Myers-Briggs is an incredibly useful and popular personality assessment. 89 of Fortune 100 companies use it! Introducing Myers-Briggs to your team can help boost trust, communication, and productivity. But we know that the personality system can seem like a lot to digest at first. (“What does T stand for again? What type am I again?!”)
We want to make things simple. Here are our top 10 easiest ways to use Myers-Briggs in your team:
First off, before you can work with your team’s personality, you need to know your team’s personality types. You can have members take the official Global MBTI Step II through Ryan C Bailey & Associates. If you’re interested in this, contact us!
If you want to save the expense, you can also get general information about their personality type by getting their personality results from truity.com’s or 16personalities.com’s version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
Then once you know their type, you can always Google someone’s personality type and what you want to know about them. Myers-Briggs is the world’s most researched personality assessment, so you will almost always find what you want to know. For example, you can search:
“How to work best with an ENFP”
“What helps an ISTJ boss”
You can also just observe someone. Staying curious and asking questions will lead you to naturally understand someone better.
What stands out to you about them?
What do they do the same way over and over again?
What’s their story?
How did they get to this job?
Even better, you can ask your team member to tell you: “When was a time you felt incredibly energized? What led you to become so energized?” Their story often gives the best and most tailored ways to know how to energize them in the future.
Once you know their type, you can also look at what motivates them by reading the Business Insider article “How to Manage Every Personality Type”.
We have a one-page template that gives specific clues on how to energize your team. You can ask your team members to complete the template and then reference it every time you meet with them. Again, please contact us if you’d like to use our template!
You can also leverage a team member’s personality by learning about their ideal role and then creating ways to help them stretch and reach their potential, according to their personality. Consider these questions:
Do you know what each team members’ ideal role is?
Do you know what are the most important skills they need to have to get to that role?
How can they master those skills?
We are big believers in going all-in on strengths to create the most growth. You can ask: “How can they take their greatest strength and move it up another notch?” For example, my dad wanted us Bailey kids to be more efficient, so he taught us how to save 6 seconds in the way we cut up our apples into smaller bits.
Learning how to contain weaknesses is also super helpful. For example, I am not as detail-oriented as I’d like to be yet. One way to contain that is by asking someone who is detail-oriented to review my completed work and help me spot anything I missed. Know that it takes way longer to grow a weakness than it does to master a strength. If I contain the weaknesses while mastering my strengths, that will lead my strengths to shine even more to the point where they also cover some of my weaknesses.
Chew On This:
How will you use Myers-Briggs to grow your team?
Ryan C. Bailey & Associates is an organizational effectiveness firm focused on equipping leaders to develop in-demand high-performing teams to increase the health and effectiveness of the greater organization.
*This blog is an amalgamation of a few different clients. No client is being singled out.