I’ve enjoyed Simon Stapleton’s post on personality and IT Leaders and decided to take the free personality test at www.41q.com

There are indeed just 41 questions and it took me less than 10 minutes to complete. Here are my results:

As you can see, most suggested career paths are from the caring/helping professions – and it’s true that education, coaching and mentoring are where I feel most at home.

But in the last few years I’ve started to become more assertive and judging – not from coaching I hasten to add, as coaches commit as far as humanly possible to remain non-judgmental when they coach (even though they may obviously have opinions and biases, like anyone else.)

No, the reason for the demonstrated extrovertism in my case is related to becoming boss of my own business – “if it’s to be, it’s up to me” is something I recall my personal development guru, Brian Tracy, talking about a lot.

In fact, it begs the question to what extent latent personality elements may unfold in changed and somewhat demanding circumstances. I’m not a psychologist so I won’t go claiming anything general – except to note that in my own experience, self fulfilling behaviour has occasionally resulted from strongly held beliefs (especially those reinforced by authority figures and societal/organizational groupings.)

In an information technology career context, you might think of the multiple roles that you are increasingly called on to play these days. While in the corporate world some of mine included:

project manager, project member, senior colleague, designer, mentor, teacher, troubleshooter, negotiator, presenter, network engineer, technology advocat, subordinate, employee, career coach.

What if I’ve not been drawn to specific (IT) roles because of my particular “personality profile” – rather, elements of my personality in the ascendant at a particular time/place of my life sought those out? (or at least influenced desire, enjoyment and performance in a ‘chosen’ career role.)

Implying that other roles and careers may also be seen as attractive should the dominant personality elements shuffle (or be restacked, upgraded, bluescreen lol!)

(BTW – I realize these free assessments are prone to error and their results not writ in stone for ever more. DYOR.)

And that reminds me to add to my reading list “The Cult of Personality”, by Annie Murphy Paul. I do like contrarian opinions about a subject – even if this one has been somewhat body slammed by the good folks at personality pathways. (An interesting site -I will also check it out.)

- Mark McClure

PS – Do a search for some blog posts I wrote earlier on Ed Schein’s work with “career anchors”.

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