Are You Gambling Your Company's Future

Hey everyone, this is Steve Shapiro and welcome to the Personality Poker Podcast. Here we'll be talking about personalities, personality styles. We'll be talking about innovation. We'll be talking about collaboration. We talk about how do you play to your strong suit, how do you play with a full deck, and how do you make sure you're dealing out the work in a way that's going to get the greatest results.

And today we're going to do chapter.

One from the Personality Poker book again. This book was written in 2010, published originally by Portfolio Penguin. I got the rights back to it, but instead of going into a studio.

What you're going to hear is an.

AI generated version of it. So I hope you enjoy it.

There'll be flubs.

It's not perfect, but at least you get the content and get to hear it.

Thanks so much.

Part 1 Are you gambling your company's future? Chapter 1 Pregame warmup Thirty years ago, I saw Jack Welch, then CEO of GE, deliver a powerful presentation. At the time, GE was obsessed with cost cutting and efficiency. But eventually they hit a wall. The business was failing. During the speech, Welch said something I remember to this day, for too long we've been squeezing lemons. It's time we started growing lemons. That line stuck with me. You can't cut your way to growth. Innovation is the key. Yet in their obsession with short term efficiency, many organizations slash headcount, gut innovation, and dismantle the very functions that make them resilient. They call it cost cutting, but what they're really doing is self sabotage. They don't just cut fat, they cut muscle.

And the fat that remains isn't on a spreadsheet. It's buried in bloated systems, outdated processes, misaligned priorities and political power plays. It hides in complexity and bureaucracy, quietly draining energy from where it's needed most. The result is a weaker, slower, more fragile organization that can't compete today and won't survive tomorrow. Cutting fat isn't enough. You also need to build strength. And in business, there are two kinds of strength.

Operational muscle. The teams that drive sales, serve customers and keep the lights on.

Innovation, the people who build the future challenge the status quo and solve the problems no one else sees.

When times get tough, most companies tend to double down on their operations. Meanwhile, their innovation muscle atrophies and quietly fades away. They dismantle and weaken the very capabilities that would help them adapt, evolve and stay ahead. They favor efficiency in the moment over relevance in the future, and then wonder why they can't keep up Efficiency without resilience is a death sentence.

When leaders try to get lean, they usually focus on the obvious layoffs, reorganizations and fancy new org charts. But that's not transformation.

That's theater. Personality Poker was built for leaders who.

Are tired of the illusion. It's a game that exposes the invisible.

Forces slowing your business down. The mismatched roles, the misaligned teams, the hidden drag on your performance. It helps you build the right muscle.

Not just for survival, but for long term success.

You don't have to choose between speed and sustainability.

You can move fast and build strength.

You can cut costs without cutting your future. You just have to stop tearing your business apart from the inside. The anatomy of a Smart Organization if you want to build a high performing organization, stop focusing on effort and start focusing on fit. Most companies reward people for powering through tasks. Even when those tasks go against their natural strengths. The result is wasted energy, disengagement and stalled innovation.

The key to real efficiency isn't doing more with less. It's doing less and getting more. When people focus on the work that comes naturally to them, their strong suit, they move faster with less friction and deliver greater impact. It's not about working harder. It's about focusing on what matters most.

Everyone has a unique innovation style. Some generate bold ideas. Others refine and improve. Some bring structure and execution. Others rally the team. When people are aligned with the kind.

Of work they're built for, things click.

Results accelerate. Progress feels effortless.

But most organizations ignore this. They assign work based on availability, not ability. They treat everyone the same. They throw more process at performance gaps instead of asking whether people are even in the right roles to begin with.

The result?

Burnout, bottlenecks and missed opportunities. If your team feels stuck, it's probably not a motivation problem. It's a misalignment problem. When people are forced to operate outside their strengths, everything takes longer and produces less value.

The solution isn't to push harder. It's to get smarter about how work is assigned. When everyone plays to their strong suit, you create a culture where innovation is natural, progress is sustainable, and performance becomes exponential.

