 The most important lesson about leading other people that I have ever received happened in the cockpit of an airplane when I was a young teenager in flight school. But I didn't realize that it was that kind of a lesson at the time. In flight school, one of the first things they teach you is that no matter what the flight manual says, no two individual planes will ever fly exactly the same way. We'd study a plane, study the book, learn where all the dials were in that specific model, but then we'd actually go up in multiple versions of the same plane. And even though it was the exact same model, had the same engine, same guidebook, it was so clear when we were up in the air that each plane was a unique machine, all its own. The manual told us the landing speed, the maximum fuel load, how much runway we needed. But what it didn't tell us was that one plane might accelerate faster than others. One plane might stall out at different speeds or one might shift or steer a little more smoothly. As I tested out the different planes, which remember were also the same planes, I learned that you can't get complacent with what you've read in a book. You have to stay alert, always course correcting and assessing the changing conditions and the individual quirks of the machine that you're piloting. It went like this, you checked the signs, evaluated, determined action, took action and continue to do that until the plane was safely on the ground. I'm telling you this story because it relates to the rise of a certain trend that I'm seeing a lot of in management, one that's very compelling and has actually started to become the framework on which many leadership models are being built. And that trend is the personality test. Listen, I get it. You know, they're fascinating. I've even used them myself, the Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, the disc, the Hartman color code. And yes, I fully support the idea of looking inward and learning more about your underlying moods and motivations. But the problem with relying on these tests as a management tool is that once you put someone in a box and you decide that you know who they are, you keep them in that box and then you start leading the box.