WorkLife with Adam Grant: Your Hidden Personality

Hey, everyone. Molly here. When I agreed to come on as the new host of WorkLife, I was terrified. But I was also excited to learn from our amazing guests and to share insights that could help all of you, our listeners. One of my favorite takeaways so far came from Kaya Henderson, an iconic leader who told me that leadership is really all about listening and co-creating success with your community. So I have a request for you. Please fill out the WorkLife audience survey. It's quick, it's easy, and it's linked in the description for this week's episode. And it'll help us all make this show the best it can be. Thanks for listening to WorkLife. This episode is sponsored by PerplexityAI. How much of your workday actually goes towards making decisions? Now, how much goes towards just finding the information you need to make them? 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A few months ago, I heard a story so crazy that I had to call the source directly to hear it for myself. Her name is Marie Louise. She's a lawyer. So to set the stage, I was working in the capacity as a general counsel for a multinational company and we had just been acquired. They were merging with another firm so she was already nervous. Who are they going to keep? Who would get fired? There was a big executive retreat to figure it out. Right before the retreat, everyone I'm Marie Louise's team was asked to take a personality test. She showed up for the meeting and the new bosses. You know, they wanted to broadcast who was who and they made t-shirts with their personality type 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. Don't worry, you won't be fired but you will 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 Work Life, 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 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. Okay, 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. Have friendly, assertive, hard working, 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 the major personality traits, it's the most widely studied and the most visible. We can see signs of it at an early age. I can remember thinking about this stuff when I was four years old at a day camp. Meet Susan Cain. And I remember us all being gathered around to sing that song if you're happy. And you know, 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. I don't know why they're making us sing this song. It feels 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. I felt like I was working on a kind of odd project that was hard to talk about at dinner parties. 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, extroversion has roots in your physiology, your brain chemistry. 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 that 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 play group of kids who they've never seen before, you know, they're more likely to react to that scenario by freezing up and letting their nervous system settle down as they take 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. I took the test and I felt like, you know, I felt like the scale has had fallen for my eyes. It was such a moment of epiphany. But after that, every time a friend would come over to my house, you know, the first thing they had to do was take the test and then we would sit around and talk about it. And the test was-- Wait, backup. You invite the friends over to take to take personality tests? Well, I remember. And then talk about your results? Well, I don't know. I mean, they were good friends, you know? And what was it about the sort of your introversion, extraversion results in particular that resonated with you? 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, you know, 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 to doing it. And then I was spending the other half, sitting at boardroom tables, you know, often was 10, 15 people assembled around the table. And they were often kind of intimidating types, feeling the sense of having to overcome and innate discomfort. And I hadn't ever been able to put my finger on what explains that until I came across this language. Most people think about introversion, extroversion, as where you get your energy. Like extroverts get it from people, introverts get it from being alone. But when Susan studied the science, she learned that wasn't quite right. Everybody, whether you're an introvert or an extrovert, draws energy from other people. And I think that we don't make enough distinction between how many people and in what kind of a setting. Yeah. There ends up being this idea of introverts or anti-social. And I always say, it's not that. It's just differently social. When you meet someone new, introversion, extroversion is often the very first thing you notice. You can even pick up clues in a split second before they've set a word. Hey, Allison? Yeah. Allison is my wife. What are you doing? Googling you. What'd you find? Just you in the middle of a speech or with your mouth hanging. It's always interesting to see how the people close as to you perceive your personality. Early on, Allison saw me a little differently than she does now. When you first met me, did you think I was an introvert or an extrovert? An extrovert. Why? Because you're loud and like physically loud. What are you talking about? Uncoordinated and like everything you do is. Uncoordinated. I was a junior Olympic springboard diver. That's all about coordination. No, that's totally different. Just because you can do a summer salt in the air doesn't mean you can quietly open the refrigerator. Everything you do is noisy. Why do you think that makes me an extrovert, though? Because no introvert could ever live with themselves being that noisy. That's true. So I believe you that I'm noisy. But I don't think that makes me an extrovert. I think if I were really an extrovert, you'd be complaining about all the wild parties that I was throwing. Well, I mean, that may be true, but you do like more outgoing things than I do. That's because you're more introverted than I. 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 company's 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. My name is Sierra Stewart. Sierra is a team leader at Bain. I'm here in Cape Cod acting as a trainer at our associate consultant training session. I've got a team of about 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 and personality type to kind of bubble to the surface pretty quickly. The mismatch and 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. The way that we stuff 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. 