Ten Things We Believe About Ourselves and Work

We spend a remarkable amount of our lives working, yet much of the language around work has traditionally concentrated on what we are capable of doing, what our role requires, how our performance compares with somebody else’s, or where we fall short of an expected standard. All of those questions can matter. We are interested in another one as well: how do we prefer to work?

It sounds almost too simple. Some of us like to think things through before speaking, while others discover what they think through conversation. Some want a clear destination before beginning, while others are comfortable discovering the route as they go. Some find reassurance in detail; others gain energy from possibility. We can care deeply about finishing things or be most alive at the point when something new begins. None of these preferences tells us whether we are competent, intelligent, conscientious or kind. They tell us something different about how we naturally tend to approach our work.

That distinction matters because preference is easily confused with ability. We can prefer doing things at which we are fairly ordinary, and become exceptionally good at work that takes a great deal out of us. Skill grows through learning, practice and experience. Preference concerns what attracts us, how we tend to approach something and where we find ease or energy. The two can overlap beautifully, but one does not prove the other.

Playing to our preferences also has very little to do with building a permanent comfort zone. Work regularly asks us to operate in ways that are not our first preference, and sometimes we actively choose to do so. We may value harmony and still initiate a difficult conversation because the relationship matters more. We may want certainty and still make a decision with incomplete information because the opportunity matters more. We may enjoy independence and ask for help because the outcome matters more. Knowing a preference gives us information about ourselves. It does not issue an instruction.

This is where Daniel Pink’s work on motivation has been an important influence on our thinking. His articulation of autonomy, mastery and purpose gave accessible language to a substantial body of research about what happens when we experience some authorship over our work. Autonomy in this sense is not independence from everyone around us. It is having some meaningful control over what we do and how we do it.

That idea matters to us because playing to our preferences is ultimately about agency. We can play towards a preference, across it and sometimes deliberately against it. What changes when we understand the preference is not necessarily the situation. What changes is the amount of information we have available when deciding how to respond.

We also chose the word best carefully. We are not talking about being better than the person next to us. Our best is our own. It is what becomes possible when more of what we have is available to the work, when less energy is spent unnecessarily fighting the way we naturally operate, and when we retain enough agency to decide what matters when our preference and the situation do not line up neatly.

This belief in the essay, with sources →

There is nothing particularly strange about wanting a way to describe ourselves. We look for patterns everywhere, and recognising one in ourselves can be genuinely useful. A good description can give language to something we have noticed for years but never quite managed to articulate. There can even be a small moment of relief in reading something and thinking, yes, that sounds like me.

The difficulty begins only when a description stops being information about us and starts becoming the definition of us. “I recognise myself in this” is quite different from “this is what I am”. The first adds something to our understanding; the second can quietly place a boundary around it. We are interested in what happens when that boundary stays open.

This is not an argument against personality. Personality psychology has produced a substantial body of research showing meaningful and relatively enduring differences between us. Pretending that evidence does not exist simply because we are interested in preferences makes little sense to us. What interests us is that the research also gives us a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between relatively enduring patterns and the considerable variation in how we actually behave.

William Fleeson and Eranda Jayawickreme’s Whole Trait Theory is particularly useful here because it does not force us to choose between stability and movement. It treats traits partly as distributions of states, allowing us to have recognisable overall tendencies while still displaying a broad range of behaviour across everyday situations.

We recognise this easily in our own lives. We can enjoy company and still want to be alone. We can be cautious about one decision and surprisingly bold about another. We can be patient in one relationship and discover previously unknown limits to that patience in another. We can be confident in familiar territory and hesitant when everything around us is new. These are not necessarily contradictions waiting to be resolved. They are part of the range through which we move.

Alfred Adler’s thinking has influenced us here too, although from a very different psychological tradition. Adler called his approach Individual Psychology, but the name can be misleading to modern ears. His concern was not with understanding an isolated individual. He treated us holistically and socially, seeing our behaviour within the relationships, purposes and circumstances of our lives. Adlerian accounts describe behaviour as socially embedded and emphasise our creative capacity in shaping how we engage with the world rather than reducing us to a collection of fixed characteristics.

That feels important. We are not denying the patterns in ourselves. We are resisting the temptation to give any one description exclusive rights to the whole story.

Personality can tell us something. Experience tells us something. Preference tells us something. The situation tells us something. The person sitting opposite us may tell us something we had not noticed at all. Each can add to our understanding without becoming the final word on who we are.

