Ethical to hire only Deltas in my company?

[Hawkeye]

Hi guys.

My first post here!


Anyway.

I'm EII and plan to start my own company at some point in the future.

I have a few questions that I would appreciate some input on.



Do you guys think it would be unethical for me to insist on only hiring other Deltas?

I my previous job, it was a mix of primarily Gamma and Delta, and I found that virtually all of the toxic office politics originated from the Gammas engaging in destructive power struggles, making everyone's lives miserable in the process.

By contrast, in my current workplace it just so happens that everyone is Delta, and the work environment has been absolutely sublime in its total lack of conflict. Everyone literally gets along perfectly, and it genuinely feels like one big happy family.

Naturally, when I start my own company, I want that same kind of harmony and peace. I see office politics and power struggles as a total waste of time and productivity.

However, in conversations with HR people in the past, I've heard them say that it's unethical to hire people based on their MBTI types. This makes me wonder if the same principle would apply to Socionics?

Or could it be argued that it's unethical to hire people if I already know they will be incompatible and likely to clash with each other? Can it be reasonably said that I have a "moral obligation" to hire only people of compatible Socionic types?

What do you guys think?

[Tallmo]

Hi guys.

However, in conversations with HR people in the past, I've heard them say that it's unethical to hire people based on their MBTI types. This makes me wonder if the same principle would apply to Socionics?

What do you guys think?

HR people have their own guidelines and they are no experts on typology. If you have your own company you decide yourself. Besides, it would be a mistake to hire based on MBTI. Socionics is different though.

Why are you even asking this? Of course you put together the team you want to work with if you have a chance to do so.

[Adam Strange]

Hi guys.

My first post here!


Anyway.

I'm EII and plan to start my own company at some point in the future.

I have a few questions that I would appreciate some input on.



Do you guys think it would be unethical for me to insist on only hiring other Deltas?

I my previous job, it was a mix of primarily Gamma and Delta, and I found that virtually all of the toxic office politics originated from the Gammas engaging in destructive power struggles, making everyone's lives miserable in the process.

By contrast, in my current workplace it just so happens that everyone is Delta, and the work environment has been absolutely sublime in its total lack of conflict. Everyone literally gets along perfectly, and it genuinely feels like one big happy family.

Naturally, when I start my own company, I want that same kind of harmony and peace. I see office politics and power struggles as a total waste of time and productivity.

However, in conversations with HR people in the past, I've heard them say that it's unethical to hire people based on their MBTI types. This makes me wonder if the same principle would apply to Socionics?

Or could it be argued that it's unethical to hire people if I already know they will be incompatible and likely to clash with each other? Can it be reasonably said that I have a "moral obligation" to hire only people of compatible Socionic types?

What do you guys think?

@Hawkeye, I've thought about this a lot. A lot. I've been experimenting for years, as a matter of fact.

Yes, it is unethical to hire based on MBTI or on Socionics or race or color or creed or anything else, other than the ability to do the job.

On the other hand, I was in a factory near Detroit and there were no blacks working there. When I asked the foreman about that, he said "We don't hire ******s here." The place went out of business a few years later from lack of talent.

So hiring the best, regardless of what they look like or what they do in their spare time, is going to be your most essential strategy. If you only hire your friends or the people that you like, you will find yourself engaged in an emotionally difficult and very expensive waste of as much time as you keep that clusterfuck going.

Human talent is your only advantage. Don't start building your house on a foundation of stuff you brought home from the city dump because you liked it. Hire the best. And if you don't believe that the best arise from all groups, then you are already at a disadvantage to your competitors.

OK, having said that, you should start your hires with people who can help you the most with the least amount of input from you. The whole idea of hiring someone is to offload the work that you are doing onto someone who is better at it than you, so you can concentrate on 1. Making your vision a reality, and 2. The things that you do best.
That means, most likely, hiring Duals, Identicals, and Mirrors. People from your Quadra. You don't need to justify your choices in most states when the number of employees is small. Also, look for quality minorities. They are often just waiting for a chance to prove themselves, which is much better than hiring some entitled asshole who thinks that he or she invented language so they are done working for the day.

