapt matters more. Who you become is not about the traits you have. It's about what you decide to do with them.

WorkLife is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media and Pineapple Street Media. Our team includes Colin Helms, Gretta Cohn, Gabrielle Lewis, Angela Cheng and Janet Lee. This episode was produced by Dan O’Donnell with help from Julia Alsop. Our show is mixed by David Herman with help from Dan Dzula. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu.

WorkLife is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media and Pineapple Street Media. Our team includes Colin Helms, Gretta Cohn, Gabrielle Lewis, Angela Cheng and Janet Lee. This episode was produced by Dan O'Donnell with help from Julia Alsop. Our show is mixed by David Herman with help from Dan Dzula. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu.

Special thanks to our sponsors: Warby Parker, Accenture, Bonobos, and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Next time on WorkLife, astronauts on the International Space Station. If they want to survive, they have to build trust.

Paolo: They're asking me all these things. How do you work in a stressful environment? How do you behave? Risk management and all these things. And I'm like, "What the hell do I know, I'm just an engineer."

That's next time on WorkLife. Thanks for listening. If you liked what you heard, rate and review the show. It helps people find us. See you next week!

Adam: You've known me for almost half my life now. What do you know about my personality that I am totally oblivious to?

Brian: Nothing, Adam. You're perfect and you know it. This is Brian Little signing off and thank you.

WORKLIFE SEASON 1

1.    How to love criticism. February 28, 2018. Transcript

2.    The Daily Show’s secret to creativity. March 7, 2018. Transcript

3.    The problem with all-stars. March 14, 2018. Transcript

4.    Your hidden personality. March 21, 2018. Transcript

5.    How to trust people you don’t like. March 28, 2018. Transcript

6.    Faking your emotions at work. April 4, 2018.

7.    A world without bosses. April 11, 2018.

8.    When work takes over your life. April 18, 2018.

9.    #MeToo with Ashley Judd, Ronan Farrow, and Tarana Burke. Bonus: April 25, 2018.

10.   A debate with Malcolm Gladwell. Bonus: May 10, 2018.

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. What are your core personality traits?

2. When have you acted out of character, and what motivated you to do it?

3. What have you learned about finding a balance between what’s authentic and what’s effective?

4. What can you do to better understand the personalities in your team—and help them understand yours? Have you ever tried explaining your personality to your colleagues? How did it go?

5. When you’ve worked with colleagues who have very different personality traits, how have you adapted? How have they accommodated your traits?

6. If you were to write an operating manual for how to work with you, what would you put in it?

7. If you asked your colleagues to write an operating manual for working with you, what do you think they would say?

8. Does your organization tend to favor or reward particular personality traits? How can you help people recognize the value in a diverse range of traits?

9. What steps can your workplace take to make sure it’s not only extraverts who land in leadership roles?

10. What are your restorative niches—the places, people, and projects that help you recharge and reconnect with your personality?