The mirror you were handed

The mirrors you chose came first. Today, the mirror your employer held up, usually without telling you what it saw.

Companies have been testing people since Arnold Daniels built the Predictive Index for a Massachusetts manufacturer in 1955. Kathy Kolbe's index measures not what you think or feel but how you act when you're free to: your instinctive way of starting and finishing things. Hogan, from 1987, measures how you look to other people, including what you're like under stress, which is why boards use it. The Leadership Circle Profile is a 360 that maps creative competencies against reactive habits. Culture Index is the fast one small companies use to hire.

They share one assumption: that behavior at work is predictable, that a job has a shape, and that the question is whether yours fits it. Predictive Index measures four drives. Kolbe measures four action modes, and its finding is that the modes don't change; most frustration at work is being asked to start things someone else's way. Hogan is the one with teeth: it measures reputation, not identity, and its scales name what you do when you're tired.

I've taken Culture Index and the Birkman. Both told me things I'd been told before by people I didn't listen to. That's the thing about these instruments. They are not for you. They're for the people deciding about you. Which means somewhere in your past there is probably a report that describes you, written in a language you never learned, that someone has been acting on.

This month is called You, and part of knowing yourself is knowing what others have been told about you. Not to resent it. To read it as if it were about a stranger, and see what it got right.