This belief in the essay, with sources →

We rarely arrive anywhere as a completely context-free version of ourselves. We behave differently with an old friend and a new manager, differently when we know the territory and when we are finding our way through it, differently when we feel trusted and when we feel watched. The task matters, the relationship matters, the consequences matter, and sometimes whatever happened before breakfast matters more than any of us would ideally like.

This sounds obvious when we say it about everyday life. At work, however, behaviour can acquire a surprising permanence in the language used to describe it. Someone “isn’t confident”, “doesn’t collaborate”, “is indecisive” or “is difficult”. Perhaps that description captures something real. It may also describe what we have observed in a particular environment, around particular people, at a particular time.

The difference matters because behaviour can become evidence of character very quickly. If I speak less in one team than another, there may be something useful to learn about me. There may also be something useful to learn about the team. If I become cautious around a particular colleague, the explanation may not live entirely inside my personality. If I become more willing to take risks once I understand an area well, the apparent change in me may be partly a change in the circumstances surrounding me.

Rory Sutherland has spent much of his career making context difficult to ignore. His work at Ogilvy has deliberately looked for small contextual changes that produce disproportionately large changes in behaviour, often in places where a conventionally rational account misses what is actually happening. Ogilvy describes this as looking for “unseen opportunities” in behaviour, where relatively small changes in context can transform how we think and act.

We like the intellectual mischief in that. Sutherland repeatedly asks what happens when apparently irrational behaviour makes more sense once we stop removing the circumstances surrounding it. His broader argument is not that rationality has no place, but that our tidy explanations of why we behave as we do are often produced after the event.

We recognise something similar at work. Before deciding that a behaviour reveals who we are, it is worth becoming interested in where, when and with whom it appeared.

None of this makes us infinitely malleable. Context is not a magical explanation for everything we do, nor does it remove our ownership of our behaviour. We bring our own history, habits and tendencies into every situation. The point is that situations bring something too.

Person-environment fit research has examined this relationship for decades. A major meta-analysis covering 172 studies and 836 effect sizes considered fit between us and our jobs, organisations, groups and supervisors, finding meaningful relationships with workplace attitudes and outcomes. Whole Trait Theory reaches similar territory from personality science by incorporating the ways in which we react differently to different situations.

We are neither blank sheets written on by our environment nor fixed objects unaffected by it. We meet the situation, and something happens in the meeting.

That shifts the question in a useful way. Alongside “what am I like?” we gain “what happens to me here?” and, perhaps more interestingly, “what is it about here?” Sometimes the answer tells us something about ourselves. Sometimes it tells us something about a relationship, a task or an environment. Often it tells us a little about all of them.

This belief in the essay, with sources →

Most of us only need to look backwards to discover that we have changed. Work that once excited us can lose some of its attraction. Something that once terrified us can become familiar. We acquire experience, confidence, responsibility and occasionally a little perspective. We enter new relationships, leave old ones, change roles, recover from setbacks, discover things we are good at and learn that some things we were very sure about earlier in life have become considerably less certain.

It seems odd to us to acknowledge all of that movement and then assume that how we prefer to work remains untouched by it.

This does not mean that our preferences change every morning or that nothing about us persists. We can recognise themes that have been with us for years. Some ways of operating can feel so familiar that they seem woven into us. The point is not that everything moves. It is that movement itself does not invalidate what came before.

A preference expressed five years ago may have been an entirely accurate description of us at the time. If it looks different today, one interpretation is that the earlier understanding was wrong. Another is that something changed. Our role may have changed. Our confidence may have grown. A relationship may have altered the way we experience something. Repeated exposure may have turned unfamiliar territory into familiar ground. Life may simply have happened.

This is where we part company with the idea that consistency is always evidence of accuracy and movement evidence of error. Sometimes movement is the interesting information.

The broader personality literature gives us good reason to take psychological change seriously. Research examining personality across time and through interventions has found measurable movement in traits previously regarded in much more fixed terms. This research concerns personality rather than our particular conception of working preferences, so we do not use it to claim more than it demonstrates. It simply gives us another reason to remain suspicious of permanence as the only marker of a meaningful measurement.

For us, the implication is modest but important. We are interested in understanding ourselves as we are now without requiring that understanding to become a lifetime contract. A snapshot can be valuable precisely because it captures a moment. Its usefulness does not depend on pretending that the moment will never move.

We can recognise ourselves without freezing ourselves.