Efficient organizations harness the power of different suits. Working with large corporations for nearly 25 years, one of the most valuable things I have learned is that everyone everyone can contribute to the success of his or her company. Everyone has a different style, but we rarely recognize the power of each style and how to capitalize on that individual strength.

In addition to the alignment of styles to goals, you need balance among the styles. Having people in the correct roles is great, but you also need a good complement of those roles. Sadly, most companies are not playing with a full deck. Although homogeneous teams are often more efficient, that is they get things done faster. Having a bunch of yes men working for you is not the answer for long term growth. When people think too much alike, new ideas trickle to a stop. Effectiveness dwindles Although diverse teams usually suffer creative tension, Personality Poker can be used as a powerful tool for conflict resolution. The essence of successful companies then, is the ability to be both efficient and effective. They are able to focus on both production and innovation, and not just on doing things right, but also on doing the right things. Several studies suggest that less diverse teams produce better financial results overall than highly diverse teams.

But to be clear, those studies refer.

To diversity of disciplines, not diversity of innovation styles. These are very different things. A discipline is any area of expertise.

Such as chemical engineering or advertising. You can have an organization that comprises diverse innovation styles while sharing only one discipline. It is this range of innovation styles that leads to systematic growth. On the other hand, although having a diversity of disciplines is also useful for generating breakthrough ideas, it's best to keep this type of diversity outside the organization. More on that in Appendix B. To be aligned and balanced, you first need to recognize the four primary innovation styles they People who prefer facts and.

Principles Spades People who prefer ideas and experiences People who prefer plans and actions Clubs People who prefer people and relationships Hearts let's take a look at an example of innovation styles in action.

Playing with a Full Deck I once worked with a small branding and marketing agency that, although very successful, was having difficulty finding a way to scale and grow the business. The leader was a dynamic, creative woman beloved by employees and clients alike. Over dinner one evening, we played a one on one solitaire version of Personality Poker. She went through each card carefully selecting those that best represented her style, while I observed providing comments and insights when I felt she was not sure of the relevance of a card. In some cases, we had long discussions about examples that demonstrated her style. Throughout the conversation, she balanced her self observations against my point of view. Although she demonstrated particular attributes of each style, in the end the cards revealed her to be a creative person who also enjoyed people and relationships. That is, she was primarily a diamond with a heart secondary While going through the deck, she hesitated at some cards, such as competitive a club card, but overall she realized that her strong preference was for the creative side. All of the other styles she used were learned out of necessity and did not come naturally.

We then discussed how her creative personality style might be what was holding the company back from exponential growth. From my experience, creative individuals are brilliant entrepreneurs. They are great at starting new ventures. They are full of new ideas, but sustained growth requires plans, processes and systems. The traditional creative types typically do not gravitate toward these types of activities. They are attracted to the newness of fresh ideas. An organization will have a problem scaling to any size under the leadership of this type of person. Unless, that is, they are paired with someone who excels at implementation the next day every employee in the company played Personality Poker. As expected, in this highly creative business, there were a lot of diamonds. In fact, 80% of the employees were creative, 15% were relationship oriented, 5% were planners, and no one demonstrated an appetite for facts and data. One of the only Clubs was the CEO's executive coach, someone who was not even involved in the day to day activities of the business. Another was the CEO's executive assistant.

For the CEO, this was a breakthrough moment to grow the business.

She now realized that she would have to create a more balanced team of styles. Above all, facts and data would need more attention moving forward. Although she was good at ensuring that projects adhered to plans and schedules, she learned that she would benefit from bringing.

On people for whom this was their natural strength.

In doing so, she could free up her creative people, including herself, to do what they did best. Although her company's business was creative in nature, it needed to become better at nurturing diverse points of view Personality Poker.

Substyles let's explore the Personality Poker styles a little further. For each of the four styles, there are two low cards and high cards. These loosely correlate to Introversion and extroversion. Lower cards 5 to 9 represent the more inward, introverted version of each style, whereas the high cards 10 to ace represent the more outward extraverted version of each style. In some cases, the differences between the inward style and the outward style can be substantial. The result is the eight styles depicted in the table below. See which one resonates with you. As a self assessment, it is worth noting that the 2, 3 and 4 cards do not represent specific sub styles, but instead indicate the less attractive qualities associated with each suit. This concept is addressed in chapter two.

