John Cutler · 7 min read · Product Teams
TBM 440: The Problem With Putting People in Boxes
Read the original on cutlefish.substack.com →
Personality and strengths frameworks at work are convenient but misleading because they assume stable traits predict behavior, when in reality how people act depends heavily on context, incentives, and situational dynamics. The author argues that labeling people as 'types' compresses complex human behavior into oversimplified buckets. A more useful approach is understanding under what specific conditions people behave differently and why.
Key Takeaways
- Personality tests and strengths frameworks describe relatively stable tendencies, but what matters at work is how someone behaves in specific situations with specific incentives, norms, and constraints.
- Two people with identical personality traits (e.g., high conscientiousness) can respond to the same problem in fundamentally different ways based on how they interpret reversibility, evidence, and authority.
- The 'culture fit' concept often disguises existing cultural norms as universal virtues, shifting the burden of adaptation entirely onto the individual.
- Labels like 'strategic,' 'decisive,' or 'collaborative' are convenient but leave open the harder question of how someone will actually behave in a given situation.
- Instead of asking 'What type of person are you?', leaders should ask 'Under what conditions do you behave differently, and what causes you to switch modes?'
Excerpt
Personality and “strength” tests at work have never sat right with me. Sure, they became fodder for some fun discussions and had that occasional “wow, how right!” horoscope vibe. But they rarely seemed to help with day-to-day work, and they never replaced the hard work of truly getting to know people, including how they interact with others and how different contexts bring out different versions of them. When building a team, we tend to adopt the sports-team metaphor: find the right people for the right positions. Or, slightly more generously, ask, “How do we bring out the best in this…