The life as a manager is all about understanding ourselves and other people. Knowing the nature of our team members, clients, and other stakeholders we have much higher chances to succeed.
Starting point for good collaboration with other people is to understand that there are different personalities out there. You may sometimes wonder why other people often have so strange ideas or simply don’t understand where you are coming from. In many cases the reason is that you may deal with a person that has a very different personality type like you. Knowing these differences becomes crucial for effective communication and successful working together. Once you know your own personality traits and you can estimate the personality of the other person, it becomes quite clear what you can do to make the collaboration work.
There are many different frameworks to describe the differences between common personality types. The one that I like using during my work is the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator (MBTI). The test has been researched well around the globe and from my experience it delivers quite accurate results. Through this concept, we could often identify reasons for collaboration issues and address them in a very effective way.
The Myers-Briggs Personality Framework determines 16 personality type along four dimensions:
- Extroverted vs. Introverted. Do you live more insight your own world or are you mostly oriented towards what is happening around you? – Intuitive vs. Sensing. Are you very detailed oriented or putting your thoughts in the bigger context? – Thinking vs. Feeling. Are your decisions driven by logical thinking or by feelings? – Perceiving vs. Judging. Do you easily change your plans when new information is available or do you stick to your plans as much as possible? You can find out your personality type by doing a simple online test. I like the free test of Sonya Elen Kisa. The language is easy to understand and it can be done in less than 10 minutes. Then type the results in Google and you will find lots of detailed information about your own personality type.
You will get four letters as a result that represent your personality. My one is ENTP. You can just do a Google Search to see what these letters mean for you. There is a rich resource on Myers-Briggs available at The Personality Type Page.
In case you get one letter close to 50%, chances are that you are the corresponding profile. In this case I recommend also to look up the profile with the opposite letter for those dimensions that are close to the 50% mark.
The concept is not only interesting to understand ourselves better. Whenever you deal with other people it may be interesting to know their profile to optimize the communication with this person. What you can do is to simply estimate the four Myers-Briggs indicators and then research the respective personality traits in the Internet.
Here some important information for people that have an ‘S’ in their Myers-Briggs profile. Don’t use the indicator as the one and only information to understand the other person. Personality types are normally very complex and therefore the MBTI can only give some indication, but certainly not the full truth about the other person.
More information for managers, please click here. Also, check out our free guidelines for effective Business Presentations. Please click here to download the free guide.
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