By Irene
As part of a team building process, everyone on our team took one of those personality tests. There are a bunch out there, but we took one called HBDI. This particular method divides the brain into right and left brain and cerebral and limbic. As in typical psychology parlance, left brain is more analytical/logical/fact-based, and right brain is more artistic, symbolic, intuitive-based. Cerebral (front of brain) is more calculating and limbic (back of brain) is more feeling. At least, this is how we were talking about the brain during a facilited session to discuss our test results. I'm sure that there are plenty of studies that show that it is more complicated than that. Our session was facilitated by a well versed professional in the field, this woman with like 2 PhDs and oodles of experience facilitating these conversations at large companies. Interestingly, a lot of her experience is working with large tech companies (Dell, Motorola, etc.)
Anyway, so we all took these surveys before this facilitated session. And the day of the session we got a profile folder assigning basically which "quadrant" of the brain we fall into. More interesting than seeing the results of your own profile, we guessed the profile breakdown for each other. This basically allowed us to see how other people perceive us and how other people perceive others on the team, and also of course how someone sees themselves. This exercise was particularly helpful because it ended up meaning we gave each other feedback on better ways to work with each other.
For me in particular it was interesting because my work involves a lot of data collection and excel spreadsheet stuff, but I enjoy the bigger picture/planning/creative thinking/managing stuff as well. But I am not really given that type of work because I'm perceived as being very data-driven/oriented. Which I actually am - and I have a hard time seeing the bigger picture without getting a really solid understanding of the paper clips and minutia. But I think I was trying to highlight this other aspect of me as well, which was often being over looked. So it was interesting, because during this discussion people were like...Irene...you're really right brained, but you're doing all this left brain stuff....?!? And I was like well yea...but I infuse the data intensive work you give me with creativity, and a more human element. Which is true...I like doing trainings, and I end up always pushing for more interaction with our field folks and getting their input/feedback.
Anyway, I hope I didn't overplay my right brained-ness, but that I get some other type work passed my way as a result of this.
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