Myers Briggs Assessments
Get your team communicating effectively
At 360 Training you'll often hear us say there are three main barriers to self-development in the workplace. The first two - a lack of skills or knowledge - are usually easily addressed with tangible, pragmatic solutions. The third - and in our experience the most frequently-faced challenge - is around working relationships and developing the softer skills of influencing and persuading, building and managing good relations, and leading teams.
Is instilling those skills in our people easier said than done? What if there was a way you and your team could hone these less palpable skills and improve insight into the behaviours of the people around you - both at work and in your personal life?
Well, we think a significant part of the solution already exists in the shape of MBTI - Myers Briggs Type Indicator. Established in the 1940s and 50s by a mother-daughter team (Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers), their system developed Carl Jung's earlier theories on psychological archetypes.
Understanding individuals
MBTI effectively divides the population into 16 different profiles, each of which will have varying bias on each of four scales that measure where you source your energy, how you take in information, how you make decisions, and how you orient your life. Once individual profiles are defined, they lead to definitive breakthroughs in understanding workplace behaviours. Allegiances and rivalries, teams who are all talk and no action, over-ambitious projects that have failed though lack of attention to detail - all these and so much more can be influenced by the personality preferences of the people involved.
Initially it is easy to see how MBTI can help you to pigeonhole people into different types. But individuals and organisations that wring the greatest benefits from the system are those who use it to subtly adapt the way they work with those whose profile is different in key areas.
Introvert or extrovert?
Take the example of the Introvert versus Extrovert types - E or I being the first of the four-letter profile driven out by MBTI. Extroverts draw their energy from interaction with others while Introverts prefer quiet inner reflection. Noisy and garrulous, extreme Es have a tendency to think out loud and talk their way to solutions and conclusions. Imagine the impact on a lone I, who would struggle to hear themselves think. For them, team meetings and brainstorms can be a traumatic experience. Think of Edvard Munch's painting The Scream, which pretty much sums up the I's experience in this scenario.
MBTI can provide a framework for understanding and de-personalising such impacts and, in this instance, would help the Es to understand that they could improve the contributions of their I co-workers by building in some reflection time into the process and resisting the temptation to hound the I for group input.
It's this sophisticated use of empathy-building skills and enhanced flexibility that really starts to make MBTI a valuable part of the training mix.
