Managing Teams and Personality Types

Managing Teams and Personality Types

Managing teams:

The use of the Myers-Briggs personality inventory to facilitate communication

Managing teams:

The use of the Myers-Briggs personality inventory to facilitate communication

Ideally, the use of team-based strategies at work enables different personality types and differently-skilled employees to pool their collective resources and knowledge to function more effectively. However, even under the best of circumstances, personality clashes will occur and create friction on teams. While there is no way to prevent this entirely, self-awareness amongst team members, regarding their different ways of approaching a problem and interacting with one another can be an important way to mitigate the danger of conflicts interfering with productivity and tearing apart a team. This is particularly critical, as employees are growing more specialized, yet work projects are growing more integrated: an introverted and methodical it software designer who likes to communicate through email may find himself confronted with the need to design a user manual with an extroverted member of the marketing staff who barely reads written communications, tends to gloss over details, and is a 'big picture' thinker.

As an icebreaking strategy, having team members take a personality inventory such as the Myers-Briggs personality inventory can be useful to increase awareness about the difference in temperaments amongst the employees who must work together and put aside their differences for the good of the company. Before team members take the test, they should receive a briefing about the nature of the Myers-Briggs, and how it can be used to engage in more effective team communication. Afterwards, as part of the icebreaking exercises, team members can discuss their results with one another, and engage in various activities to better enable them to deal with conflict.

The Myers-Briggs is a tested reliable and valid instrument, often used in clinical and vocational settings, that classifies test subjects into sixteen different personality types. The test is popular because of its ease of scoring and administration (versions of the test can even be taken online) and its comparative thoroughness. The qualities tested by the Myers-Briggs are also those that often cause clashes between employees, such extroversion vs. introversion, thinking vs. feeling, judging vs. perceiving, and the tendency to experiencing the world through sensing vs. intuition. Taking the test helps someone who is quiet and feels fulfilled working behind a computer understand why he or she might see the world differently than someone who is a 'people person.'