In the workplace - Working Together - PART II

Mapping the Mind - Rita Carter 2010

In the workplace
Working Together
PART II

Traditional employment selection forces people to present a narrow slice of their potential personality range at the outset. Simply by defining the employee by a particular type of skill: manager, artist, engineer, designer or whatever, most workplaces put a huge amount of their employees’ potential out of bounds from day one. Then, once established in a particular job, employees are generally expected to do just the one thing they have been hired for. If they extend their remit there is a risk that other workers, and sometimes their managers too, will be put out. Colleagues may feel that the person who is straying from their job description is challenging them for their own job, seeking undeserved recognition, or just trespassing. Bosses may feel threatened as well — either because they too fear for their own position or feel that keeping people in well-defined boxes gives them power over the captives.

The result of this is that work is often less satisfying for those doing it than it would be if it allowed them to use more than one of their personalities. Employers, too, lose out by failing to tap into a huge reservoir of largely hidden abilities within their workforce. The constraints may even cause some employees’ minor personalities to close down or die off, taking with them their potential abilities. Minors which are deprived of life may become wreckers, forever usurping the Major’s efforts as well as those of people outside the individual. Worse, they may become silent but powerful critics, making themselves known only as small black holes of negativity.

Providing they are not completely mismatched to their work, people with strong Major personalities tend to do well in traditionally segmented workplaces — the sort where engineers do engineering, designers design and tea-makers make tea. Nevertheless, even the most integrated person is likely to have peripheral interests and talents, some of which could usefully be imported into the work environment. I know a plumber, for example, who, in his spare time, makes tiny train-set components for his children, who have an elaborate toy railway system in their attic. His day job makes no use at all of the delicate touch he has developed for working in miniature, and his skill came to light only when he saw me trying, unsuccessfully, to mend a piece of shattered jewellery and offered to help. A plumber would be the last person I would have thought of asking to do such a pernickety bit of manipulation, but it turned out that he had precisely the talent needed for the job. How many ’extra’ abilities of this sort might there be in a roomful of employees? And how might a company find out about them and encourage their use?

Given the near-infinite variety of work requirements, types of profession, companies and management structures it is impractical to try to answer that question here. It seems likely, though, that the recognition of multiplicity and the incorporation of diverse personalities could benefit every workplace, whether it be the boardroom of a vast multinational corporation or a cluttered kitchen table.

More broadly, I hope this book has convinced you that recognising and learning to know, understand and deal with the personalities that make up our selves can help us function to our fullest capacity in every endeavour. I have tried to show that what has conventionally been regarded as a potentially harmful pathology is actually a sign of inner diversity created by our species’ wonderful ability to adapt to changing circumstances. In our quick-changing and uncertain world, the essential multiplicity of the human mind will I hope, come to be seen as a ubiquitous and precious faculty rather than a curious and rare eccentricity.