Suit Low Inward five to nine High Outward ten to Ace Spades to me, knowledge is power. I love to gather and analyze data. I rarely accept things at face value and I prefer having facts and objective proof when making decisions. I could spend hours studying, reading or searching the Internet.

I value being the guru in my area of expertise and I relish the opportunity to impart my knowledge to others. I would make a good professor and enjoy getting into meaningful debates over important ideas. I could spend hours engaging in intellectually stimulating conversations.

Diamonds I consider myself to be a creative individual. I willingly entertain new ideas and am known as someone who thinks differently than others. I have a knack for developing unique, inventive and breakthrough ideas.

I love engaging in new experiences and embarking upon uncharted territory. I prefer variety over routine activities. A motto that fits my philosophy is it's the journey, not the destination.

I am a planner and often feel lost when I do not have a.

Clear direction spelled out.

I am an organizer who likes everything in its place. I am most comfortable when I know how and when things will be done. People consider me disciplined and dependable.

I am focused on the bottom line. I tend to be competitive and people come to me when they want to get things done. I am goal driven and thrive when I am in action. I am motivated by results and am not satisfied unless I achieve my goal. Hearts I am a person who places great value on deep and significant relationships. When it comes to friendships, I cultivate quality over quantity and am willing to do just about anything to support the people who matter most to me. I am a highly social person who enjoys spending my time with a variety of people. I am energized when I am in the presence of others and tend to thrive in the spotlight. Networking with others is one of my innate skills. I feel that strangers are just friends I haven't met yet. The History of Personality Typing the study.

Of personalities is believed to originate with the Greek physician Hippocrates circa 377 BC. Author of the Hippocratic Oath. Hippocrates hypothesized that people could be classified into four basic temperaments or personalities. These temperaments were caused by the four primary body fluids called humors, from the Latin word for blood, sanguis, yellow bile, cholera, black bile, melancholic, melus, black plus colae, bile and phlegm. According to Hippocrates, the balance of humors in the body determined the personality. So if you had more blood than any other liquid, you were thought of as having a sanguine temperament. Later, Galen, the second century AD Greek physiologist, philosopher and writer, built on Hippocrates theories. Melancholics are the thinkers. They have the thoroughness and analytical attributes of spades, combined with some attributes of low inward clubs, such as being orderly and conscientious planners. Galen described them as those who take a long time to make decisions but are good at staying the course once they get going.

Cholerics are doers. They have all of the take charge attitudes of the high outward clubs. Galen described cholerics as those who are quick to respond and could keep the momentum going.

Sanguines are the influencers. They are personable, helpful, enthusiastic optimists who emulate the high outward diamonds combined with high outward hearts. Galen described the sanguins as quick and impulsive, yet having relatively short lived reactions.

Phlegmatics are the relators. They are loyal and supportive team players who get along with virtually everybody. They prefer consistency and routine. In personality poker they would be primarily low hearts. Galen believed that phlegmatics take longer to make decisions that result in short lived responses.

Although our four primary styles are not a perfect match for the four temperaments, you can quickly see the relationship when you take into consideration the sub styles. Over the years, the four Hippocratic temperaments have been refined, expanded and used to create other personality typing tools such as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, MBTI, DieselSC, and dozens of others.

The reason for including this brief history.

Lesson is that it provides a foundation for why personality poker may feel familiar if you have completed other personality profiles in the past.

Personality Testing and Poker Most of us.

Have taken a personality assessment or two at some point in our lives, so you may be wondering what makes this one different.

I address these differences later in this.

Chapter, but for now it's useful to have some background on personality testing in general.

