Making the Most of Your Potential in Teams and Groups – Using Myers Briggs

By understanding oneself and our motivations we can be more deliberate in the behaviours and approaches we choose. Sharing a language to discuss this is extremely helpful, especially for people who are not professional managers but promoted into those roles. When we understand others and their motivations, we can be more deliberate in the way we work, lead or manage them.

The Challenge

The target was to help senior management teams work together more effectively.

All team members were publishing professionals, responsible for different parts of the publishing process and/or different publications.

Publishing has tight budgets and timetables and each department can affect the success or stress of another department.

The required outcome at the end of the programme was to enable more open, supportive and constructive communications between the management team/s.

The Design

We decided to base the fundamental programme design around Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®). MBTI®, an industry standard reporting on psychological preferences, provided each delegate with an individual, personalised feedback and how their preferences might affect the way they operate. Using the MBTI® we had really useful information to address all of the issues we wanted, with a more robust understanding of the underlying forces and personality frameworks.

To start, each delegate completed the MBTI® level I questionnaire before the workshop.

The next phase was a one-day off-site workshop, where we worked with delegates to understand and learn the language of MBTI®. This is vital as one of the most important elements of MBTI® is that people must verify the profile shown in the questionnaire and to do so, they need a good understanding of the elements that are covered.

This approach also gave the team to chance to share their insights about themselves and the people that they work with. As part of this workshop, each person had a chance to look at their report and to discuss it in public or in private.

Once individuals had verified their initial type, we were able to run Level II which gives so much more detail and insight into personality.

Rather than digest this in a workshop setting each person was offered a one-to-one follow-up session on the phone to discuss the report.

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Significant Model Used

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Intense Hours of Debate

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Personal Coaching Session

ClearWorth is certified to MBTI level II. From our experience and feedback the depth of understanding and insights gained from completely level II is worth the investment.

Why use MBTI®

The purpose of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® (MBTI^®) personality inventory is to make the theory of psychological types described by C. G. Jung understandable and useful in people’s lives. The essence of the theory is that much seemingly random variation in the behaviour is actually quite orderly and consistent, being due to basic differences in the ways individuals prefer to use their perception and judgment.

“Perception involves all the ways of becoming aware of things, people, happenings, or ideas. Judgment involves all the ways of coming to conclusions about what has been perceived. If people differ systematically in what they perceive and in how they reach conclusions, then it is only reasonable for them to differ correspondingly in their interests, reactions, values, motivations, and skills.” read more Myers Briggs

ClearWorth is certified to use MBTI at Level II. This is a much more comprehensive report with more detail. If possible we would always use Level II rather than level I. Level I is extremely popular and there are many sites on the internet where you can take a version of the questionnaire for free and receive a report or a generic statement about your personality type.

Level II goes in the 5 elements that make up each of the 4 types and gives people a better understanding of their character and behaviour.