INTJ

When I was nearing the end of my time at AIG, we had an all-lawyer meeting in New York. By now, there were about 100 of us, from Dublin, Singapore, London, Boston, Greenwich, you name it. Oh and of course Wilmington, Delaware.

Before we arrived, the powers that be had us take the Myers-Briggs. For the uninitiated, the test is a series of questions designed to determine what personality type one is. The test has been criticized as meaningless, which is probably why it was used at AIG.

I took the test in my office and then forgot all about it until the meeting in New York. The people running the meeting (third party contractors of a human resource type) arranged a workshop based on the test. The result was that the 100 lawyers were grouped at tables according to their personality types, which are constituted of four choices.

For example, for those who haven’t experienced the test: I am an INTJ, which means that I am introverted (I) as opposted to extroverted (E); an intuitive thinker (N) rather than someone who depends on facts and reality (S, for senser); one who relies on logic and thinking (T) rather than one who values relationships (F, for feeling); one who prefers a structured lifestyle (J) rather than someone who goes with the flow (P). We make up a pretty small part of the population, which is a good thing.

I was surprised by who was at my table: the head international lawyer, Randy; the two head regulatory lawyers, Mervin and Dave; the head direct marketing lawyer, Estelle; a secondary international lawyer, an Englishman, Ian; and me. We were all INTJ’s ,which was disturbing.

An intuitive is not a good thing for a lawyer to be. The opposite, the S, a senser, is someone who gathers all the facts and examines them carefully before coming to a conclusion. Doesn’t that sound like a lawyer? Yet some of the most important lawyers in the company (not me, the other guys) were intuitives, likely to fly off the handle at a moment’s notice and make a decision based on what their gut feeling tells them is the right thing to do. For the good of the company, I wanted the others to be at a table full of S’s.

I learned as early as law school that a lawyer shouldn’t be intuitive. Law school mainly consists of reading cases, examining and evaluating the holdings, and understanding what the law is and how it came to be. When I read cases, after the first couple of sentences, I’d think, “Right, this is how this is coming out.” Usually I was wrong. Decision by intuition for a lawyer, no. Yet here they were, Estelle, Randy, Mervin and Dave, some of the most important lawyers in the company, making decisions by the expensive threads of the seat of their pants.

We sat, glumly silent, while the tables of extroverts chatted wildly. Finally the operatives gave us our assignment. I don’t remember precisely what it was, but, for an introvert, any assignment that required us to talk to anyone else was a bad one. So we heard our assignment, and you can imagine what happened at our table.

First, we all sat sullenly and wouldn’t talk to each other, and, if the others were like me, we all cursed the overlords for making us talk to each other. During this interlude, I managed a glance at Mervin’s test results: I had blown the top off of the introvert scale, much worse than Mervin. Mervin was famously grumpy and scary, and it pleased me that I was worse.

Finally, we stirred, looked at the project, and immediately concluded how it should come out without giving it overmuch thought.

Then, without any regard for coming to a consensus or what the losers who disagreed thought, we just decided that was it.

Then we sat quietly, arms crossed, smug that we had finished ahead of all of the other tables. And we didn’t have to talk to each other anymore! Win win.

Finally, when all of the other tables had been given a deadline and finally shut up, we were all asked to report on our findings. Once again, I have no memory of what they were. Instead, I focused with malign intent on the facilitators as they had forced me to engage with other lawyers in a problem-solving exercise, which, after all, couldn’t have been necessary. There are other, less invasive and obnoxious ways, to get across whatever it was that the extortionists had to say.

We were asked to present our solution. I don’t recall how it was that poor Mervin was forced to talk; it may be that he was less mortified by such an occasion. Mervin had to deal with state regulators on a regular basis. At some point, he essentially moved to California to negotiate some settlement over some horrible thing AIG had did. Typical Mervin, he forced himself to stay on eastern time to be able to communicate with New York on their time.

When Mervin came to Delaware, he had allegedly been known suddenly to drop to the floor and perform push-ups or say, “Hold on,” and rush out into the hallway and run up and down the stairwells for a while. As always in this blog when reporting on events of which I have no first-hand knowledge, I certainly hope these incidents weren’t apocryphal.

I don’t recall what Mervin said. He just looked at his notes and said his piece. The rest of us I’m sure thanked him from our souls for taking on such an onerous and humiliating task.

Next, a table of extroverts was given their chance, and they all stood up at once and started talking over each other.

Oh, so clever. What a great and imaginative show. Fucknuts. Everyone at our table gave them a sullen, oh wow you are so clever looks. One of them was a fellow from our department in Wilmington, and he was an over-the-top political type who was always inserting himself into conversations amongst the bigwigs. His real name is Ken Walma, and he can fuck right off, and he knows it. How do you like your president Trump, Ken?

Finally, the event ended, and I doubt that our table even acknowledged each other as we strode off.

To this exercise there seemed as little point as anything that human resources did; at AIG, it was a department generally ridiculed, and it seemed right that they had to hire a third party, no doubt at exorbitant expense, to develop this exercise, which seemed likely to have no impact at all. What was the point?

But wait. When we got back to Wilmington, we began to see the point. There was a guy who reported to me. Our boss, Robert called him Donnie-Bag-o-Donuts when he began to bring in donuts on Fridays. Then, after reading a men’s health magazine, he quit. Then Robert called him Donnie-No-Donuts. Donnie used to annoy me because I would propose a solution to some problem, and he would just sit at his desk, frowning, not speaking. I’d think, “Come on, Donnie, this is where we’re ending up.” It used to annoy me no end.

Then I found out that Donnie was an S, a senser. Oh. That was just how he thought. He HAD to gather all of the facts and think about them, turn them over and over in his mind, massage them, worry about them, before he made a decision. And, as I said earlier, that’s the way a lawyer ought to think. We got along a lot better after that.

Our boss used to annoy us by taking longer to make a decision than some of us would have preferred. We’d be exasperated because these were decisions, being above our pay grade, were what a general counsel needed to take, . Then we realized: oh, he’s a P, not a J. It doesn’t bother him. He’d rather take longer and make sure it was the right decision. It didn’t bother him to have files sitting on his desk like it would us.

Now I think it speaks to his confidence. And to my knowledge, no one ever complained about our department taking too long to make decisions—thanks to him, our department had a good reputation. OK, they complained that it took too long for Donnie and me to review boring and stupid advertising. I would suggest to those people that their remedy is to learn to write ads that weren’t shockingly ignorant and violated the law.

And that extrovert sonuvabitch, Ken, well, we didn’t like him better, but at least we understood him. He’s still a suck up and a Republican, but, OK, he can’t help himself.

I’ve never forgotten that experience. The bigger lesson, I think, is to understand that there can be value in just about everything. We had a department of about six lawyers at that point, and tension and conflict were an enormous issue. We actively disliked each other, though we went to lunch together a lot to discuss which clients were trying to game us. But at least we understood each other a little better thanks to the Myers-Briggs. And I think we liked each other better too, which, in that group, was no small thing.

Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, the mother-daughter team who have subjected millions to the drudgery and humiliation of their test.