Numerous personality measures are out there, some created by qualified psychologists, some obviously not. Psychologists often create tests to capture as much variation in personality as possible. In other words, they seek to establish how many facets of personality there are to catalog the various ways people may differ from one another. At other times, Research psychologists are interested in very specific, narrow aspects of personality and develop measures accordingly. In any of these cases, the resulting personality tests may be scientifically valid but not necessarily useful or adaptable to the workplace. The big question is, does being typed relate to real world variables such as how well someone fits a particular role or how that person works as part of a team? In addition, personality typing tools that measure a large number of variables may in fact have an air of accuracy when they simply benefit from something called the Barnum Effect. Let me start with an example.

In my work with one organization, I was asked to take a written personality test that was required for all executives in the company. Eight senior leaders took this test, costing the company well over $10,000, not including the time invested by the employees. The test had more than 300 questions and took nearly an hour to complete. By the end, I was exhausted. Afterward, I received a 40 page assessment detailing every aspect of my personality.

Although some of the aspects of the.

Assessment seemed accurate, a large number of points were way off. Others on the team focused on the hits and forgave or didn't notice the misses. By doing so, they ensured that the assessments would seem more accurate than they were.

I'm a bit of a skeptic.

Yes, I choose the skeptical card when playing Personality Poker, so I wasn't willing to dismiss the inaccurate bits.

What occurred among these executives is the.

Phenomenon psychologists call the Barnum Effect, our tendency to focus on the most accurate aspects of characterizations of ourselves. The phenomenon is named after the legendary showman P.T.

Barnum, who believed that a good circus had a little something for everybody.

And with many personality profiles, a little.

Bit of everyone is in every profile.

Horoscopes and palm readings seem accurate mainly because they are cast in such a way that they could apply to almost anyone. Especially if you're willing to get a.

Bit imaginative in your interpretation.

Michael Wiederman, a psychology professor at Columbia College in South Carolina, recreated the Barnum Effect in his class. He had each of his students take a widely used personality test. But beforehand he secretly took the test four times, answering the questions randomly each time. He then printed out the personality profile descriptions of the four randomly taken tests and made copies in the class. Instead of handing the students their actual results, he passed out the randomly generated profiles. Each student was asked to read it to themselves. Then he asked for a show of hands from those who thought what they just read described their personality pretty well. The majority of the class raised their hands. He then had them pass their write up to the left and read a different randomly generated profile. Same vote, same results. He finally passed out their actual profile. The accuracy level was not significantly greater than the randomly generated ones. This is the Barnum effect in action.

With most personality typing tools, you only see the results of your test.

It might be four letters summarizing a combination of 16 different styles. Maybe it is a spider diagram that shows weights across a variety of styles. Or perhaps it's an exhaustive 40 page assessment. Regardless, given the Barnum effect, no matter what you get, you're likely to find some validity in it. How is Personality Poker different? Personality Poker benefits from its simplicity and transparency. It's simple because you choose five cards. It's transparent because everyone who plays with you gets to see your selection of cards. This transparency can lead to some fascinating conversations.

I was playing Personality Poker with a CEO Dan and three of his direct reports. It was a casual game designed to demonstrate how the system works. The executive's right hand woman, Sally, chose the visionary card. Dan suddenly looked pained. She's not a visionary, he whispered. So I said, sally, that's great. Can you describe a time when you demonstrated your visionary skills? She then launched into several examples of products she had conceived and launched. This stimulated some fascinating discussion that allowed the CEO to see his co worker in a new light. He finally understood her full potential. This ended up demonstrating the true worth of the game and the value of transparency.

Unlike most personality tests, where only the test taker sees his or her selections, the poker cards provide a visible representation. The cards selected are not the answer, but rather a catalyst for a conversation through which people can gain deeper insights into their personality. As we saw with Sally's story, the real value is the conversation and the reflection it conjures. Labeling people and sorting them into categories.

Although useful in some contexts, is less important here.

In fact, some of the most interesting conversations evolve when people gift, that is Give cards to others. Seeing how others view us, which is often different from how we see ourselves.

Is a simple yet powerful 360 degree feedback tool.

