Mike Lehr's Blog

Word choice is a function of personality. Yes, circumstances like jobs might require specific words but much room remains to choose other words. Sometimes, a single expression can give us all the insight we need.

For example, while with a previous employer, I helped a call center with customer service strategies and techniques over the phone. The center was transitioning between managing executives. When the new executive arrived, she heard about my help’s success. She wanted to meet and discuss me joining her team. After laying out her vision, she showed me a chart expressing the new functional detail for each job. Each job was shown as a box.

At the end of her review, she closed by pointing to the chart and asking, “So Mike, what I really want to know is which box do you want to be in?” To see the significance of this insight into her personality, it would help to contrast it with other possibilities:

• “. . . which box do you want to be in?”
• “. . . what kind of contribution would you like to make?”
• “. . . how would you like to help me?”
• “. . . where do you think your talents might work best?”
• “. . . where does your interest lie?”

What happened in this executive’s case is that her feelings about her reorganization plan produced certain emotions. They caused her intuition to influence her cognition in a manner that caused her to express people as mere fillers of boxes. We can see the emotional differences between her question and these other variants. Emotions illuminate personalities.

In the end, as you probably suspected, I did not join her team. She left the company after only being there thirteen months.