Once you have a few people on board who share your vision and who think the same way you do, you will (should) find that they lack talent in certain areas that you need talent in. If you are Delta, those areas are Ti and Fe, but what you will practically find is that you can't get any Deltas to do a job very well that is essential to your business. You are going to have to hire Alphas or Gammas. You might even have to hire some Betas. Your ability to manage this successfully will say a lot about who you are as a person.

You might even discover why most businesses fail in the first two years.

But hopefully not. Best of luck to you.

[consentingadult]

It is not uncommon for groups cultures to organically develop into a specific quadra culture, by people unconsciously selecting other people from their own quadra. So ethically th ere is no objection, imho.

One should, however, keep in the back of ones mind that Deltas are not suitable for every kind of job. Especially in sales it pays not to place your bets on one specific quadra. Also, not all Deltas are mentally healthy people and as such can screw up your business or team spirit.

Last but not least. in this day and age there can be some overlap between quadra values and subcutural values. Over here in the Netherlands, if you only hire Deltas, you probably won't be catching a lot of people with color of skin. You figure out the consequences of that.

[Sol]

it's doubtful you'll can type good enough to be sure anyone has types you think

if you want "nice" people - choose which you perceive so
if you want good in something else - the same

there are no objectively good typing methods and typers. a half can be typed incorrectly and you may understand this after a time. you may also reject deltas due to mistypings

Where good friendship is not supposed to be main requirement, types are lesser useful.
Besides you may reject people good enough and even better, but having lesser "nice" Jung type. Also, to be "nice" Jung type is one of factors.

In sum. To use more common approaches is more reasonable in your situation.

-

If you very want people of some types. At 1st it's good to make or find an IRL communication group and watch people there for some time to identify their types. To type correctly people which you don't know good needs higher skills. Such group may to be for people having interests in a region where you want to cooperate. Also you may communicate individually. This may reduce the quantity of mistakes from >40% to mb <30% - they may stay in significant quantity. Think, is it acceptable %.

[ooo]

it's a bad move to mix "friends" and work

[Moonbeaux Rainfox]

No awareness for logic of dynamics.

[Moonbeaux Rainfox]

Post also smells like someone, who needs to have their scapegoats ready for day x.

[SGF]

What do you guys think?

[xerx]

One company I've worked for uses Myers Briggs to make hiring decisions. I think it's ridiculous.

Personality theory isn't exactly empirical science, and my advice is to not rely on it for major decisions. Just go with your gut. Unless you have an actual Socionics test on hand, none of which are reliable to begin with, your method of typing people is already going to rely on guess-work and intuition.

[Grendel]

There's nothing ethical about narrowing the outrageous standards of employability even further than they already are. It's impossible enough to land anything these days as it is. These suits trying to psychotype people from a distance with formulas to determine who they want to use and who they don't deserve to be shot. If you can be as audacious as to claim things like healthcare are somehow human rights, you must believe work is a fundamental human right as well.

[Grendel]

When you force the outcome (without emphasizing the best of the best) you get this:

All-[demographic] casts like this aren't the result of settling with what you can find and getting first-come first-serve. In fact, they're the more calculated recruitment: getting only people with a certain trait, rather than taking what you get. Yes, within certain limits of basic qualification, mediocre-jobs should be recruiting on a first-come first-serve basis. You can't just dump all the mediocre into the furnace like this.

You cannot have a working society where only the top 50% most competent are even qualified to subsist for themselves. Not every company is a major-league sports team, niches like janitors and trashmen exist as well. Corporate culture has never been notorious for taking social responsibility "too far," only for their egregious entitlement to the highest efficiency at the cost of human well-being. This craze needs to stop, it's killing us.

[Beautiful sky]

Yes deltas work so well together except LSE with IEE- that’s more like war

[consentingadult]

It's not a question of ethics. Just because a person is Delta does not mean he will be right for the job or have the right skill set. And having a team of all Deltas will most likely emphasize certain blindspots. Do those blindspots overshadow the pros? A successful company is about finding people who can help cover your blindspots and optimize the company..

