The Gallup organization, best known for its surveys of public opinion, has a product called StrengthsFinder that seems to be quite a hot commodity in corporate America right now. If your employer pays Galllup, you get access to a website where you can click, click, click about yourself. After you're done clicking, you get in your in-box a list of your five top strengths. I think there are around 35 possible strengths. It might seem that there would be more upside to identifying your weaknesses and working to bring them up to a respectable level, but that would be such a downer. I, for one, am not going to try and bone up on turning the world on with my smile, which, in the StrengthsFinder lexicon, is known as being a Woo.
I tend not to like Woos. Woos are shallow, self-seeking manipulators whose charms must be resisted by the power of reason.
Yes, I scored high in "analytical." My other strengths included "intellection," "context," and "learner." Amanda says my results explain why having a conversation with me is like trying to talk to HAL, the voice of the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. "No, Amanda, we do not need a new car. You want a new car. Allow me to explain the difference between need and want." All in the voice of . . . HAL.
But I'm not the only one. At work, I had to collect the results of my colleagues, so that I could forward them to a certified StrengthsFinder Team Convener, or whatever the title is of the guy who would construct our StrenghthsFinder Team Map. It was amusing to watch one similar profile after another pinging into my in-box. What a bunch of pointy-headed puzzlers we are in my office!
It seems obvious that this is not any kind of a coincidence. There is a self-selection principle operating. The work that we do requires these strengths; or, reversing it, people with different strengths would never choose our kind of work. If our job was to sell stuff to people, our Team Profile would be very different, and none of us would work there. This self-selecting principle must be generally applicable and there is no reason to suppose that it's limited to peoples' strengths. The celibacy requirement for the Catholic priesthood makes it attractive to men whose sexual proclivities are unacceptable and so must be hidden away in any event. That police work involves carrying a gun and telling other people what to do tends to attract the kind of person who might discharge a rifle into the car of some African-American kids leaving a house party.
Comments