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Chapter 22
The Myth of Personality Type

We can encapsulate this chapter by saying that everything we just said about adventure learning and teambuilding also holds true for the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory.

Adventure learning used mountaineering and other outdoor experiences to provide team members with new understandings about themselves. The Myers-Briggs personality categories also provide every team member with exhilarating new insights into themselves, and a set of initials (e.g., ENTP, ISTJ) that explain what kind of person they are. The Myers-Briggs instrument is more than a piece of paper to enthusiasts -- it becomes the organizing principle of their lives.

Typology is based on the insight that there are many "archetypes" of people, that those types can be tested and defined, and that knowing what type we are relates directly to such down-to-earth business problems as leadership development, career decisions, and just plain getting along with others.

Founded on the insights of pioneer psychoanalyst C.G. Jung, typology holds that people can be divided into two perceiving or input groups (sensors and intuitors) and two judging or processing/output groups (thinkers and feelers). It measures the state of your current nature/nurture stew. Knowing where one falls on the continuum between the extremes can help you in making career moves, in delegating tasks which are beyond you, in hiring and assigning people, and in working to strengthen your lesser talents.

 

I/E Introvert/Extrovert	S/N Sensing/Intuition
T/F Thinking/Feeling	P/J Perceiving/Judging

 

People are different, Jung says, in the different ways they encounter the world. Broadly speaking, we either intuit or sense as we perceive and learn about the world. Intuitive types grasp the truth of a situation in a flash. They are the mysterious beings who never took notes in class, who guess for success...futuristic and imaginative. Sensing types, conversely, grope toward understanding in a step-by-step concrete way ... here and now.

In addition to these two perception categories, we are also either one of two deciding categories. Quick judges of a situation are called feelers -- emotion is their strong suit. Slow judgers are called thinkers -- their strong suits are logic and method.

Overlaying these personality traits are the categories of Introverts and Extroverts. Where you are on this continuum leads to assumptions about which of the characteristics above one is prone to reveal to others.

The kind of perception you naturally prefer, either sensing or intuition, tends to team up with the kind of judgement you naturally prefer, whether thinking or feeling. The total result is a set of sixteen separate personality types combining the strengths of the eight possible Myers-Briggs categories.

All of us, according to the theory, have two strong sides and two recessive sides. In fact, type psychology breaks us down into dozens of additional characteristic, with lots of hyphens and brackets, superior characteristics and phantom or inferior ones -- striving desperately to make us stereotypes even in our complexity.

Why do we include Typology among our team myths? Because, just like adventure learning, typology has virtually nothing to do with teams.

It is not that personalities are unimportant. In our chapter on behavior differences, we stated that personalities are very different -- and when they clash on the job, in the team, it's bad news.

But the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory does not measure anything that matters to teams. Teams do not rise or fall on how people are (either real or perceived) deep down inside. They rise or fall on what they actually do, how they actually behave toward one another on the outside.

Behavior, si; typology, no.

The false assumptions the Myers-Briggs makes is that personality reliably and consistently reveals itself in outside behaviors. It just ain't so. There are too many confounding life experiences which modify what we are into how we behave. Also, there is a large portion of our population that deludes themselves in terms of how they are viewed by others. They say to themselves, "Oh, I'm an introvert!" Maybe they drive through the neighborhood, shouting "I'm an introvert!" into a bullhorn. But they're wrong (introverts don't do that).

All teams care about is what you do, in real terms, as seen through the eyes of other teammates. What you are inside is your business.

A wise man once said it this way: If one person calls you a horse's ass, well, it's just one person. If two people call you a horse's ass, well, there may be a conspiracy to label you a horse's ass. But if three people call you a horse's ass, you'd better invest in a saddle.

You can better determine what kind of a horse you are by getting behavioral feedback from team members than by filling out the MBTI questionnaire.

Tip: if you're really hell-bent on going the internally-oriented (how you see yourself) Myers-Briggs route, don't use it in isolation. Combine it with  it in combination with an externally-oriented (what you look like to others) inventory, like the Social Style Inventory, from TRACOM of Denver) or the Personal Profile (DiSC, from Carlson learning in Minneapolis). It's fascinating how our own image of ourselves can vary from the way others see us – and very relevant to team communication.

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