So, recently at the clinic I had my personality completely assassinated by an industrial psychologist.
It was a privilege and I’m so lucky to have access to something like that through a patient who offered her professional service to me for free as a favour as she was grateful for the work that we had carried out.
She then pointed me towards a book related to the assassination matrix’s that she used to crucify my personality failings called ‘why CEO’s fail’.
The book is really quite American, particularly on audiobook, but when you get past that and see through it, it is massively insightful.
It describes 11 characteristics which (in a typical American way) are called ‘derailers’.
The authors of the book are hugely experienced at dealing with high level and strategic individuals in large or small high value businesses and therefore have seen these things over and over again, even though in ourselves we only see them once.
It ties in absolutely with the Hogan Assessment that my friend, the industrial psychologist, used to pick apart my character and show me how, ultimately and if not mitigated, some of my traits could lead to disaster.
For myself it’s a massive degree of mischievousness which I pretty much use a weapon to cover up my introverted extrovert personality which could lead to be the undoing of anything that grows bigger than that, which we are at the moment.
In the circumstances that we find ourselves in, we need structure and regularity in lots of aspects of the business to give everybody a chance to perform to their best and to work in a safe place but the mischievous individual wants to change everything all of the time and is bored half-way through a project (that is me).
All of the characteristics (including mischievousness) listed in the book can be mitigated and there are strategies within that book to tell you how to do that.
For me, it is the ability to partially surround myself with people who are opposite and listen and trust them and then secondly, to have faith in the direction that we’re travelling and to wait for some of the measures that we’ve taken to take effect.
I am the individual who will always say to myself ‘I dare you to fail’. That is all well and good in individual circumstances but when peoples livelihoods depend upon your decisions and your forward progress, it’s not good enough.
Blog Post Number - 2798
Leave a comment