Go Share Make Be

All Gaul is divided into four parts, or maybe five. So Julius Caesar emails Brutus, Cassius, and Casca a link to Survey Monkey to take a personality quiz.

2015 will go down as The Year of the Personality Type Surveys. 

Learning styles

• visual
• tactile 
• auditory 

Don't tell me you have provided a printout of the Power Point so nobody has to take notes! If I can't take notes, I'm outta here no matter how good the snacks look. If there are no snacks, forget it!

Calm/Storm workplace communications  This survey yielded colors and numbers I never did understand. The quiz was based on the Friendly Press style profile for coworkers. Results and categorizations of staff based on this survey were disputed adding to workplace discomfort.*

Team player type

• collaborator
• contributor 
• communicator 
• challenger

True Colors 

• green--inventive, conceptual, complex
• gold--responsible, loyal, conventional
• blue--compassionate, poetic, dramatic
• orange--active, daring, exciting

Our trainer tried to correlate our True Colors results with the four team player types, but it did not hold up, and we got to go home early. 

Chef Team-Building

For this staff event we expected to be randomly assigned to groups to cook a meal within time constraints. Instead we were allowed to divide ourselves based on attraction. I had worried a lot about which staff members I could envision working with in the kitchen. I was growing fond of the everybody, but that didn't mean I could cook with them! I bet you could try the same thing at a big family holiday dinner. By attraction we ended up in comfortable groups of similar approaches and time use styles. The food was good, too.

Some facilitators split us into groups by type. Other threw us into a big flour tortilla with one person from each category for a Chipotle burrito exercise. If money was no object, what would you do? From this I developed my four Gaul parts. I think we each have an overriding motivation:

• Go
• Share
• Make
• Be

You have a responsibility to tell me I'm full of it until I upload my online quiz and start raking in the big bucks. 

The United States Institute for Peace has a conflict styles quiz. It is short. 

• avoider
• compromiser
• competer
• accomodator
• problem-solver

John Janovy wrote in Chapter 11 of  Keith County Journal that we work for one of four reasons

• love 
• joy 
• pride 
• money

As Sixties kids we wondered which of the Beatles we would date

• John?
• Paul?
• George?
• Ringo?

And then there's the matter of backbones. Which vertebrate are you?

• fish 
• amphibian 
• reptile 
• bird 
• mammal

*Grandma Halma had this framed poem on the pink bedroom wall for the calm and the storm:

It is easy enough to be pleasant

When life goes by like a song,

But the man worthwhile 

is the man with a smile

when everything goes dead wrong.

May 2016 be your year of staying in the cave grunting and snarling at passing coworkers and saber-tooth tigers.

© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder