Personality Suppression Disorder

Consider this: the person sitting next to you at work isn't who you think they are. Your boss, employees, co-workers and customers, they don't really exist. They're all actors. And those actors are playing a role: CONFORMIST. Some of them are so good at it, they should win an award.

We suppress our personalities to fit nicely into what the organization deems appropriate. I know, this is true of society as well to a large extent - but we'll gloss over that for now.

Think about how narrow the potential script really is - Top Line Growth, Cost Savings, Continuous Improvement, Click-through’s, Target Dates, Downsizing, Offshoring, etc.

We have a shared language that is portable between organizations, heck, it even works across industries. Getting something done inside a large organization only happens if it fits within that existing lexicon.

There is way too much fact, not nearly enough feeling. Just once I want to hear someone say - "I don't know, it just feels right to me."

But that doesn't happen - especially as organizations grow. The larger an organization becomes the more the narrow the language gets. We rely on catch phrases, "best practices", benchmarking, power point templates, canned reports, quarterly forecasts, etc.

From now on, whenever someone starts a sentence with the phrase - "you know what I think", I'm going to stop them and say, "don't tell me what you think, tell me how you feel."