This belief in the essay, with sources →

We have a remarkable talent for converting difference into judgement. Careful becomes slow. Fast becomes reckless. Independent becomes aloof. Collaborative becomes needy. Structured becomes rigid. Flexible becomes chaotic. Thorough becomes pedantic. Broad thinking becomes superficial. The original behaviour has barely had time to sit down before we have given it a moral character.

What interests us is the small but important step between noticing a difference and deciding what that difference means.

If I prefer to gather more information before making a decision, that preference does not make me more responsible than someone comfortable acting earlier. Equally, their willingness to move with uncertainty does not make them more dynamic than me. Either of us can use our preference brilliantly. Either of us can overuse it to the point where everyone around us begins to lose patience.

Preference is not virtue, and it is not ability. We can have a strong preference for detail and still miss something important. We can enjoy taking risks and repeatedly take bad ones. We can value collaboration and be poor listeners. We can prefer independence while producing work of exceptional value to a team. The quality and consequences of what we do remain open to evaluation. Our preference simply does not settle that evaluation in advance.

This distinction protects something we think matters. If every preference carries an implied opposite weakness, self-understanding can become a disguised exercise in deficit hunting. Once one end of a difference is regarded as desirable, the other begins to look like something requiring correction. We become more interested in moving ourselves towards an approved ideal than in understanding what each way of operating contributes in a particular situation.

Adler’s emphasis on the whole individual and the social context offers an older counterpoint to that kind of reduction. His Individual Psychology was concerned with the meaning we give our experiences, the purposes towards which we move and the social world of which we are part. That is very different from treating one isolated characteristic as a verdict on our worth.

We can still talk about consequences. We can care about quality. We can decide that a particular behaviour is getting in the way. We simply do not have to turn the preference underneath it into a judgement about the person.

This belief in the essay, with sources →

Understanding ourselves becomes valuable when it changes the range of choices available to us. Without that, self-awareness can become little more than an interesting description. We recognise something, perhaps nod along with it, and return to exactly the same pattern with a slightly better vocabulary for explaining why it happens.

Suppose I know that I prefer time to think before responding. That information does not tell me what to do. I may ask for material before a meeting, take a few minutes before answering an important question or tell someone that I want to think before committing. In another situation I may choose to answer immediately because speed matters more to me in that moment than my preferred way of processing the issue.

The important part is that I can see the choice.

The same is true when we knowingly work against a preference. If ambiguity takes energy from us, we may seek more information when it is available. When it is not, we may decide that what we want to achieve matters more than the discomfort of moving without certainty. Knowing the preference has not constrained us. It has made the decision more conscious.

This is where Pink’s articulation of autonomy becomes particularly relevant. In Drive, autonomy concerns having a measure of control over what we do and how we do it. It sits alongside mastery and purpose as one of the three elements he identifies in enduring motivation. The deeper research tradition of Self-Determination Theory makes a related distinction between more autonomous and more controlled forms of motivation.

For us, agency is not the same thing as unlimited freedom. Work contains customers, contracts, budgets, deadlines, laws, commitments and other human beings with plans of their own. We operate inside constraints all the time. Agency lives within that reality, in our capacity to understand more of what is happening and take ownership of our response.

This brings us closer to what we mean by Self. Self is larger than self-awareness. It includes our preferences and patterns, but also our capacity to choose, to act and to recognise cause and effect. Our actions enter the world and have consequences. We do not control all of those consequences, and we are not the cause of everything that happens to us. We can still own the part that belongs to us.

That ownership matters because understanding is not an alibi. Knowing why we behave in a particular way does not make the consequences disappear. It gives us more information from which to decide what happens next.

This belief in the essay, with sources →

There is a point in most working relationships when another person’s behaviour stops making sense. They ask another question when the answer appears perfectly obvious. They make a decision when there are clearly seventeen more things worth investigating. They want an agenda. They do not want an agenda. They send an update we did not ask for or fail to send the one we were waiting for. What seems completely reasonable to one of us can look mystifying from the other side of the table.

The gap between what we observe and what we understand rarely stays empty for long. We fill it with a story. We decide that someone is controlling, indecisive, careless, uncommitted, rigid, over-sensitive or uninterested. Sometimes we are right. The difficulty is that once the explanation has arrived, it begins organising the evidence that follows. Another request for information confirms that they are obstructive. Another quick decision confirms that they are reckless.

Curiosity does something rather modest to that process. It delays the verdict.

This is where we are happy to acknowledge a less academic influence on our thinking. Ted Lasso has a scene in which Ted recalls encountering the phrase “Be curious, not judgmental.” What matters to us is what he does with the idea. His argument is that those who underestimated him had reached their conclusions without becoming interested enough to ask the questions that might have changed them. The scene appears in the first season episode The Diamond Dogs.