With personality Poker, we intentionally avoid assigning people strict types of labels or boxes. As we will see when we discuss how to play personality Poker, many people do not fall cleanly into just one suit. Still, by using suits as the shorthand for innovation styles, we avoid labels that may be misinterpreted or resisted based on the results of particular tests. People may be branded introverts, domineering, self defeating, or some other potentially misunderstood term. Most don't like and or agree with their labels. Once I heard someone say, hey, I'm not judgmental. I love everything and everyone. This test is stupid. Of course, that may not have been what judgmental meant in the context of that particular test. Still, judgmental sounds bad and everyone wants to be intuitive, extroverted, creative, or any other labels that are considered to be more desirable. Psychologists call this the social desirability response bias. With personality Poker, we avoid traditional labels that can have inherently good bad connotations. I talk about what people like rather than what they are like. After playing personality Poker, people typically refer to themselves by their suit. Saying I'm a spade is less threatening than alluding to yourself as analytical or a know it all. Quite often people mention their favorite card in the deck not as a label, but rather as one of 52 descriptors that don't necessarily carry any good or bad undertones. Even the people who select the anal retentive card are typically quite pleased with that. I myself am a proud holder of the disorganized card. Although the process is simple, the results can be quite profound. This is the real appeal. In a short period of time, teams can gain deep insights into individual styles and team dynamics.

At first glance, you might assume that Personality Poker is just the latest variant of mbti, dsky, or other personality assessments. Although there may indeed be similarities, Personality Poker is unique in several respects. No matter which school of personality theory you subscribe to, this game can further enhance any other personality test you have taken or will choose to take in the future.

Aside from the obvious, the use of poker cards More than anything, Personality Poker is designed specifically to help participants comprehend their preferred innovation style better. The four primary styles were originally identified based on the skills required for each of the four phases of the innovation process. I started with the process of innovation and worked backward to determine the innovation styles. Because of this, Personality Poker works for.

Teams, not just individuals.

Helping each person figure out his or her own style is great, but more.

Valuable is helping to create high performing.

Teams and explaining the dynamics between individuals. Part 4 Addresses in more depth the use of Personality Poker with innovation teams.

Consider a 2004 study of college students studying engineering. The participants were broken up into teams to complete their senior projects. Each member finished a widely used measure of personality styles. However, only half of the students received some instruction as to the interpretation of the results. Months later, after the students had concluded all their projects, the researchers were surprised to learn that the personality styles of those making up the teams were unrelated to team performance. However, the teams that learned something about the meaning of the personality styles demonstrated better communication, trust, and interdependence compared to those teams that had not. So one primary value of assessments like Personality Poker is the opportunity to better understand one's co workers and teammates and thus perform better as a team.

The Personality Poker Triad Some of the most fascinating work associated with the creation of Personality Poker has been studying the multiple facets of identity. We might often think of personality as some objective entity, something that resides within us. However, personality is subjective. It involves how others see us, not just how we see ourselves. So when considering personality, there are at least three distinct how we see ourselves consciously, how others see us, how we see ourselves unconsciously.

Nearly every personality assessment tool out there addresses the first point, how we see ourselves at a conscious level. If you choose to give the test to someone else with the instruction to take it as they think, another person who knows them would answer, you can get a sense of how others see them. Few, if any can test how we see ourselves unconsciously. To clarify, psychologists now use unconscious and subconscious interchangeably. Let's take a look at each of these three levels of analysis.

How we see ourselves consciously Most personality tests are administered through questionnaires, either on paper or on a computer screen. These are apt to be tedious, reminding people of traditional tests taken in a formal school setting. One of the most widely used personality tests among psychologists is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. The MMPI comprises more than 500 items and takes an hour or two to complete. One of the problems with written or online questionnaire based tests is that the test taker may overthink the answers or try to slant the outcome. This can lead to invalid results in psychology circles. As noted earlier, this is called the social desirability response bias. We all want to be seen in the best possible light by ourselves and by others. If we're applying for a job, for example, and are asked to take some test, naturally we're going to try to figure out the right answers. How do you combat this? One way is to introduce the concept of play into your assessment approach. Any method that can prompt us to be less self conscious may actually result in a more accurate perspective. Turning a personality test into a game lets people respond at a deeper, less self conscious level.