Sheer nonsense. Many especially smaller businesses over time develop into quadra-centric organizations through a process of 'natural selection'. Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta teams, and all these teams work fine. I have seen teams fall apart because someone left and was replaced by someone who didn't fit quadra wise. I mean, how difficult is it to figure out that replacing an LSE manager in a Delta team by an SLE is a recipe for disaster? I have seen it happen productivity dropping by 50% because Deltas didn't want to go beyond the call of duty anymore because of the management style of an SLE, which in itself was not really a bad style, but not suitable to lead a Delta team.

[Hawkeye]

HR people have their own guidelines and they are no experts on typology.

Ain't that the goddam truth lol.

Besides, it would be a mistake to hire based on MBTI.

Yes, in my experience MBTI is pretty useless on a practical level. I would never hire anyone on this basis.

Of course you put together the team you want to work with if you have a chance to do so.

True. I guess I'm trying to figure out how overt or covert I need to be about the fact that I'm including Socionics as a factor in my hiring process, considering how easily triggered people are these days, and how easy it's become for careers to end because of one small error in judgment.

[consentingadult]

Ok. Experiences will vary. My small business would sink to the ground if it was all Beta because there would be too much of an echo chamber.and the vision would get too lofty. It really depends on the needs of the particular company.

To your point, having a manager who doesn't align with the company would of course create friction, but sometimes having people who share similar values but from a different vantage point can be invaluable (that can't always be explained by socionics, sorry).

I look at it from a perspective of a cultural anthropologist, and that's what I see all the time. Now there are situations where people from different quadras can intermingle, e.g. you might see teams of mostly ST people in workshops. Such teams can coexist quite well, especially if people in such teams are allowed to work a lot just by themselves. Now the question is: what happens over time with such teams when people leave and have to be replaced? Now if team leader is the one who is hiring the new employee, you will see that over time the team will grow into something that centers heavily around one quadra. If the hiring is done by someone outside the team e.g. an HR Manager, than chances are more likely that the team stays diverse. Obviously, it is not always a good thing for a team to center on one quadra. Often it can go good for a while, until circumstances change and the team hasn't got the ability to adapt to the new conditions.

[Kalinoche buenanoche]

it is your company. You could start by hiring only deltas and see how that works out. you may even attract attention by telling the press that this is what you do. will be quirky. Actually maybe it's better to keep this under your hat. dunno. Also, it might be helpful to think that you are not doing this because it is ethical/not ethical/right/not right but because you are curious. Plus, a small company size may be more forgiving of this kind of experimentation.

[consentingadult]

One a side note, here is a scene from the movie 'Capitalism: A Love Story'. It runs from about 58:20 till 1:01:38. In this scene Michael Moore makes a case for what he sees as 'democratically led and worker-owned companies', which he sees as a fair alternative to the typical capitalist way of organizing businesses.

https://youtu.be/yLDIoO_ug2c?t=3500

My question is: what do we see when we look at the faces of these workers, especially in the first example? And what can we conclude from that, what is it Michael Moore fails to see? Try to look at this situation from a Socionics perspective, like a sociologist or a cultural anthropologist, not from the POV of a single individual who projects his own personal experiences onto a larger whole. And also not from a political or political science perspective.

[Hawkeye]

@Adam Strange


Thanks for the long and detailed response man. Some interesting points raised.

Can't help but be slightly amused that your reply sounds exactly like the kind of thing my ENTJ dad would say lol.



Agree, the point of work is to offload to others what I can't physically do myself, but I know for sure that this can be disastrous if offloaded to the wrong people, which is not always purely about skills.

Also, as a minority myself, I am definitely giving priority to minorities when it comes to hiring, so no worries from that angle.

what you will practically find is that you can't get any Deltas to do a job very well that is essential to your business.

Haha, oof. Classic ENTJ tact lol. But point taken.

I may have to disagree on that one though. I've seen Deltas doing everything from top management to cleaning. They just lack a certain "aggression" in their approach, but I haven't witnessed a situation yet where this was majorly problematic.

