Recognizing Personality Types : Part 2

The Productive Narcissist: The Promise and Peril of Visionary Leadership
by Michael Maccoby, Ph.D.

(Page 2 of 2)

This is the kind of result I've seen in most of the people I've counseled. A psychoanalytic understanding of personality type brings something that was only dimly seen into sharp focus. Many of my clients have moments of "aha," when they recognize a pattern or dynamic. Then they don't have to be told how to react to or deal with people; it becomes obvious. I'm confident about the usefulness and importance of personality types because I have seen case after case when a know-it-all CEO starts to listen, when a needy and dependent human resource manager starts to stand up for himself, when a consultant who always checks the way the wind is blowing challenges the client - when certain personalities take the best of what their type has to offer and become more productive. These are the moments when a client realizes that he can change more than his behavior - that his new knowledge about personality can change his entire way of dealing with life.

When I began my psychoanalytic career in 1961, I was a skeptic about personality type, even with my academic background in Freudian psychology. It was true that I could spot temperamental differences, how some people could be called outgoing and others shy, or how typical pathologies, such as obsessive worrying, were woven into the fabric of certain people's character. But I thought that "typing" people, breaking the seemingly limitless personalities into rigid and narrowly defined categories, stripped human beings of their individuality, took away the qualities that made them irreducibly, ineffably, them. It wasn't until I worked with the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, whose books Escape from Freedom and Man for Himself dealt with personality types, that I began to challenge my own thinking. Fromm and I had long discussions about personality types - Fromm speaking in favor of them, I against. No matter how much he tried to persuade me of the importance of personality type, I remained unconvinced, unwilling to see personality types as anything but robotic categories that deprived people of the freedom to choose who and what they wanted to be. While late-night conversations and theorizing didn't sway me, my fieldwork, the systematic interviews that I helped conduct with 850 people in a Mexican village, did.

Fromm sent me out with a questionnaire that asked people what they most liked and disliked about their work, their concept of love, how they thought a father and a mother should experience love, the people they most admired and why. I also asked them to describe their dreams, their children, and what they thought about disobedience or stealing. I spent about two hours with each person, and once the people believed I was really interested in understanding them, they opened up. Most of them had never considered these questions, but once they did, they started to learn about themselves and their values. It was only against the background of the extensive interviews that I saw distinct patterns of behavior emerge, take shape. I also observed how children were raised and began to understand why different types develop early in a child's life. It took observing, questioning, and talking to many people who lived and worked and grew up in almost exactly the same environment for me to see that different types continually, habitually react in similar ways, especially to the challenges of work and social relationships. I realized that my old way of thinking was akin to calling every single color simply "color," rather than recognizing the distinctive hues of blue, red, and yellow. The comparison to color is not chosen lightly, because while people, like colors, are often a mix of different types, one usually predominates.

In my consulting work, I've found that the best way to illustrate to clients that personality type actually exists is for them to determine their own personality types with the questionnaire on page 26. I've used this questionnaire with executives to begin a conversation about how personality plays out in the workplace and influences leadership. Toward the same end, I encourage you to complete the questionnaire to determine your own type. To get the most out of this questionnaire, try to put aside your ideas about the categories or behaviors that you usually label successful or good or desirable. Think carefully about each question, and respond in a way that reflects how you, not some idealized version of you, actually behave. This is by no means easy. As a psychoanalyst, I'm a participant in people's struggle to see themselves as they really are. Those who are better equipped usually have spent some time and work on self-reflection and honesty, and the questionnaire is meant to aid that process. The description of personality types that I present later in the book will allow you to interpret the results.

That said, it's still hard to see yourself as others do. Even if you're as honest as possible, your coworkers or colleagues might have other ideas about you. The way to get around this is to complete the questionnaire first, then ask a colleague or friend whom you trust to complete it "for you" - hat is, to answer the questions as they see you. You can then compare the results and see exactly where you may be lacking in self-knowledge, which will help you to arrive at an honest appraisal of your behavior and its strong and weak points. People who do this are often surprised by the results, motivated to learn more about themselves, and interested in how they can become more productive. Helping people to understand themselves and become more productive has been my professional purpose throughout my career: working as a child therapist in Boston, coaching teenage boys in a Mexican village, practicing as a psychoanalyst in Mexico City and Washington, D.C., and finally working with all levels within organizations, from factory workers and telephone operators to middle managers and CEOs. In every case, the people who were open to seeing themselves clearly, including their defects, were best able to free themselves from their hard-wired past and develop and grow into the people they wanted to be, to determine their future. A goal of this book is to facilitate your quest for self-knowledge as well as your understanding of the people you work with.

A note on the methodology: The questionnaire breaks personality or character into four types that I've adapted from the work of Sigmund Freud and Erich Fromm. The questions are based on hundreds of interviews I've conducted with managers in more than twenty countries, particularly in my work with Hewlett-Packard, IBM, AT&T, Asea Brown Boveri (ABB), and Volvo, as well as professional managers in health care, the federal government, and local law enforcement. The evaluation of the responses is in the appendix, and more complete descriptions of each type are laid out in the next chapter.

Copyright © 2003 by Michael Maccoby.

About the Author

Michael Maccoby, PH.D., is president of the Maccoby Group and director of the Project on Technology, Work, and Character, a nonprofit research center. A psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and consultant, Dr. Maccoby has advised leaders at numerous corporations, from AT&T to Volvo, as well as at institutions such as the World Bank. From 1970 to 1990, he led a research program on leadership and work at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of the bestseller The Gamesman and author or coauthor of seven other books, most recently Why Work? Motivating the New Workforce. He lives in Washington, D.C.