A particular area of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is most active during conscious thought. This is among the most advanced parts of the brain, parts which separate us from other animals that cannot analyze and calculate the way humans can. However, when we are in a state of flow, as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly in his landmark book the Psychology of Optimal Experience, this part of the brain is quiet and we move into a more playful mindset. Flow casts the human brain back to a more primitive state where thoughts and sensations come through without being controlled, judged or censored. Anyone who meditates knows what it's like.

To be in this state, as the.

Purpose of meditation is to go behind the judgmental veil of that prefrontal cortex and enter a state of flow. When the conscious part of the brain is activated, the flow state is interrupted. Interestingly, in children, the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed, which allows them a more natural state of play. Personality Poker's fast and fun pace can help bypass the judgmental dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. On the other hand, written quizzes and diagnostics activate the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, resulting in answers that are analyzed on a conscious level, resulting in potentially lower levels of accuracy. Research by Northwestern University neuroscientist Mark Young Beaman shows that people who are in.

A good mood not only tap into.

Different parts of the brain, but also solve more problems through flashes of insight. Playfulness helps to put us in a good mood and enjoy a more relaxed frame of mind. Studies have shown that people in this state generate more unusual ideas when brainstorming. This explains why we get so many good ideas while showering or half dozing. A relaxed frame of mind is conducive to insight, helping us bring forth new knowledge or ideas without forcing them. Like playfulness and a positive mood, the drowsy brain induces a relaxed state and encourages insights. How many times have you been bombarded by an amazing idea or thought or solved a problem in your mind just seconds before falling asleep? This stroke of genius in the is a flash of insight thanks to your brain's calm state. For more on unleashing your creative thinking, see chapter 11 how others see Us.

Personality Poker can be a powerful 360 degree feedback tool through the gifting of cards. Of course, with other typing tools you can get feedback from others, but this typically involves a huge investment of time on the part of your friends and co workers. Personality Poker is fast, painless, and a lot of fun.

Knowing how others see us can be extremely useful for two reasons. Remember, how others see you doesn't necessarily reflect your true personality. Rather, it's an indicator of your behavior. We assume that the people who know us best see us the way we see ourselves. After all, these are our friends, family members, and co workers, and we're not trying to dupe them, right? Even though we may not be hiding who we are, the research on personalities suggests that other people will still view us differently from how we view ourselves. In one study published in 2007, researchers Richard Grusa of the Washington University School of Medicine and Louis Goldberg of the Oregon Research Institute compared multiple measures of personality administered to the same group of more than 500 people. Each research participant was asked to ask three good friends to complete the same personality evaluation, gauging their perception of the participant. The researchers correlated scores on the participants personality measures with the corresponding scores reported by the friends. Correlation coefficients can range from 0.00 or no relationship whatsoever to a perfect 1.00, which would indicate perfect agreement. The overall pattern across the various personality measures showed correlations in the 0.40 to 0.50 range, which only represents moderate correspondence.

In plain English, let's say you reported that you were below average on a particular personality trait, such as the ability to handle stress well. If your friends were asked to rate you in the same way, they would agree with you about 70 to 75% of the time. Given that each trait has only two options, a person pulled off the street who speculates about you would be correct half the time. Just by guessing, our friends don't know us that much better than complete strangers. Why Others see us differently than we see ourselves.

Why is this? There are many and varied reasons. Here are a few Some behaviors are hard to observe Even when teammates or co workers spend a good deal of time together and feel as though they know each other well, there are often substantial differences in how people view themselves versus how they are viewed by their associates. Why? Part of the answer is that particular personality traits are not easily visible. Some traits, like extraversion, are fairly apparent. You can observe over time whether someone is gregarious or tends to gravitate toward solitary work. In Personality Poker, for the most part, the high cards 10 through Ace, correlate with more extroverted personalities. Regardless of suit, some traits, like inquisitiveness, are much more difficult to observe, especially in the limited confines of work behavior.

