If you read last week’s article, or listened to the podcast, or maybe just chatted with me in the past few weeks, you know…

I AM ON FIRE WITH THE MBTI!!!

Yeah, I really like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the wealth of personality preferences assessment data it can provide for personal growth, relationship development, and a long list of other ideas.  For that list, simply go back to last week’s article.

Last week I wrote about the robust data and reports available for individuals and couples.  This week, let’s talk about how the MBTI can impact leaders, teams, groups, organizations – any groups of human beings that have to interact with each other and make decisions, or report results to another human being.  I think that is pretty all-inclusive group – did I miss anyone?

Imagine having all that individual personality preference data – communication style, preferred work environment, decision making style, stress management strengths, conflict style – as a leader of a group, or as member of that group.  With an agreed-upon shared exchange of this information in a team, the level of understanding, the improvement in team dynamics, and the overall organizational health can increase exponentially.

Given this information, the opportunities to compare and contrast profile data, with how it impacts the organization, compared to how a group would prefer it impact the organization can have a significant impact on how the team moves forward.  Again, it can’t help but promote some improvement in organizational health.

I’ll share a few examples from the training – we were literally able to fill up two days discussing the impact of different preference profiles on our little time-limited training group.  Imagine the discussion for groups with a vested interest in seeing each other improve and move forward in a more positive direction – or a group that wants to improve it’s bottom line by achieving greater organizational health.  As cliché as it sounds, the possibilities are endless.

One exercise took the MBTI type chart and encouraged participants to put their name in their corresponding type.  From this simple exercise, you have a visual representation of the make-up of the team and can review any patterns that might exist.  Aside from great discussion on patterns, interactions, and potential blind spots in a team, the biggest take-away for me – a literal “AH HA!” moment, was the construction of the chart and how that generates discussion.  The chart is not random, but is set up in a way that clusters certain components in halves or quadrants of the chart – therefore generating further opportunities to discuss how the make-up of the team could be helpful or hazardous.

The next exercise took half a day – It could definitely go longer, or provide for considerable future discussion, in a group that has to work with each other for years to come.

As I mentioned last week, the Step II assessment provides a breakdown of the expression of “facets” of each individual personality preference pair.  It looks a little like this: (note – this was an example freely posted on another website and may or may not represent an actual person.

For this discussion, we took the full set of facets for different teams, and plotted individual scores – representation of how they express those facets, and discussed.  My group had quite the interesting discussion as the graphic showed most of the team in the blue or “Introversion” preference for most facets, or somewhere in the midzone, while my scores were 5s and 4s in favor of Extraversion.  A team with one individual strongly preferring all facets of Extraversion, while the rest of the team favor Introversion.  We were all pretty sad to see the discussion end after only 20 minutes – even those who preferred Introversion wanted to keep talking about it!  And then we went on to complete this exercise for each of the preference pairs and their facets in our team.

These are just two of the possible discussion exercises for teams and organizations.  Of course, from this information comes critical ideas for leaders to build their groups, as well as grow their own leadership style.  As I’ve said before, I’ve worked quite a few groups in improving their dynamics – and that was before having access to these aspects of the assessment.  I am incredibly excited to work with more groups now – if you are interested, feel free to contact me at DrDan@DanielAFranz.com or take a look at my Facebook page Dr. Daniel A. Franz.  And, if you are interested in learning more about the MBTI, take a listen to last week’s podcast on the topic.

Take care – I look forward to working with you soon!  – Dan