The words hang in the air, thick and syrupy like cheap perfume in a hot car. ‘Well, of course Mark is questioning the process. He’s an ENTP.’

And just like that, Mark ceases to be Mark. He is no longer the guy who has been with the company for 13 years, who single-handedly fixed the disastrous server migration of ’23, who can tell you the precise pressure at which the office coffee machine produces a palatable espresso. He is no longer a person with valid, experience-based concerns about a workflow that is demonstrably inefficient. He is a type. A four-letter code that explains him, categorizes him, and conveniently dismisses him all at once.

I feel a familiar tightness in my chest. I’ve been in this meeting, or a version of it, at least 43 times. The names change, the acronyms on the whiteboard evolve, but the fundamental shortcut remains the same. We have become absolutely addicted to the neatly packaged fiction of personality tests. We use them to hire, to form teams, to explain friction. We’ve taken the beautiful, chaotic, unpredictable mess of human personality and tried to shove it into 16 neat little boxes. It’s corporate astrology, and we’re all pretending to read the stars while the ship is taking on water.

The Personal Cost of Labels

I should be clear: I am a hypocrite. There was a time I clung to these labels like a life raft. I once managed a team of designers, and I had their four-letter codes pinned to a corkboard above my desk. I remember one person in particular, a brilliant illustrator who was quiet, reserved, almost painfully shy. Her test results came back as an INFJ, the ‘Advocate.’ So, in my infinite wisdom, I decided she needed to be advocated for. I put her on our most demanding client account, a project that required 3 daily stand-ups and constant, aggressive communication. I thought I was helping her ‘grow.’

It was a complete and utter disaster. She wasn’t growing; she was wilting. The quality of her work, usually stunning, plummeted. She called in sick 3 times in a month. I had taken a masterful artist and tried to turn her into a mediocre account manager based on a quiz she took on a Wednesday afternoon. I wasn’t managing a person; I was managing a label. The mistake cost us a contract worth $373,000 and, more importantly, it nearly cost us an incredible talent. It took me months to undo the damage, to rebuild the trust I had broken by refusing to see the person right in front of me.

The Allure of the Easy Way

Why do we do this? The answer is both simple and damning: because it’s easy. Real management is hard. It is a slow, painstaking process of observation and conversation. It’s learning that Sarah gets her best work done before 10 AM, that David needs to talk through a problem to solve it, and that Maria needs total silence to concentrate. It’s messy, it’s unscalable, and it doesn’t fit neatly on a PowerPoint slide. A personality test offers a seductive alternative. It gives us a language, a simple shorthand to discuss profound differences without the risk of actual, vulnerable conversation. It feels scientific, objective. But it’s a feeling, not a fact.

Most of these tests, especially the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, have shockingly poor scientific credentials. Their test-retest reliability is low, meaning you can get a different result just weeks apart. There’s no evidence they predict job performance. Yet, they persist. They persist because the need they fill is emotional, not logical. They provide a sense of order in the face of human complexity.

Seeing Beyond the Surface

I knew a guy, Liam S., a museum lighting designer. This was his entire job: to make people see things clearly. He once told me that the secret to lighting a 3,000-year-old sculpture wasn’t just pointing a bright light at it. That just washes it out. The secret was in shaping the shadows, in lighting the space around the object to give it depth and context. His boss, a man who loved spreadsheets more than art, had the whole department take a personality assessment. Liam was classified as an ‘Architect’ type. So, naturally, his boss tried to move him from the creative work of shaping light to the logistical work of designing wiring grids and electrical loadouts. He saw the label and completely missed the artist.

They almost lost him.

He almost left. They almost lost the very person whose unique approach to light and shadow was responsible for an exhibit that brought in a record 233,000 visitors.

The Simple Truth

We build these immense, intricate corporate systems for understanding each other, full of frameworks and jargon and multi-day certification courses. We spend thousands of dollars trying to decipher our employees’ inner worlds with color-coded charts, all while ignoring the most direct path to understanding: talking to them. It’s the corporate equivalent of building a Rube Goldberg machine to do something as simple as شحن تيك توك. It’s a solution so complex it makes you forget the original problem was simple. People want to be seen, understood, and equipped to do their work well. They don’t want to be a code.

And yet, I’ll admit-and this is the contradiction I can’t seem to solve-there are days I miss the simplicity of it. I miss the shared language, however flawed. One is a shortcut. The other is the start of a real conversation. The hard conversation.

It’s throwing away the star chart and navigating by the actual stars, however distant and difficult to read they may be. It’s sitting down with Mark after the meeting and asking a simple question: ‘Hey, you seemed frustrated in there. What part of the process isn’t working?’ And then, and this is the most critical part, actually shutting up and listening to the answer.