First Impressions Stick Another reason our colleagues may see us quite differently than we see ourselves is the power of first impressions. Unfortunately, first impressions can be quite sticky, thanks to the way humans process and remember information. Psychologists refer to this form of cognitive bias as the anchoring and adjustment bias. When we encounter a new person, we immediately anchor on whatever about them is apparent. Over time, we adjust our impressions as more information about the person becomes available. The bias, however, is that we tend to be overly influenced by the anchor or the first impression. Sometimes that anchor even colors how we interpret new information about the person. For example, if we peg a new co worker as an extrovert, and the second time we encounter her, she seems withdrawn, we might conclude that she's having.

A bad day or is upset with.

Us rarely thinking, hey, I might have been wrong in my first impressions.

Roles affect perceptions, but the most likely reason is that sometimes our work roles prescribe particular behaviors and tendencies, which then give a distorted view of our underlying personality. People assume that because we're often staring at spreadsheets, we must like working with numbers. Not necessarily. Typically, how others see us is a reflection of our behaviors and actions, but not always a reflection of who we really are. They see the tasks we perform and the way we act, but they can't get inside our head I once did.

A session in Texas for a city manager, Rick and his team. We played the poker game as we always do, which you will learn how to do shortly. Each person received five cards and then traded cards with the others to improve their hand, giving extra attention to the gifting of cards to others. I asked everyone to find a couple of people in the room whom they knew well and give them the card that best described them. Everyone kept their self selected cards separate from the gift cards. Rick had a flush of self selected cards, five hearts. Most interesting was that all of his gifted cards were clubs. He found this quite surprising. His team saw him very differently than he saw himself. When we dug deeper, we discovered a couple of interesting things.

Given that Rick was a city manager.

It'S not surprising that others would perceive.

Him as a club.

Clubs make great managers, but in reality, managing is not what he enjoyed. He preferred being around people and motivating them. This is a great role for a leader.

We looked at the work he was.

Doing and determined that some of his.

Tasks should be offloaded to a person who was a strong club. This would free him to do what.

Comes naturally, thereby reducing his stress and increasing his effectiveness. Specifically, taking the time and effort to examine our assumptions about ourselves and our co workers can help recalibrate our impressions of everyone involved. Rarely do co workers have the opportunity to do this in a safe, structured way, but here is the important does it really matter if people see you differently than you see yourself? Amazingly, the answer is a resounding yes. The perceptions of others influence our behavior. We've already established that when people form an opinion of you and your personality, it is difficult for them to change that point of view and that their assessment of your personality may not match your own assessment. Because of this, their interactions with you.

Will be based on a misperception.

Surprisingly, as a result, your behaviors may conform to their expectations without your even knowing it. For example, if you think of yourself as a diamond, but others perceive you as a club, over time you you may begin to take on the attributes of a club. This is due to something psychologists call the interpersonal expectancy effect.

This effect was first demonstrated by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson in their classic 1968 study of teacher expectancy effects. Elementary school students were given an IQ test. Their teachers were told beforehand that high scorers on the test are were likely to bloom in the classroom. Afterward, teachers were told which of the students scored in the top 20%. But here's the catch. The students on that list of top performers were in fact randomly selected with no relation to actual test performance.

When given the IQ test a year later, students on the fake top 20% list improved 12.2 points versus the rest of the students who only improved by 8.2 points. The fact that the teachers thought certain students had greater potential apparently changed the way they interacted with those students, changing the performance of the students. This is now called the Pygmalion effect, after the sculptor in Greek mythology who fell in love with a female statue he had carved out of ivory, whom.

The gods eventually brought to life.

What does this mean for understanding our personality style and performance in work teams? This data seems to suggest that the beliefs others hold about our personality style can lead us to behave in ways consistent with that style. Imagine a company with a spade dominant Culture Although you too may be a spade, if you appear to be more touchy feely than the norm, you may be subconsciously labeled as a heart. Then, as people interact with you at work, they subtly bring out your heart like tendencies. The drawbacks of this are obvious. If your supervisor thinks you're a club and you're a diamond, guess what type.

Of work you'll be assigned?

