Fire the feeler!
Back in the early 2000s, when I was managing editor at Webmonkey (Wired magazine’s tech tutorial site), our parent company Lycos (!) sent me off to Waltham Massachusetts (!!) for management training (!!!).
They put me up at one of those long-stay executive hotels where there was no room service, but there was a microwave in my room and a freezer full of Hungry-man frozen dinners in the lobby.
Hungover from my first night of boneless fried chicken and corn, I rolled my uncomfortably full self into our first day training. The first thing they had us do was take an elaborate corporate personality test that took the whole morning to fill out. In the afternoon, they gave us our results (turned out I was a “feeler”), and they projected a grid of where we’d all tested out. The grid was divided into 4 quadrants, and three of the four squares will filled with dots. The top-right square only had one dot, and it was alllll the way up in the toppest-rightest corner.
The management coach guy who was leading things explained that each quadrant corresponded to a different office personality type, and each dot represented one of the managers in the room. The first quadrant was for “visionaries” (big-picture thinkers who dream dreams that can’t possibly come true until at least 5 years out). He asked how many of us tested as visionaries, and a bunch of dudes raised their hands. Then there were the “thinkers” (analyst types who keep up on the latest industry news and correct course accordingly). A slightly smaller group raised their hands. The third group was “workers” (Hufflepuff worker bees who just want to put their head down and go), which accounted for just about everyone else in room.
The only one left who hadn’t raised their hand was me. “So this last quadrant,” the coach said, waving his pointer around the all but empty top-right square, “is for the ‘feelers’ on our team. Which one of you is this?”
Slowly I raised my hand.
“Now,” he turned to the rest of the room, “if this was the distribution of the personality types on your own team of reports—lots of workers, lots visionaries, lots of thinkers, but hardly any feelers—how would go about managing this team?”
“FIRE THE FEELER!” yelled out one of the tippety-top highest level managers at Lycos.
The room erupted in laughter—me included. Because IT’S TRUE! No matter how much the training coach tried to backpedal (“actually feelers can be very valuable when it comes to empathizing with others, and anticipating problems in the org”), in truth highly sensitive feeler types like me can really be hard for corporate American to take.
Butt-hurt tender-hearted hand-wringers (BTHs), as I call us, AKA bathroom-criers, do tend to confuse and rattle their fellow employees with their canary-in-a-coal-mine truth talking, sky-is-falling doomsaying and general over-willingness to talk about the feelings.
But we’re really fun at office parties!
EPILOGUE: Right after I was outed as a feeler, I was compelled to leave early and walk-crawl back my to suite with an case of epic gut-emptying bout of food poisoning. Iffy Hungry-man chicken to the rescue!
