Tuesday, November 16th, 2010 | Posted by P. A. Theisen

How The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Can Help Modern Managers

As a manager we have to deal with other people every day. Effective communication is crucial for success. The better we know other people’s viewpoints and understand where they are coming from, the higher the chance that we achieve our goals.

Starting Cheap Accutane 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.

Personality types can be described in various models. In praxis, I use the Myers-Briggs Personality Framework which I have found to be very easy to apply in real life situations. The framework helped me to understand myself and others and adopt my communication style to the respective specifics of team members, customers, etc.

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 that one of the four letters turns out to be tested in the 45-55% range, it’s wise to also look up corresponding profiles by switching just this one letter. For me for instance, the letter “E” for extraverted is only at 54%. This means that I am very close to “I” for introverted. Thus, I may have some personality traits of an INTP as well.

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.

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How The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Can Help Modern Managers