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To me, one of the most important aspects of Self Reflection is investigating our own personality traits. When I teach leadership in the classroom and get to the part where we talk about Self Reflection, I’m always amazed at the number of “aha” moments that happen for people when they start to discover their personality traits through various self-assessments. Time after time, the one area that continues to fascinate me is learning about our particular personality type through tools such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am neither a MBTI® Master Practitioner, nor for that matter, have I ever been administered the MBTI by someone who is certified. I have, however, found a number of assessments, both in books and online that allow us to get quick and dirty results to begin to understand which of the sixteen personality types we are.
What is the MBTI and Personality Types
As a quick review in case you haven’t heard of the MBTI and the sixteen personality types, it is a personality assessment that classifies individuals along four areas: Extraversion vs. Introversion; Sensing vs. Intuition; Thinking vs. Feeling; Judging vs. Perceiving. Based on where we stand in each of these areas, we have our own personality type which is expressed as a four-letter code such as INTP or ENTJ. So what we are talking about here is much more in-depth than simply someone just being extroverted or introverted.
There are a number of things that I find fascinating with learning about our personality types, but nothing is more surprising to me as when I see someone take an assessment, determine their personality type, then read more about the type and be utterly surprised to find that the description fits them perfectly.
These folks tend to be even more surprised when they find that there are actually others who are “just like them” with the same personality type. While we are certainly all unique and individual in our own way, it is interesting to find that others share our personality traits and can be more like us than we previously imagined.
Knowing Our Own Type
To me, the power of understanding our own personality type is not knowing that I happen to be an INTP, but knowing the particular traits of an INTP and how they relate with other personality types.
Once we know our personality type, we are able to learn more about the strengths and weaknesses of our type. Then we can use this information to find situations that lend themselves to our personality strengths and steer clear of situations that would highlight our personality weaknesses.
Using Personality Types in Organizations
Organizations will many times administer personality type assessments so that they can make sure they have the right types of people in the right positions. The first experience I had with personality typing was when my brother-in-law had applied for an Assistant Comptroller position years ago and as part of the interview process had to take an assessment. In that case, they apparently checked the results, hired him and just “filed” the results.
Understanding the personality types of individuals can be useful for organizations. It can help when building high performing teams to integrate a combination of individual types that can compliment each other. I’ve also seen assessing personality types used to help with conflict resolution.
A former coworker shared his story with me where at a previous job he had been working at a very small organization that had less than ten employees. He was constantly at odds with one of his coworkers. Everything both of them seemed to do would aggravate the other.
Finally the owner sat both of them down and had them complete a personality type assessment so that they could understand their own personality type. Then the owner did the best thing he could, he made them share their personality type and the information about their type with the other. As my coworker explained, he didn’t like the other person any more, but they were now able to work together because each understood the other.
Leader’s Reflection: As leaders who know and understand our own personality type, we are able to leverage this information by taking advantage of situations that play to the strengths of our type and minimizing situations that are not suited to our type. When we are also able to know the personality types of those around us, it can help us to form and lead high performing teams made up of individuals that complement one another.
Tom, thanks for a great post. I’m always cautious about some of these different studies because of the labels. I’ve gravitated to strengths and values studies more because they become less of a brand, like an ISTJ or something like that.
However I do agree with you that whatever you use must be shared as we each think our type is the only one there is or that it’s the best one to be. Strength comes from diversity and mutual appreciation.
Thanks for the post.
Mike, I think you’re right and I agree with you about labels. I know what my traits (including strengths and weaknesses) are but I can never remember my “label”. In fact, this morning while I was writing the post I had to dig around my hard drive to find the deeply buried file that told me that my type is INTP.
I also think you say it best: “Strength comes from diversity and mutual appreciation.”