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 work 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. How you are energized. How you see the world in process information. How you make decisions. And last but not least, your lifestyle or work style. All right, 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. 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. 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. Some of you in the room probably have a list that looks a little like it's a Coke can. So you're like, it's red. It's aluminum. It's cylindrical. 12 fluid ounces. White script letters. So far so good. But not everyone stops at red aluminum. But you guys have things like diabetes on your list. And Christmas time and polar bears. And you mix it with ROM and it's awesome. Right? Can we hear, is anybody willing to just read their list, shout it out real fast? Yeah, sugar, energy, capitalism in 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. There's something very comforting I think about saying, I am an extrovert. 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 Mervei 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, you know, almost religious zeal? I think you're not wrong at all to draw the parallel between between religion and 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 that has over people's sense of self. At the beginning of her career, Mervei had to take a personality test. 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. 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, how you're the real sort of CEO type, I see great things in your future. And, you know, right, right, right. I mean, yes, yes, yes, everything but the orb. 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. This is going to be a different kind of ad. I've played a personal role in selecting the sponsors for this podcast because they all have interesting cultures of their own. Today, we're going inside the workplace at Warby Parker. Many companies claim to have cultures of learning. But Warby Parker takes that to a whole new level. People are hungry and they want to look for what's next for themselves. At Warby Parker, they believe everyone is capable of mastering more than one role. And they encourage people to to reinvent themselves with news. skills. They call the philosophy "learn, grow, repeat." You can see it all over the company. The my favorite example is the story of Lawn and Mary. I'm Lawn Binder. I'm the Chief Technology Officer at Warby Parker. I've been here just about six years. My name's Mary Nagel, and I started initially as the Executive Associate for Technology and Finance. She joined, actually, as my assistant. It was mainly administrative duties, not much in the weeds with technology. And she was great at her job. But every month, Lawn and Mary would talk about what she wanted to do with her career. Mary always had an analytical mind. She loved puzzles, solving things. And then one day, Lawn came to her with a problem. I had an app that I was working on, and I needed somebody to help me with some bugs that were coming up in the app. I think he knew that I'd shown some interest in just, like, I guess, curiosity in what the engineers did for a living. And so I turned to Mary and I said, "Do you want to do it?" with, like, a shrug. And I was like, "Actually, yeah, I think that's something I'd be really interested in taking on." And she did amazing. And for the technical folks in the audience, she started unrolling a loop. It took me a very long time, but I eventually was able to fix the bug, get the application working. She just figured it out. I remember just feeling this huge sense of accomplishment. She'd also developed a new passion, which is a big priority at Werby Parker. So Lawn didn't say, "Thanks, Mary. You can go back to your Executive Assistant role now." Instead, she turned to her and asked, "Have you ever considered becoming a software engineer?" and my answer was yes. And Werby also created a path for her to get there, which they do across the whole company. Mary had the time, space, and resources to pursue her dream. Now two years later, Mary has gone from being an Executive Assistant to a full software engineer. I love it. It's like I get to go and work and solve a puzzle every single day. So at Werby Parker, there's no telling just how far Mary will go. And how long will it be until Mary has your job? Probably another month. He knows I'm coming for him. Mary isn't alone. Lawn's next Executive Assistant went on to become a Technical Product Manager, and many other Warby employees have made leaps into new roles too. I'd love to see that happen in every company. Instead of being kept in a box, tethered to a job title, people are encouraged to explore and empowered to advance. Curiosity is a core value at Werby Parker. And their frames are so fashionable that I actually know people who wear them even though they don't need glasses. Looking for somewhere to start? Their home trion program lets you select five frames to test out free for five days. If you don't like them, you can send them back. Try it today at werbyparker.com/ted. 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. It wasn't interested in studying why people are stuck the way they are. I care about how psychology can improve people's lives. 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. The study of personality helps bring together two passions of mind from the very beginning. One with the sciences and the other with the arts and humanities. And to be able to study neurons and narratives in the morning and the afternoon, to me was quite intoxicating. One's the 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. High self-monitors are able to flex themselves to the demands of the situation when they're at a funeral. They act funerial when they're at a party. They act party. There are 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. 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. 