Field Notes

Perhaps you have already taken and benefitted from the insights of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Gallup’s StrengthsFinder, the DISC personality assessment, the Enneagram personality typing system, or many of the other popular self-assessments. Of the many personality assessments, The Big Five Personality Traits assessment has become tremendously fashionable of late. If you haven’t already, take the test at no cost by visiting truity.com. Learning more about yourself through self-assessments is an exercise in reflection. Taking the time to look in the mirror is a great way to see the perfections and imperfections that make you who you are. Now the hard work of self-development begins.

Emotion, not logic, creates the powerful customer experiences.

While cognitive and technical skills can be learned in a rule-based way, there are no clear guidelines for how people should work and interact with others. The so-called soft or social skills — such as empathy, listening, advocacy, and conflict resolution — are difficult to teach and nearly impossible to scale across an organization. Despite their role in creating high-performing and effective organizations, social skills have proven elusive to develop in team members and leaders. That’s because most organizations go about teaching them in the wrong way. Training programs, soft skill workshops, and peer group discussions often fail to make a dent in the challenge of giving people the social skills they need to succeed. Effective organizations have learned to develop social skills the hard way—through practice clinics.

There is a typical gap between what everyone on a team thinks and what gets discussed. Those topics, issues, or ideas that are too uncomfortable or embarrassing for the team to discuss remain unaddressed and unspoken. While these undiscussables help the team to avoid short-term conflict and awkwardness, they often hold the group back from making the progress they should. Most undiscussables involve the so-called elephant in the room, which is a euphemism for a topic or issue that everyone prefers would go away. The unspoken truths of bad behavior, bad decisions, or bad outcomes are usually the elephant or 1,000-pound gorilla the team avoids discussing.