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No! Please...Please don't make me Delegate!

Just to finish getting high Mechanical off my chest (and I say this as an 85 - my third highest score after Musical 92 and Outdoor 89), there is a downside to being so "hands-on".

How do you delegate when the whole notion of understanding and solving a problem is, for you, so tied up with getting your hands on it? You may assign what looks like work to others, but how much real work (i.e. requiring the application of experience and/or intelligence) will you let go of?

Lest that sound harsh, I have asked this of every chart-topping Mechanical I have ever had in a workshop. The closest I ever got to an exception was a guy called Steve (Mechanical 99) who said, "Yes, I would delegate... if I thought they were competent." Noting the rather conditional mood of his statement, I asked how often that condition was actually satisfied. "Not very often..."

I would be interested to hear from anyone who has more a more industrial / production oriented client base than I do. My suspicion is that Steve's comment is true; were he to find himself in a crowd of "engineers' engineers" (with their concomitant 90+ Mechanical scores) he might find that they all delegated merrily (even dangerously - "she's about to blow - you go check it out...").

But the fate of high Mechanicals in non-engineering settings is a hard one - nonetheless, you will still probably prefer to (continue to) be "dinged" at your performance review for failing to give enough away, rather than for (entirely hypothetically) ever letting someone incompetent near something you could have sorted yourself.

High Challenge

Just to make sure we can entertain some thoughts about the other end of the Challenge scale (if in fact it isn't more like a circle) (or even a mobius strip... or a double helix...) (and assuming that you MidWestern BUG people didn't get all Challenged out)...

Some years ago, just after returning from Advanced Training, where a comment in passing had been made about "recommending professional help" if you came across someone with more than 7 reversals, I did a Birkman for someone who had 8, with of course a Challenge score of 99. Given this person was very senior in a major government-linked institution in London, I was just a little concerned. (Hey - I'm a 55 - I may seem high Challenge to my 36 wife, but really I am right there in the middle...)

And of course, what was fascinating was that this lady recognised all of it, and was entirely at home with every reversal AND the 99 Challenge score.

"Do you ever find that you maybe set yourself up to fail? That you keep pushing the bar higher until you can't jump it? Ever jump off bridges and then start calculating the distance to the bottom of the gorge on the way down?"

"Oh yes, that's me, all the time." I even felt she couldn't quite understand why I was being slightly apologetic about it. And why not? It may have seemed alien to me, but she had lived this pattern every day of her adult life. So once more, a lesson not to try to "dull the effect" of what the tool is saying. I might not be comfortable having those scores; but for her, this is home.

(And by the way - I really saw no signs that she needed the kind of professional help that had been suggested to me would have been indicated by the 8 reversals. But here's the interesting thing. Born in Ghana, came to UK mid childhood. Early development and later socialisation in totally different cultures; I wonder how much that played into a set of scores that were almost all reversed? And does being so aware of the reality of multiple and contradictory cultures make you more at home with that level of reversal? As I say, she absolutely acknowledged what the scores suggested in terms of internal contradictions.)