No, probably not the creative work you want. Get ready for a whole lot of the planning work you'd rather avoid. Even worse, if you're good at the.

Club style work, this will further reinforce.

Your boss's beliefs, leading to even more planning work for you. Are we doomed to behave in ways consistent with the expectations others have of us? Certainly not. Personality poker is one useful tool for helping identify the disparity between your actual personality and the way others perceive you.

This information can then be used to.

Generate valuable conversations for the sharing of preferences, dislikes, strengths and pitfalls that can shape an effective action plan for working together.

For example, if you are a heart but are perceived differently, opening the eyes of your co workers to your preferred style may facilitate assignment to roles that are more fitting, such as coaching, facilitating, supporting, and team building. If you're struggling in a particular area, having others know your preferred style will help them provide you with proper support. If everyone is clear on one another's style, a balanced team can be assembled based on reality, not perception, to provide unprecedented results.

The Unconscious Self so far we have discussed using personality poker to assess how you see yourself and how others see you, but these two pieces may not be enough to get a full picture of your behaviors. Unfortunately, even when introducing the concept of play, the game provides feedback based only on what the conscious mind thinks. Is our conscious mind a good predictor of reality not always.

One form of social desirability, response bias deals with self deception. In general, people harbor rosy views of themselves. For example, when asked to rate themselves as automobile drivers, the vast majority of.

People claim they are above average, and.

Nearly all of the rest label themselves as average. Where are all the terrible drivers? When rating ourselves, we or describing our own personalities, we may fall victim to the way we wish to see ourselves rather than the way we really are. Meanwhile, when we complete personality measures, we sometimes focus on how we act in a particular setting rather than what would be most natural for us. Our conscious mind misleads us.

So how do we test the unconscious mind? Until recently, few methods existed for testing the unconscious mind. The Rorschach test, known for its famous inkblots, was one of the few tests that apparently could assess the unconscious. But over time, even this approach has fallen out of favor and is now deemed highly inaccurate. There's even an entire book, what's Wrong with the Rorschach? That is dedicated to disproving the validity of the test. However, recent years have seen tremendous advances in the methodological tools available to test unconscious processes. Perhaps the most promising is the implicit association test, the most widely used method for assessing implicit social cognition.

I first learned about this tool from a marketing expert, Katja Brissette of Olson Zaltman Associates. What Katja and her team discovered is that focus groups and interviews that query only the conscious beliefs of buyers were capturing only part of the picture because such measures are unable to tap into unconscious beliefs. Her company therefore uses traditional market testing along with iats as a way of creating a more comprehensive picture of someone's beliefs about a product or brand.

The IAT has been used by researchers interested in studying implicit attitudes and stereotypes ranging from political beliefs to preferences for.

Certain social groups over others, as well.

As the more non social side of life, including preferences for different flavored soft drinks.

Research has shown that as compared with explicit measures of personality traits, a desired outcome on the IAT is incredibly difficult to produce. In other words, the test can't be faked or consciously slanted in a particular direction. Also, research has shown that implicit associations are often uncorrelated with an individual's self professed beliefs. It truly tests the unconscious. These findings suggest that the implicit association test is a reliable tool for measuring implicit associations that makes it a highly desirable way of testing personality.

How does an IAT work? Basically, the implicit association test is a computer based reaction time task that that measures the relative strength of associations between paired concepts in the personality poker version of the iat, we associate the words from the cards with the concepts of me and not me. This allows us to see which words best relate to our implicit beliefs about ourselves. When words that resonate with you are paired with the word me, your response times should be faster. When words that don't relate to your personal style are paired with the word me, your response times will be slower, suggesting more conscious thought. If you don't understand the concept entirely, don't worry. In chapter nine I provide details and screen snapshots so that you can fully grasp the theory. I even created a version of the IAT that readers of this book can take.

You might be interested to see what your unconscious mind thinks of you.

Reasons abound as to why Personality Poker is different from and potentially better than standard personality assessments, but the proof is in the pudding. Let's stop talking about Personality Poker and start playing it. Part two Playing Personality Poker.