“Uh, oh,” you think to yourself. “With the day I’m having, the last thing I need is a long, protracted discussion about the budget. My life would be so much easier if I didn’t have to work with him.” Or…

The marketing team and engineering group are at it again. Meetings going nowhere. The release date on the new product version is moving back farther and farther and it’s nearly impossible to get a clear message to the customers about its status. Eyes are rolling. You can hear muttering in the hallways.

Most of us have been there. Annoyed. Frustrated. Even angry. How come we can get along with nearly everyone else in the organization so well, but that person (or that department) feels like sandpaper to us? Personalities are complex and dynamic, seemingly impossible to quantify. Often we have difficulty understanding our own motives and actions—how much more challenging is it then to understand what drives others individuals or teams?

Measurement tools in the workplace are commonly accepted: aptitude testing to determine what we know…evaluations to illuminate what we do…it only follows that it would be useful to examine who we are. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® is a personality assessment tool that has been used in organizations for many years with important results.

While the concepts around the MBTI^® were around in the 1920s, the MBTI^® assessment tool was developed by Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers in the 1940s, based on the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® has been used in the workplace for many years to:

• Help individuals understand themselves
• Increase understanding and tolerance among the various types
• Improve communication, problem-solving and decision-making processes
• Diagnose leadership styles
• Guide career choice and professional development
• Seek the source of interpersonal conflicts

Read on and find out how other companies used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® to maximize their teams...and remember, work is an adventure…be prepared!

Ed Tilley
President
Adventure Associates, Inc.