There is something profoundly attractive to us in that stance. Not because curiosity makes everyone secretly delightful, and not because understanding obliges us to agree. It simply leaves open the possibility that our first explanation is incomplete.

There is a considerable difference between asking what is wrong with someone and wondering what is happening between us. The second question includes ourselves and the context. It allows for the possibility that a difference between us is producing friction neither of us fully understands.

Once preferences enter that conversation, previously baffling behaviour can become more intelligible. The colleague asking for another detail may not be trying to derail us; they may want more certainty than we do before feeling ready to move. Our desire to press ahead may look equally baffling to them. Understanding the difference does not decide which of us has the better answer. It gives us better information about the disagreement.

Amy Edmondson’s foundational research on psychological safety adds an empirical dimension to this territory. Her work concerns the conditions in which interpersonal risk becomes possible within teams and its relationship with learning behaviour. We do not use psychological safety as a synonym for comfort or permanent agreement. Its relevance is that learning from one another becomes difficult when asking, questioning, admitting uncertainty or offering a different perspective carries too much interpersonal risk.

Ted Lasso is fiction. Edmondson is research. We do not confuse the two. They meet here because one gives memorable human expression to something we value and the other helps us understand why environments that permit inquiry and interpersonal risk matter.

Curiosity allows us to remain interested in each other for a little longer. Sometimes that additional interest changes nothing. Sometimes it changes the whole conversation.

This belief in the essay, with sources →

Our central belief creates an obvious problem. If I do my best work when I play to my preferences, and you do your best work when you play to yours, what happens when our preferences point in different directions?

The tempting answer is to decide whose preference takes precedence. I adapt to you or you adapt to me. One of us gets the meeting we like, the level of detail we prefer, the pace that feels comfortable or the way of communicating that comes most naturally. It sounds like a choice between generosity and self-interest.

We think that misses how relationships actually develop.

Working together is rarely one exchange. We meet again. We remember what happened. We learn something about each other. I make an adjustment towards you and notice how you respond. You adjust towards me somewhere else. Sometimes one of us cares more strongly about the issue. Sometimes the demands of the work make one approach more sensible. Sometimes we find a third way that did not belong to either of us at the beginning.

This is mutuality, which is different from permanent compromise. It does not require us to split every difference down the middle or maintain a private ledger of who accommodated whom last. It means both of us remain present in the relationship.

The old parable of the long chopsticks captures the idea rather well. Two rooms contain the same food and the same chopsticks, which are too long for anyone to bring the food to their own mouth. In one room everyone goes hungry trying to feed themselves. In the other, they use the same awkward chopsticks to feed the person opposite. The interesting thing is not that the second room has discovered self-sacrifice. Feeding the person opposite is also how each person gets fed.

That idea sits at the heart of our earlier exploration of whether we play to my preference or yours. The answer we arrived at was not one or the other but a reciprocal loop. Adaptation offered can make reciprocal adaptation more likely, and cooperation can become something sustained over repeated interaction rather than won in a single exchange.

Alfred Adler was exploring a deeper version of this territory a century ago. His idea of Gemeinschaftsgefühl, usually translated as community feeling or social interest, placed our connectedness and capacity for cooperation at the centre of his psychology. Adler’s individual was never really isolated. Work itself was one of the major social tasks through which we encounter our interdependence with others.

That matters because mutuality is not an optional act of niceness attached to otherwise individual work. Most work is already interdependent. Even the most independently minded among us relies on customers, colleagues, suppliers, infrastructure, knowledge created by someone else and relationships through which our work acquires value.

Research on reciprocity and repeated cooperation gives us another route into the same territory. Gouldner described reciprocity as a pervasive social norm. Regan’s experimental work showed how receiving a favour can influence later reciprocal behaviour. Axelrod’s repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma work demonstrated how cooperative strategies can emerge and persist across repeated interactions.

None of this promises that generosity is always returned or that every relationship becomes cooperative if we are sufficiently thoughtful. Human beings are considerably less obliging than that.

Our belief is simpler. Working well together does not require either of us to disappear. My preferences remain relevant when I adapt towards yours. Yours remain relevant when you adapt towards mine. Mutuality is not the compromise between my preference and yours. It is the mechanism by which both can remain in the relationship.

This belief in the essay, with sources →

Culture is one of those words that can become more impressive as it becomes less tangible. Organisations write values, define behaviours, describe purpose and invest enormous effort in explaining what sort of place they want to be. These things can matter because intention matters. They tell us something about what we hope to create together.

