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Myers Briggs Type Indicator: Diversity – Closing Thoughts

by Ron Potter

Statistics Worth Noticing

There are a few statistics that I think are worth noticing.   I have seen some interesting patterns in corporate leadership teams that are quite different from the US population as a whole.

Thinking

The first observation is that there are five dominant types when I look at corporate teams.   They start with the types that end with the TJ combination.  Remember that T (Thinking) is very logical in their decision-making.  The opposite end of the scale is the F (Feeling).

The word feeling is misleading in Myers-Briggs types (MBTI).  People often assume that you either work and think logically or your feelings tend to take over and may make rash decisions.  A better descriptor might be values.  People who have a preference for F (values) over T (logical) are not illogical.  They’ll weigh all of the logical points of view but their final decisions will be driven by the values they believe the team (and themself) should live by.

Feeling Plays a Large Role (or Should)

As an example, I would often watch leadership teams prepare to make decisions based on the logic of one dimension or another.  Once they have worked through all the logic, an answer might seem very obvious.  Then, if there is a person on the team with the “F” preference, they may ask a question something like this: “I see the logic and I agree with the logic but how do you think our customer will react to that decision?”  The question was not logically based but was value-based.   I’ll notice the rest of the team being silent for a moment as they contemplate the question and then say something like “You’re right.  The customer probably won’t like that at all and we may lose customers because of the decision.”  This often leads to a rethinking of the decision, taking into account both logic and values.

Entrepreneur

Before I show you the interesting statistics, I want to throw in one further MBTI type.  That type is the ENTP.  It doesn’t end in TJ like the other four but it has been classically known as the “Entrepreneur Type”.  I find that with leadership teams, the ENTP (Entrepreneur) type often comes up with a new or innovative approach to a topic but then the TJ’s take over for implementation (very logically based).

Together these five types INTJ, ENTJ, ISTJ, ESTJ + ENTP make up 71% of Leadership teams and 68% of Operations teams.  Those numbers aren’t unexpected but in contrast to a general population where those five types are the preference of only 28%, it paints a very different picture of corporate leadership.

Don’t Misunderstand

It’s important that you don’t misunderstand me.  I’m NOT saying that you should have a preference for one of those five types to be considered a good corporate leader.  If you’ve learned to balance your own thinking on each of the four scales, regardless of your personal preference, you’ll make the best corporate leader.  In fact, it is my belief that many teams and many individuals on teams fool themselves into thinking that the TJ+ENTP types are required and therefore “act” as if they are one of those types for fear that they’ll be “found out” to be one of the “inferior” types.  There are no inferior types, only inferior balance of all types.

The Other Statistic Worth Noticing

The other statistical anomaly I’ve noticed on corporate leadership teams is in the NT/ST area.  Notice that both types have the T component (logical) while some of them also have the N (iNtuitive) component and others have the S (Sensing) component.  They are both logical in their decision-making but some are driven by their conceptual (N) view of the future while others are driven by the facts and details (S) of the present.

The US population, in general, is 10% NT and 30% ST.  Leadership teams are 49% NT and 39% ST while Operations Teams are 32% NT and 50% ST.

Once again, this pushes corporate leadership teams in a much more logical approach to decision-making versus the general population.

Word of Caution

But here’s one word of caution.  Madison Avenue learned a long time ago that we make decisions based on feeling (F) and then justify those decisions based on logic (T).  Neuroscience has proved that to be true.  This also holds true for ideas and thoughts.  We “buy” based on feeling and then justify based on logic!  Don’t kid yourself.  Your feeling, value, emotional side comes into play in your decision-making much more than you think.

Years ago my wife and I were in a Chevy dealership looking for a “sensible” car.  While we were waiting, another salesman and I were drooling over the current Corvette.  My wife finally said, “I see no logical reason to buy a Corvette.”  The salesman and I looked at her as if she was from the moon.  The salesman said, “No Corvette has ever been sold based on logic!”  Guess which model makes the most money for Chevrolet.

Diversity of Thought

Diversity has been used and misused a lot recently.  I think one cartoon recently summed up that misuse:

When we think about diversity from a leadership point of view, we should be celebrating and encouraging diversity of thought, history, perception, and preferences.  This helps us build unity, engage everyone and in the end, make the best decisions.

