Ho Ho Heigh Ho: Gifts, Organizational Design, and Belonging at Work
Santa. Brave New Workplace. And Bob Merberg's Parachute, Upside-Down.
Gift suggestions, followed by my mind-blowing experience with a Big 5 -based job profile app (which you can try, too)…
🎁 Clocking in with Santa
Looking for the perfect book to leave for the kiddos under the Christmas tree? Check out Raymond Briggs’ classic, Father Christmas. This heartwarming story reimagines an endearing but weary Santa navigating the challenges of workaday life.
I’m unable to add Father Christmas to the Heigh Ho bookstore, but you know where to find it.
🎁 Brave New Workplace
If you’re looking for nonfiction as a gift for the leader or worker advocate in your life — one who favors the kind of thoughtful, well-informed perspective absent from the business bestseller list — look no further than Julian Barling’s Brave New Workplace: Designing Productive, Healthy, and Safe Organizations.
Barling draws on decades of research to explore 7 essential elements of thriving work organizations. He examines the outcomes when organizations successfully implement these elements, neglect them entirely, or push “too much of a good thing,” while carefully considering the influences of gender dynamics and culture.
If I could only recommend one new book to my wellness colleagues who aspire to rise above the trendy self-help solutions flooding the wellness space, this is the book. Brave New Workplace is available in the Heigh Ho bookshop (for US delivery only) or from your “prime” e-commerce sweatshop.
My Parachute… Upside-Down
Over on Bluesky, I expanded my horizons in an exchange with Brent Reed, a PhD candidate in Organizational Science. Brent shared a journal article, Personality Profiles of 263 Occupations, based on a study led by Kätlin Anni.
The findings are rooted in the 5-Factor Model of Personality, which identifies traits on 5 fundamental spectrums (i.e. the Big 5): Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience. Organizational psychologists recognize the Big 5 as a valid framework for personality assessment (in contrast to what I'll call “Big $” assessments — popular with major corporations, vendors, and tipsy party-goers — that unreliably cram you into binary categories, like you’re either Thinking or Feeling, Judging or Perceiving, etc.).
Sharing his takeaways, Brent, who wasn’t involved with the study, explained:
It doesn’t just explore the link between personality and jobs — it also offers insights for helping people discover careers that align with who they are.
The study was accompanied by an app that, after completing a questionnaire, identifies your traits and compares you to the nearly 70,000 job holders in the occupations studied. The output lists jobs where you have the most in common with people, and those where you have least in common.
I took the assessment twice, and both times, of the 263 occupations studied, the results showed that I’d have the least in common with… HR Managers!
I reported back to Brent:
Having spent much of my career embedded in HR, I can’t disagree with it finding HR Manager to be the job with the ppl "least similar" to me. 😬
He replied:
I imagine these results help explain why many folks have felt like fish out of water at one time or another…
Of course! Popular tools like the classic What Color Is Your Parachute? self-assessment can help some people identify where they belong. This new tool, however, flips that model upside-down, offering me a sense of relief about why I felt I didn’t belong. (This is my interpretation — your mileage may vary.)
Belonging: Get the Funk Out
Much is made about workplace Belonging these days (nowhere is it covered more masterfully than in Brave New Workplace). And, increasingly, the so-called burnout epidemic is attributed not just to individual or organizational factors, but to misaligned person/job fit.
Using validated instruments and job profiles — in the context of frameworks like Belonging that go beyond just slapping a B (for Belonging) to the tail-end of DEI — we can help people and organizations avoid funks, and gain actionable insights into the ups and downs of our own vocational journeys.
Feeling you belong shapes the way you experience your work. — Julian Barling, Brave New Workplace
Follow Brent Reed on Bluesky.
Follow Bob Merberg on Bluesky.
Try the job profiler app. [Last accessed December 18, 2024]