Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (1)

Personality Patterns at Work: Nature, Then Nurtured

October 11, 2009
A few years back, we ran a large teambuilding event for a company on Wall Street.  It was customized to welcome 250 incoming analysts to the firm as part of their orientation.  These young men and women were handpicked from top schools and selected because they had already proven to be the best and the brightest.  And that they were.  Sharp and quick.  It was obvious.  Collectively, they vibrated with intelligence, sparkled with charisma and exploded with confidence.  But more than anything it was clear that they were determined to win.  Of course they were; this was the face of the financial sector’s future.  Smart. Driven. Outgoing. Competitive.  But now with the financial industry being what it is, one thing about that day adheres relentlessly to the inside of my mind.

At the time it was intriguing, entertaining and even a little mind-boggling, but now it smacks of an interesting reality.  What happened was, we put groups of people through a circuit of specially designed exercises that we’d vetted many times over looking for whatever loopholes they might find and try to jump through.  See, we knew that most teambuilding exercises were simply not hard enough for them, so we made up our own, and then added on layers and layers of difficulty.  Otherwise we knew from experience that they would solve each challenge in two seconds flat.  To avoid that and attempt to keep it interesting, each exercise had a long list of rules and conditions, all of which the analysts said they understood, which was apparent in practice too.  As a whole, the teams didn’t do anything that they were not supposed to do.  It’s what they did do that was so shocking, and might I add that they did it in two seconds flat.  The rules? They were no deterrent. Not one bit. These folks figured out a way around them in the amount of time it takes me to breathe in and out once.  Then they somehow twisted what they could do by altering the meaning of our instructions to gain an advantage, which in many cases was a substantial one.  It’s just the way their brains work.  We looked on in awe and when we called them on it, their response was, “You didn’t say we couldn’t do it.”  And with that, someone turned to me and said, “Great, these guys are going to be running our financial system someday.”  Little did we know that “someday” was right around the corner when a different class, but the same type of thinking would bring the market to its knees.  

It makes me think that Wall Street needs to focus more on their recruiting/selections practices then on the ethics training of its employees that is invariably necessary only after it’s too late and all the rules have been bent as the means to a winning end.  I don't know though, on the other hand, can it survive with fewer Type A's?

Posted by Donna Flagg on October 11, 2009 | Comments (1)