Opposites Attract
- roamcare
- 1 hour ago
- 3 min read
Every now and then you find something that everybody in the business world does that would work great in our personal lives, yet nobody seems to have made the connection. Or perhaps they have but have not figured out how to get the world’s population into one room to take a test.
We are talking about “personality tests.” We thought about this after Michael was at a conference recently. Upon his return was the debrief or what new and exciting, and old and trite topics and discussions were held (because let’s face it, every meeting has some of each). After going through the agenda, he mentioned:
”Oh, and we did a DISC assessment again.”
“Really? Did you get the same results as the last time.”
“Almost!”
Personality tests are all the rage at business conferences. Everyone wants to know how one relates to and with their coworkers. Go to enough business conferences and you will have been exposed to the DISC assessment, the MBTI or Jung assessment, an Enneagram test, gifts and talents assessments, or even “The World’s Quickest Personality Test” if your conference is pressed for time.
They all compare things like how well you organize activities or if you can operate an electric drill, do you focus on results or feelings, and can you solve scientific equations. After you answer 30 or 40 questions, you add up, or subtract from, or graph out your answers. Magically the assessment will identity your dominant personality. And perhaps a secondary personality – or two or three. Depending on the test, it will plop you into one or more of 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, or 16 personality buckets.
Clearly personality assessment is not an exact science. But the interesting thing is, all of them are weird, all of them are pretentious, yet all of them are generally accurate, and all of them recognize that groups of people of competing personalities typically perform better than groups of similar people.
It doesn’t matter what the originator calls their personality categories, but it does matter that they all have opposing styles. Participants almost never fall completely into a single category. And as Michael demonstrated, testers can almost never reproduce the same results. People are complex, and we learn and grow as we go through life.
Whatever you want to call them, opposites do better than similars. You cannot have a successful office if all of the employees are dominant. Every day will end in a stand off. Or if all of the team members are sociable. Then likely no work will get down. If everyone is too congenial, no one will ever challenge their abilities or push them to do better. But then if everyone is too approachable, no one will defend their position or performance.
We need to surround ourselves with thinkers and doers, with those who can intimate a solution and those who can prove the problem is answerable. We need the skeptics as much as we need our cheerleaders.
Somehow, the best bosses surround themselves with the right variety of people. Why don’t we do that in our personal lives?
We aren’t saying you should find a personality test and have your family members take it with you. And you probably would get dirty looks if you took one to your church group, card club, exercise class, or dinner parties. Maybe though, maybe it would be worth the effort to find that one person at church, or the gym, or even the local tavern who you don’t often talk to or partner with and strike up a new acquaintance. Or when you are scrolling through social media, stop on a post that doesn’t “fit” your ideas and see what other people think.
Opposites do attract. We find them in nature and in our lives. Only opposite magnetic poles will attract and attach to each other. Air masses naturally move from high to low pressure areas. Sometimes it gets complicated. In generating electricity and chemical experiments, opposites may facilitate the end result, but care must be taken to maintain safety.
With people we believe we benefit most when we surround ourselves with diverse individuals and the variety of thoughts, cultures, and practices to grow and evolve as individuals. Likewise, differences in personalities can result in excitement and balance in a relationship.
Communication, and a willingness to understand and appreciate each other are ideals that can bind opposite or unlike persons as firmly as a magnet holds a favorite picture to the front of a refrigerator. And it can bring just as much happiness too.
