Elves Who Would Be Dentists
A Book Review of Now, Discover Your Strengths [Note — Drafted on November 29, 2005]
Head Elf: Hermey! Aren’t you finished painting that yet? There’s a pile up a mile
behind you!
Hermey: Not happy with my work, I guess.
Head Elf: What?
Hermey: I just don’t like to make toys.
Head Elf: Oh well if that’s all—What? You don’t like to make toys?
Hermey: No.
Head Elf: Hermey doesn’t like to make toys.
Elves: Hermey doesn’t like to make toys.
Head Elf: Would you mind telling me what you do wanna do?
Hermey: Well, some day I’d like to be a dentist.
Head Elf: A dentist?
Hermey: Well we need one up here. I’ve been studying molars and bicuspids and
incisors…
Head Elf: Now listen, you, you’re an elf and elves make toys. Now get to work.
---Scene from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
How many of us feel we are mere elves? We are trained in school to be good
workers. If we attend business school, we learn to how market widgets. Law school gives us skills to twist the law in service of the corporation. Even the humanities crank out elves who manage elves.
Is there a better way?
In their new book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham and
Donald O. Clifton (2005) write that most workers fail because we are trained to focus on our weaknesses, not our strengths. Companies urge employees to improve on their weaknesses. Unfortunately, much talent is squandered in the process. Only twenty percent of employees in a recent Gallup survey reported that their employer utilized their strengths.
Buckingham and Clifton urge companies to tap into the natural strengths that
employees bring to the table. Leading in with Tiger Woods and Bill Gates as examples of strong lives, the authors suggest that we first must discover employee strengths. By taking the assessment test, employers should be able to discover whether employees are “Maximizers,” “Commanders,” or some other mix out of some 34 different strengths.
With this intelligence, employees can be managed individually. Presumably, Head Elves the world over will be empowered to nurture and develop ill-fitting elves.
While the book offers valuable insights into the role of psychology in the
workplace, it stops at the water’s edge. Other reviewers have written about the lack of detailed mechanism for implementing the scheme. Can a small to mid-sized company afford to implement a concept with thirty-four positive personality themes? If everyone is trained to be sharp in their strengths, do you risk organizational tunnel vision at the top?
Someone has to know a little bit about everything. Otherwise, you repeat the Franklin Raines problem at Fannie Mae where the top dog claimed ignorance of financial irregularities.
My critique is that of Hermey the Elf. What happens if employees are just
alienated from the corporate mission itself? In Toward a Diversity of Psychological Type in Organization, a dusty work that has not enjoyed the media acclaim of Now, Discover Your Strength, John Fudjack & Patricia Dinkelaker wrote that there is a strong bias towards certain personality types in companies. The executive ranks are top-heavy with personality types known for extroversion, sensing, thinking, and judging or ESTJs for short. The ESTJ types prefer “bureaucracy.” They enjoy dominance. They love to manage people and they dream of administration. While only 15% of the population are ESTJs, nearly 30% of executives fall into this category.
If too many people have strength for some variant of administration and
bureaucracy, the company will become “one-handed.” Conservatism and rigidity will set in. And the prospects for a fair use of assessment tests will fall by the way side.
Executives will begat executives.
Poets, artists, and yes, dentists, will try to change their type to fit in. Failing that,
they will try to pass as the in type. Or, they might resign themselves to their ill-fitting place in the corporation. But their pain will not go away. And the rule of Head Elves will loom ever present.
On the problem of personality prejudice in the workplace, the authors are
strangely silent.
In the world of Christmas dreams, Hermey the Elf leaves the elf shop. He follows
his passion. He becomes a dentist. And that is a strong life to rival Tiger Woods and Bill Gates.
I LOVE this one!! You remind me of how unhappy I was most of the years I was working.
I worked in a lot of offices over the years, and I discovered exactly what you have written about. People are not encouraged to meet their own potentials. We are “worker bees,” and there are rules. Creativity is not encouraged, and yet, there is so much untapped potential! Personally, I could have, and would have loved, doing more. I always, always wanted to learn, but that wasn’t what they really cared about. Show up, do your job, get along with your coworkers, and we’ll see you again tomorrow. Rinse and repeat.
And two other things: meetings and rules.
Because there are so many “managers,” they have to have meetings, and lots of them. They have staff meetings and meeting with one another. They have so many meetings, that they will have meetings to figure out when to have meetings.
Then there are the “rules.” Okay, we all need some rules, I guess. But it was the ones that made no sense until you discovered that something happened one time, many years ago, and the company decided it required a rule so that it never happens again. (We can never use that convenient exit door because John Smith forgot to lock it 10 years ago. That’s just how it is, now and forevermore.)