“Could Your Personality Derail Your Career?”

ARTICLE REVIEW

by Amy Locklin

In a process of self-evaluation, I found the 2017 “Managing Yourself” article published by Harvard Business Review extremely helpful. In reading “Could Your Personality Derail Your Career?” I discovered I’m excitable, imaginative, and possibly also bold. These qualities sound better than they are, which is part of the stance of this article.  

According to its author, our strengths are also our weaknesses, an idea with which I implicitly agree. The goal of “Could Your Personality Derail Your Career?” is to help us control our personalities in critical situations.

I also like what Chamorro-Premuzic writes about asking your family to help you identify your negative, limiting, and/or undermining traits, with an emphasis on when interacting with others. This suggestion should be taken with, as they say, a grain of salt, because some families don’t have healthy enough boundaries for giving constructive feedback.

However, seeing dark as part of a key term woven throughout an entire article’s premise, topic, and main claims seemed to echo the author’s hypothesis as a limitation in his own visual and language choices.

For example, one graphic has ten by ten rows of people. 60% are a light gray uniform person figure and 40% are black figures in a variety of dynamic postures—including with wide arms and legs, doing a handstand, and kneeling in child’s pose. They are all wearing, presumably, pants.

While the graphic works to offset positive and negative values somewhat with the dark figures being depicted in action, the word dark alongside the use of pictorially black people connects to a long history of language usage in sync with race and power norms.

The colors to the qualities shown later—blue, red, and gold—are only emblematic of gender in the sense that blue is traditionally for boys, and that is the color for distancing traits. (At least there weren’t only two colors, pink and blue.)

And a special kudos is owed to the author for primarily sticking to the plural they, which is the gender-neutral choice, and therefore the most inclusive pronoun.

Gender pronouns unfortunately do come into play in a list of “ingratiating traits.” Chamorro-Premuzic writes, “Someone who is diligent, for instance, may try to impress her boss with her meticulous attention to detail, but that can also translate into a preoccupation with petty matters or micromanagement of her direct reports.” Whether I agree with the implicit suggestion that women are more prone to these limiting traits or not, this singular female pronoun stands out as stereotypical; and I write this acknowledging that stereotypes come from somewhere.

The passage reminds me of one of my favorite books from an author who is, like many other psychology researchers, a professor in a business school: Jonathan Haidt. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt varies gender pronouns to prioritize individual hypothetical people like the example given above. However, somehow the males get to ride the elephant and the females to betray love. . .

What are some takeaways? The risks are too great to try to vary singular gendered pronouns in writing about hypothetical cases. Similarly, the risk of using dark to convey negative traits is that it unconsciously reinforces historical racial power norms.

I have intentionally avoided identifying the author’s gender by omitting their first name, which can be found with the 2017 article itself in Harvard Business Review; you can access it by clicking on the graphic included.