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. I guess the first thing that I was puzzled by in that study was that people put salt on steak, which was near to me. One of the first things that self-monitoring did for me was that 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? No. To simply say I'm an introvert or I'm agreeable, this is the fact that in many situations you may not be, I think that people have to be careful that once they've diagnosed 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 traits as 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 Kane who wrote the book Quiet? Hi, my name is Susan and I'm an introvert. When I was in eighth 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. That was the kind of thing that really triggered my shyness. So I stood up in front of the room and couldn't say a word, couldn't think. So I just stood there gaping. Then a minute later, I sat back down and that was that. I just felt incredibly ashamed and humiliated by this. After that, my fear of public speaking was intensified really for the next few decades. Earlier, Susan mentioned that introverts are an anti-social. 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. When you have a fear inducing or horrifying thing happened to you. It gets encoded into your amygdala and 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 Europe 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 that you fear in very small and manageable doses. I remember feeling incredibly raw and exposed and it was just incredibly unnatural. 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. Acting out of characters 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 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, isn't disingenuous. Acting out of character often feels inauthentic. But that feeling doesn't hold you back when you're pursuing a passion. You know, if I do get butterflies, let's say before I speak, what I will always tell myself is, okay, there's at least one person in this audience who has a child who's 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 where all the better flies in the world. Like, will I do almost anything for you? our passions, whether there are 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. Are you just a raging extravert now? Oh God, no, no, no, not at all. And 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 or like that, you know, 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 found that ambiverts actually make more effective leaders and more productive sales people. 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. That's what co-workers should be doing with each other, right? Like it should be 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 is 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 Bane. The management consulting firm with the co-can exercise. They have a creative way of making personality useful when a team comes together. 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 Bane. When he kicks off a new project, he gives everyone a sheet of paper, just a one-page overview of working with me, and actually it's written by people who have formerly worked with me. He has 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. And pretty much everyone now at least has something that they've written to say, sort of here is my preferences, here's what I do well, what I don't do well, what I'm working on to see you know when you when you start working with me. I think it's brilliant to do that and I'm kind of stunned that every manager on earth doesn't do it. Yeah, it's like those are the things you would learn in six months of working with you. Absolutely. Why would I not want to know that my day one? Do you ever see things on there that you don't like about yourself? I do. And what do you do? Like are you like, yeah, I'm going to edit that out or what? 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, you know, 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. Work life is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by Ted with transmitter media and pineapple street media. Our team includes Colin Helms, Greta Cohn, Gabrielle Lewis, Angela Chang, and Janet Lee. This episode was produced by Dan O'Donnell with help from Julia Alsob. Our show is mixed by David Herman with help from Dan de Zula, original music by Han Stale Sue. Special thanks to our sponsors, Warby Parker, Accenture, Benobos, and JP Morgan Chase. On April 24th, we're taping an episode of Work Life in New York at the 92nd Street Y. I'll be on stage with Malcolm Gladwell for a fireside chat about all things work. And we're going to answer questions from you. If there's something you're curious about, you can submit a question by email or voicemail. Check out the show description for details. Next time on Work Life, astronauts on the International Space Station. If they want to survive, they have to build trust. They ask me all these things, you know, how do we work in stressful environment? How do you behave, you know, risk management and all these things? And I like, what the hell do I know? I'm just an engineer. That's next time on Work Life. Thanks for listening. If you liked what you heard, rate and review the show. It helps people find us. See you next week. You've known me for almost half my life now. What do you know about my personality that I am totally oblivious to? Nothing, Adam. You're perfect and you know it. This is Brian Little, signing off and thank you. Oh, and further record, I'm not a fan of the Myers Brakes. It suffers from so many problems that a few years ago, I actually wrote a public breakup letter. MBTI, if you want me back, you need to change too. If you're looking for a more scientifically rigorous option, try the-- This episode is brought to you by Founder's mentality, a podcast in partnership with Bain and Company. If you listen to Work Life for conversations about leadership, navigating change and unlocking innovation, I have another show for your rotation. It's called Founder's mentality, the CEO's sessions. It gets into the real decisions behind some of today's leading executives and companies. Not just what a CEO should do, but who a CEO has to become to do it. In their recent episode with Lara Borough, Group CEO of the Economist Group, you hear how she walked into a divided organization and a transformation project that had already cost the company millions and made the call to scrap it. Instead, she pushed for a new approach, one that could fund itself and bring the business back together. She and host Jimmy Allen break down that choice, how customer data reshaped the company's priorities, and how the economist is thinking about transformation now in the age of AI. Follow Founder's mentality, the CEO's sessions, from Bain and Company, wherever you get your podcasts. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. 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