You might even have to hire some Betas.

Can you name any specific business roles where you think Betas would generally be better suited compared to Deltas?

[Hawkeye]

Also, not all Deltas are mentally healthy people and as such can screw up your business or team spirit.

Haha, there are psychos in every quadra though.

if you only hire Deltas, you probably won't be catching a lot of people with color of skin. You figure out the consequences of that.

Haha what?? Socionics and skin colour are definitely not related whatsoever lol.

[Hawkeye]

it's doubtful you'll can type good enough to be sure anyone has types you think

Definitely agreed. I haven't found a Socionics test yet that is foolproof, so my question about hiring is mostly hypothetical for now.

[Hawkeye]

it's a bad move to mix "friends" and work

Not saying I want to be close friends with everyone. Just want to make the work environment is harmonious (hence maximising productivity).

[Hawkeye]

i don't think it's unethical

i think on the surface, don't even mention it to avoid legal issues

but if you're the owner, you gotta do you and what's best for your company

Yeah the legal issues are the main thing that worries me.

Also cultural backlash. Nowadays, people get outraged by everything and then cancel you if you say a single word that rubs them the wrong way.

It would be hard to hide the fact that I was Socionically typing a job candidate if there was any kind of standardised testing involved. And I can't rely on 100% VI for typing, so there would have to be some kind of test probably.

Maybe I can come up with a test that somehow hides the socionic stuff among other things. But this would be very difficult to say the least.

[Hawkeye]

No awareness for logic of dynamics.

Can you clarify?

[Hawkeye]

Mike Krzyzewski, Dukes basketball Coach (probably one of the most successful) recruits only the best of the best players on Duke's basketball team.

Would this coach be unethical because he's not allowing subpar players in?

If deltas are (what u discern) to be the best of the best for your squad.... and they have the credentials/passed the interview process (+ demonstrating those qualities)...

Why not?

Factor in (while not automatically eliminating other types) being a delta as part of the decision making process... for your company and its values

Equal oppportunity without forcing the outcome

When you force the outcome (without emphasizing the best of the best) you get this:

All very good points, thank you!!

[Hawkeye]

It's not a question of ethics. Just because a person is Delta does not mean he will be right for the job or have the right skill set. And having a team of all Deltas will most likely emphasize certain blindspots. Do those blindspots overshadow the pros? A successful company is about finding people who can help cover your blindspots and optimize the company.

It comes down to the questions: What are the needs of the company and who would be the best fit? Personality type can only tell you so much.

Good points.

Actually I am now thinking of possibly dividing my workforce into smaller teams, making sure (as much as possible) that each team consists of people only from a particular quadra.

Teams could therefore run themselves comfortably and naturally according to their own quadra values, and teams would only have to interact with each other formally "from a safe distance" so as to minimise triggering everyone's vulnerable functions.

Thus I would get the advantages of socionic diversity while minimising the downsides.

In theory at least.

[Hawkeye]

Yes deltas work so well together except LSE with IEE- that’s more like war

Haha, I know lots of LSE / IEE friendships tho??

[Hawkeye]

Sheer nonsense. Many especially smaller businesses over time develop into quadra-centric organizations through a process of 'natural selection'. Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta teams, and all these teams work fine. I have seen teams fall apart because someone left and was replaced by someone who didn't fit quadra wise. I mean, how difficult is it to figure out that replacing an LSE manager in a Delta team by an SLE is a recipe for disaster? I have seen it happen productivity dropping by 50% because Deltas didn't want to go beyond the call of duty anymore because of the management style of an SLE, which in itself was not really a bad style, but not suitable to lead a Delta team.

Brilliant point.

Actually this exactly happened to me in my previous workplace.

LSE manager (of predominantly Delta team) was replaced with SEE, and that's when everything started falling apart. Team members totally lost their sense of loyalty to the company. They began to feel like they were being driven like slaves instead of treated like valued team members. Staff turnover went through the roof as everyone starting jumping ship.