Respecting team members and their ideas will be key to building unity.  Dividing people into arbitrary groups doesn’t help.  Building respect is what helps.  I’ve built these thoughts around the Myers-Briggs Type Indication.  But working with any valid assessment of personality will do the trick as long as you drop the arbitrary ethnic, racial, or gender division.  Diversity of thought is independent of these arbitrary divisions.

RESPECT the people you work with!

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Myers Briggs Type Indicator: Diversity

by Ron Potter

We can see almost daily comments about diversity.  It creates great division when it seems to be lacking and it’s talked about in glowing terms when it’s promoted as the issue that will solve all of our problems.  The issue I get concerned about is that we think of diversity in too narrow terms.

Most of the time we are thinking about and talking about race or gender.  While these are very important I believe there’s much more to diversity than those two categories.  Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be talking about and focusing on race and gender, I’m saying there is more to consider.

Myers-Briggs Helps with Diversity

A couple of years ago I wrote several blogs focusing on the use of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).  I’ve been amazed at how many questions and comments I’ve received from people wanting to know more about MBTI in general and asking questions about specific situations and wondering if understanding MBTI would help.

This is why I’m starting a short series on MBTI again.  I have not gone back and read any of my previous blogs.  I just wanted this series to be inspired by my current thinking.

MBTI is Not a Label

Most of the teams I worked with wanted to label everyone to help them understand the person better.  I always discouraged this practice and I didn’t like to hear about trained professionals who thought labels were a natural conclusion.  They are not!

MBTI checks for preferences.  Meaning, in a given situation what would your natural preference chose?  This doesn’t mean that you can’t train yourself to look at things from many aspects, not just your natural preference.

In fact, the best leaders I’ve worked with have trained themselves to look and behave in the world in almost all of the MBTI aspects, not just their natural preferences.  I’ve even asked people who work for these great leaders to tell me what they think the leader’s MBTI is.  They can’t.  They can see them perform, ask questions, make decisions using almost all of the facets of MBTI.  It’s one of the things that make them a good leader.

I’m not going to go into great depth with every aspect of the MBTI.  I’m going to focus on the four natural pairs, how they conflict and can also complement each other.  I will also look at the statistics I’ve found that show how much of each time is present in the population as a whole as well as in business leadership teams.

Four Pairs

Over the next few weeks, we’ll take a look at the four pairs that exist within MBTI.  They are:

  • Energizing – Extraversion vs Introversion {EI}
  • Perceiving – Sensing vs Intuition (SN)
  • Judging – Thinking vs Feeling (TF)
  • Orientation – Judging vs Perceiving (JP)

Each person has a “preference” for one unit of each pair.  For instance, my MBTI is ENTJ.  That means that I have a tendency to be Extraverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Judging.  Thus ENTJ.

Be Careful

I can’t tell you how many times people have said something to me like, “I’ve taken the MBTI many times and I always come out the same.  I’m an ESTP.”

Be careful on two fronts.  The first is that you are not an ESTP or any other type.  It simply means that you have a preference for a certain set of pairs.

Second, be careful what you remember.  For those people who have said that or something similar to me, I’ve asked to see their previous results.  They are almost always wrong.  They have simply categorized themselves into something they like or that resonates with a particular type but they are totally wrong in what they remember as their tested and identified type.

Scientific

There are a couple of other stories I would like to tell you.  I was once asked by the head of the psychology department in a major pharmaceutical company to help her with her team.  I told her I wanted to collect MBTI data of her staff so they could see how each other approached the world.  She agreed.  However, once the letter went out to her staff I received a scathing email from one of her managers.  She wanted to know how I could expect to promote the work of these charlatans who weren’t even scientists with such an esteem group.  I simply said that her boss had asked me to do it and to hang in there.  As we finished the session, this person quietly came up to me and asked if I could do a session with her team.

A Rose by Any Other Color

Another experience I’ve had over the last few years is that clients would say to me, “We don’t use MBTI anymore.  It’s very dated.  Now we use [name of another product].  I said that was no problem, would they please send me what literature or website they had and how their people fit into this “new” chart.  I would read through the data and then in every case, did a full day session with the team to help them understand themselves and the team in more depth.  They were always amazed at how much I had learned in such a short time.  What I often didn’t tell them that the “new” product was simply MBTI repackaged with different words and colors.

Granted, some of the language is dated and could be upgraded for modern teams to understand better.  But the essence of MBTI is solid and extensive.

I hope you’ll enjoy and learn from our journey over the next few weeks.

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Commitment: Diversity

by Ron Potter

We’re looking at the element of Commitment in our Truth, Respect, Elegance, Commitment (TREC) journey to great teams.