We experience culture somewhere more ordinary as well. We experience it in what happens repeatedly.

It appears in how we speak to one another, how decisions really get made, how comfortable we are saying that something is going wrong and what happens after someone makes a mistake. It appears in who talks, who gets heard, what earns approval, what gets ignored and what becomes too tiring to challenge. We discover it in the stories that get repeated and in the behaviour that nobody bothers explaining because everybody already knows that this is simply how things work here.

Over time, repetition turns behaviour into normality. Once something feels normal, it becomes remarkably difficult to see.

Edgar Schein’s work gives this distinction a particularly useful foundation. His model separates observable artefacts from espoused beliefs and values and from deeper underlying assumptions. The values we declare and the assumptions embedded in everyday organisational life do not necessarily tell identical stories. That gap is where some of the most interesting questions about culture begin.

Our phrase “culture is what becomes normal between us” is deliberately simpler. It expresses what interests us most about culture in everyday work: patterns of language and behaviour acquire meaning through repetition and through the assumptions we collectively begin to take for granted.

There is a connection here with Howard Gossage, although it comes from a very different field. Gossage spent his career resisting the idea that communication entitled the communicator to attention. His advertising was conversational, participative and suspicious of the assumption that an audience existed merely to receive whatever someone had decided to transmit.

That has stayed with us because organisational culture is also communication made habitual. We cannot announce our way into being trusted, collaborative, curious or open any more than an advertiser can purchase genuine interest simply by purchasing space. What matters is what happens in the relationship.

This makes culture less remote. It is not something happening somewhere above us in the organisation. We participate in it every time we work together. The way we respond to disagreement becomes part of it. So does the way we use authority, share information, take decisions and treat someone who tells us something we did not want to hear.

Some of what becomes normal serves us beautifully. Some of it made sense once and has quietly outlived the circumstances that created it. Some of it is invisible until somebody new arrives and asks the irritatingly simple question that nobody already inside the system remembers to ask.

Seeing culture in this way changes it from a statement about who we claim to be into an inquiry about what actually keeps happening between us.

This belief in the essay, with sources →

Change naturally pulls our attention towards the future. We describe the organisation we want to become, the culture we want to create, the behaviours we want to see and the outcomes we want to produce. There is energy in that future orientation because change begins with some idea of a place different from the one we currently occupy.

The future, however, has to meet us where we are.

We are already working together in particular ways. We already have preferences, habits, relationships, assumptions, sources of energy and sources of frustration. We already know which conversations are easy and which ones everyone politely avoids. There are things in the present that support the future we want, things that pull in another direction and things we probably do not notice because they have become normal.

For us, this makes the present more than a problem waiting to be replaced. It is information.

John Kotter’s work on organisational change has influenced our thinking here for a long time. His original Harvard Business Review work emerged from observing more than 100 organisations attempting significant transformation. What stands out is how little successful change resembles the simple announcement of a destination. Urgency, coalition, direction, communication, obstacles, evidence of progress and the eventual embedding of change all involve the organisation that already exists.

That is important to us because change does not arrive in an empty room. It meets existing relationships, loyalties, frustrations, habits, preferences and assumptions. The future encounters the present before it becomes anything at all.

When a new set of values is announced and everyday behaviour continues unchanged, that tells us something. When a new way of working arrives enthusiastically and quietly evaporates a few weeks later, that tells us something too. When one team embraces a change that another resists, the difference is worth understanding before we decide that one group has a better attitude.

Schein’s distinction between espoused values and underlying assumptions is helpful again because it gives us a way of thinking about the distance between aspiration and what has become embedded in everyday experience. Kotter brings another dimension by making the process of movement itself visible.

We are particularly interested in the gap between what we say we want and what we currently do, but not as evidence for a prosecution. A gap is not automatically hypocrisy, resistance or failure. Sometimes it tells us that an aspiration has not yet found a way into everyday behaviour. Sometimes it reveals a genuine tension between two things we value. Sometimes the existing way of working contains knowledge that the new idea has overlooked.

Seeing more clearly gives us a chance to find out.

This is why change, for us, starts with curiosity about what is already here rather than dissatisfaction with those of us who are here. We can understand the existing patterns, the preferences underneath some of them and the conditions that keep them in place. From there, what we want to preserve, alter or create becomes a much more interesting conversation.

The future still matters. We simply have a better chance of reaching it when we know where we are beginning.

This belief in the essay, with sources →