[Hawkeye]

One a side note, here is a scene from the movie 'Capitalism: A Love Story'. It runs from about 58:20 till 1:01:38. In this scene Michael Moore makes a case for what he sees as 'democratically led and worker-owned companies', which he sees as a fair alternative to the typical capitalist way of organizing businesses.

https://youtu.be/yLDIoO_ug2c?t=3500

My question is: what do we see when we look at the faces of these workers, especially in the first example? And what can we conclude from that, what is it Michael Moore fails to see? Try to look at this situation from a Socionics perspective, like a sociologist or a cultural anthropologist, not from the POV of a single individual who projects his own personal experiences onto a larger whole. And also not from a political or political science perspective.

It's a very interesting movie. I actually agree without about half of it, and plan to run my company according to some of these principles. But that's probably a discussion for another thread lol.

[consentingadult]

Interesting claims. Do u have any data to support this?

What do you think yourself? Are there any universities in the Western world doing Socionics oriented research?

That being said, I now enough about both social and behavioral sciences on the one hand and Socionics on the other hand to come to a good understanding in the Anti-Positivist tradition. Which probably is opposite to the mindset of the average LSI.

Would a delta-team be optimal in a Se-type setting/environment? Or would their gifts be better leveraged in a different setting?

If people are smart enough to let these Delta teams function and not interfere with their operations, it can work. It very much depends who is above them. Alphas and Betas social approach is that of an 'obligation to effort', which is a Ti-approach to doing thing, whereas Gammas and Deltas have a social approach of 'obligation to result', a Te-approach to doing things. So probably when you have a Delta team within a larger Gamma based organization statistical chances are they will function better than in an organization that is largely Beta in culture.

[consentingadult]

Haha what?? Socionics and skin colour are definitely not related whatsoever lol.

Perhaps not where you live, but where I live most people with skin color are from places and strata where Beta cultural patterns were/are dominant. We have a lot of immigrants that, two or three generations ago, were, more or less, at the bottom strata of their respective societies.

There is also a particular cultural group in the Netherlands called Hindustani. These are mostly the descendants of people who, after slavery was abolished in the Dutch colonies, migrated from India to Suriname in South America. Starting in the Sixties, many of these people migrated to the Netherlands. And in this group, Gamma cultural patterns are dominant.

All this doesn't mean you can have all the quadras in one country or one stratum. You have to take a bird's eye, sociological view, then you'll see how quadra values interact with cultural values of a sociological level of e.g. strata, or with cultural values of certain groups considered from a cultural anthropological perspective.

[Adam Strange]

If people are smart enough to let these Delta teams function and not interfere with their operations, it can work. It very much depends who is above them. Alphas and Betas social approach is that of an 'obligation to effort', which is a Ti-approach to doing thing, whereas Gammas and Deltas have a social approach of 'obligation to result', a Te-approach to doing things. So probably when you have a Delta team within a larger Gamma based organization statistical chances are they will function better than in an organization that is largely Beta in culture.

@consentingadult, a very good distinction, and true in my experience.

[consentingadult]

Haha, I know lots of LSE / IEE friendships tho??

I think her statement about work relations between LSEs and IEEs are simply wrong. In the workplace, LSEs and IEEs unintentionally push each other towards ever increasing productivity, which can lead to frustrations in the long term, but war is the wrong word.

Probably the same goes other other extraverted Activity partners, with a different information elements being dominant in the process.

[Adam Strange]

On hiring: https://fs.blog/2020/07/job-interviews/

[consentingadult]

On hiring: https://fs.blog/2020/07/job-interviews/

Great article, my point proven. If there ever was a need to prove my point, since it isn't rocket science.

[Ave]

Ethics is a big debate.

However, I don't think it's legal, that is, if socionics can even be legally recognized as a basis for discrimination in the workplace.

[Moonbeaux Rainfox]

I can currently not track down where I read it first.

The thought for me boiled down to the equilibrium of a system.

If you are not aware of the dynamic interchange (by trying to hold the parameters static - with an iron grip so to speak), you run the danger to break up the whole 'organism'.

[sbbds]

It’s not like you’re skinning kittens. I don’t see why this is ethically problematic. Nobody is entitled to a job.