Part 1:
Know Thyself

Know thyself. It's some of the oldest advice in the world -- and still some of the best. Knowing yourself -- what you can do, what you like to do and how you like to do it -- is the starting point for finding the right spot for yourself. Understanding how your personality and work style affect you can lead you to an understanding of the personalities and work styles of others, making you a more effective leader, team builder and manager.

Knowing your own work style and having a vocabulary for thinking and talking about the work styles of others is important -- so important that businesses now regularly seek the expertise of psychologists and personality researchers. The most widely used tool for identifying your personality type and working style is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The MBTI was developed by Katherine Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. They based their work on the theories of Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychologist. In its classical form, the MBTI is a paper-and-pencil exercise that takes about half an hour to complete and must be evaluated by a qualified facilitator.

(See "MBTI on the Web" for more on Myers-Briggs and "Instrumentation for Self-Knowledge" for links to other kinds of personality-type instruments and materials on the Web.)

"It's not a test," stresses Bob McAlpine. "It's an indicator, a wonderful tool for helping people understand who they are and identifying their primary sources of energy."

McAlpine is president of Type Resources, a Louisville company that qualifies people to administer the MBTI and similar instruments. The publisher of the MBTI sells the forms and interpretive materials only to qualified administrators. Type Resources trains people in those qualifications -- on a year-round schedule that will take company employees to Australia and China this year.

McAlpine's knowledge of the MBTI and the research that supports it is deep, and his patience in explaining the theory and practice of personality typing is endless. He begins with Jung:

"Jung's theory identified eight types of mental process. Each of us can use them all, but there are those we prefer and don't prefer. If we see other people using those we don't like, we say they're weird. Myers-Briggs lets us say they're not weird, they're just different. Then we can begin to figure out how we can work with them with respect -- how we can make peace, not war, in our relationships with other people." (For more detail on the eight types, see Part 2: "Eight Mental Processes.")

Personality type affects all our interactions with others, says McAlpine. "In business, senior managers may not be comfortable talking about values. But if I'm a CEO and I have difficulty telling you what's important to me, how can you be equipped to make the best decisions -- decisions I'd be most comfortable with? Or how about a board of directors that has decided the CEO has to go. What brought that about? I wonder how much of it we could bring right back to typology. Turnover rates, retention issues -- it might be interesting what organizations might find if they could explore what's here."

Type -- if we know how to decode it -- gives us a model, he says, for how we might expect a person to prefer to use those different mental processes. "It's not pigeonholing. It would be unethical for me to give you the MBTI and then say you prefer these processes so you should do this or that. But you can look at the results and say, 'Yeah, this really fits,' or 'No, this isn't exactly me.' I've developed a process that is different from what this type might lead people to expect."

Work Styles

"Any person can be successful at any job," says McAlpine, "yet some people are more comfortable -- have a more positive experience -- at one job than another. If we look at the mental processes used in the job and the processes preferred by the person, there's a high correlation. We're not talking skill, but if interests match requirements, people are more successful."

The Myers-Briggs methodology outlines eight types of mental processes that provide a foundation for a personal work style. The key, says McAlpine, is communication: "We develop a language associated with our particular process. If I communicate in a language from a process you're comfortable with, then we'll communicate well, otherwise we're ships passing in the night."

If you understand Myers-Briggs, you can use your knowledge to identify this process language, and respond in that process, says McAlpine: "If we're communicating using one process we can even move to another process and continue to communicate. But I've got to be careful if I try to move you, because I might pull you out of your comfort zone. There's an energy flow. If I'm in my comfort zone I'm gaining energy, but if not, I'm losing energy."

This can be applied to all kinds of communication, says McAlpine -- job interviews, building teams, training situations. "When I go for an interview, if I know the language that will be expected, I can prepare myself. When I'm coaching with a subordinate what language is appropriate? What's my preference? Do I need to shift my language and approach to be more effective? If I'm a CEO going into a meeting, what am I attempting to convey, who am I speaking to, what's the appropriate language?"

This means using Myers-Briggs types flexibly, he points out -- to consciously choose to work within particular processes to match needs, not to say, "I am me, therefore I speak this way." If you're working with a team you need to be prepared to deal with all the associated emotions and resistance that gets so close to who we are.

The Myers-Briggs types are divided between extroverted interaction with other people and introverted internal observation. "The extroverted processes are easily observed. People see and are aware of what you're doing," says McAlpine. "But the introverted processes normally surprise others. They work behind scenes and aren't as readily shown. If I am most comfortable using introverted processes, for me to share the results of those processes normally requires a request, and I would probably consider whether revealing them would be worth the energy, or my results would be respected, before I would make the decision to reveal, to share what's there. In a meeting, for example, asking, 'what's our vision, what's important to us?' is asking people to use an introverted process. We have to make sure we've created an environment that makes doing that comfortable for them."

Even individuals working by themselves can benefit from an understanding of their work style and personality, says McAlpine. "Take critical problem solving, for example. At critical steps I need to use certain mental processes more than others do. Is this a process I'm comfortable with, or will it require more energy? I need to make sure that I don't shortchange it, that I give it the appropriate level of energy.

"The same thing applies to strategic planning. At a certain place in the planning process we need to pull more from some processes than others -- we need to understand that some are easier for us to access than others, that what comes from some processes may be easier to share with others, and from other processes more difficult."

For individuals, he says, what's most important is using your knowledge of your own preferred processes and alternatives so that you take a more holistic approach and you get to a better decision.

Career Styles

Myers-Briggs can be very useful in considering career and job changes. McAlpine points out that most of us have had jobs that are a bad fit. If we had been equipped to analyze the situation going in, we might have been able to say, "It's a great job, but there are things we don't align on, and its not who I am."

But there is danger, he says, in treating what we know about our personality type as a given, fixed and unalterable. We change and develop, he says, and we must recognize that in ourselves as well. "Jung identified these processes and said life is about learning to use all of them, about moving toward wholeness."

That means using Myers-Briggs types as a dynamic model. "A young person might look at a job and say, is this job something I'll be comfortable in now and also something that will challenge me to develop? Or he or she might recognize that the job requires mental processes they're not comfortable accessing. That can be an important realization -- that they're going to be working outside their comfort zone as they work into their career. On the other hand, if they move into a job that's comfortable now, is it going to facilitate their development down the road, or stifle their growth?"

The good news, McAlpine stresses, is that people do change. We can learn other processes, just as we learn other languages, and become comfortable in them. And our understanding can help smooth the transitions: "From a holistic perspective, people might find as they reach mid-career that they want to move to other things. They find that typology gives them a tremendous opportunity to understand what's going on as they see their interest shift."

Part 2 >>