Last week we talked about the trust required in great teams.  Trust of purpose, leader, and team members.  In building that trust we must look at the diversity of thinking and points of view.

Word of Caution

During my career, I have been asked to either lead a “diversity” effort or coach the person who was leading the effort.   The first thing that struck me was that diversity was defined by outward appearance.  Race and gender were the two most common ones but any number of characteristics can be identified.

Inclusion, not Diversity

One of my first reactions was that it shouldn’t be called “Diversity training” it should be named “Inclusion training.”  Because the name identified it as diversity, it seemed like the curriculum was based on emphasizing the diversity rather than turning it to inclusion.

As I got to know the people who were to be part of the process, I noticed that two members thought similar to each other even though they were of a different race and gender.  While another pair almost never saw eye-to-eye even though they were the same race and gender.

Diversity of Thinking

Great teams have learned to respect different points of view and how to work with those differences as simply differences.  Not good or bad.  Not right or wrong.  Just differences.

In my car the other day, I heard an old song by Dave Mason that hits this one right on the head.  The words are:

There ain’t no good guy, there ain’t no bad guy
There’s only you and me and we just disagree

No good.  No bad.  Just disagreement.  Let’s start with the fact that we just see things differently.

Brain Science

Why is that?  Why can we observe the same thing and yet it seems like we see things differently?

One of the tools that have helped answer that question is the functional MRI (fMRI).  The MRI has been around for years but it simply took a snapshot.  The fMRI takes video!  We can actually see movement within the brain.

When our eyes observe an event, the image isn’t simply recorded on our brain and then stored on our “hard drive.”  There are two major flaws in believing that’s how we see the world around us.

Brain Processing Centers

First, are the known processing centers of our brain.

  • Values
  • Emotions
  • Goals
  • Beliefs
  • Ideas
  • Memories
  • Pain
  • Stress
  • Experiences

There are somewhere over twelve processing centers known today and many scientists believe there may be at least twice that many.

What we know from the fMRI is that when an image enters our eyeball and the optic nerve, it is split into at least 127 million bits of information and dispersed throughout the processing centers named above.  The image is then funneled through the ancient processing centers of motion detection and object recognition before being “reassembled” into coherent perception.

Think about that for a minute.  You and I can watch the same event.  But, because I have very different emotions, goals, beliefs, memories. etc. the image that is “reassembled” in my brain can and will be different from the image reassembled in your brain.  We see different things!

Courtroom judges will tell you that if two eyewitnesses tell the same story, the judge knows there has been collusion because “no two eyewitnesses ever see the same thing!”  We see things differently!  Just because someone has a whole different take on a situation don’t mean they’re not telling the “truth.”  “There ain’t no good guy, there ain’t no bad guy.  There’s only you and me and we just disagree.”

Memory is Not a Hard drive

Because we’ve been using personal computers now for several decades, we’ve come to think that our memory functions much the same as computer memory.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  When we enter data onto a computer storage device or in the cloud, we can depend on it to be exactly the same when we retrieve it in the future.  However, our human memory doesn’t work that way.  Not only is it modified by the processing centers that we just talked about, but new experiences are also constantly modifying our memory from the moment it’s stored.  Our memory is never an accurate representation of what was first stored in our brain.

Beliefs and Assumption

Because of this science-based understanding, we should start conversations about decisions and difficult topics by having everyone share their beliefs and assumptions.  They’re all valid.  It will help you understand where others are coming from.  It will help them understand your position.  It will actually give the team a great foundation to begin working toward a position of commitment.

Appreciate diverse thinking!  It’s powerful!  It gives us a broader range of perspectives and helps us move forward together.  Every point of view is an accurate one.

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BlogMyers-Briggs

The Only Team I Ever Recommended Be Split Up

by Ron Potter

Diversity

The best teams I’ve ever worked with have had a great deal of diversity of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) preferences on the team.  However, diversity alone is not enough to ensure a high performance team.  But, it is a great foundation.

photo-1453474473052-08cd150dfe87 (1)There has only been one time in my twenty-five plus years of Team and Leadership Consulting that I’ve recommended a team be split up and given other assignments.  That team of seven people were all resident in one particular Myers-Briggs Type Preference.  And while MBTI is certainly not the end-all measurement of team diversity, it produced a very discernable pattern.

THE answer to the question

I would find myself asking a question of one member of the team.  That member often would give me a very complete and articulate answer.  But then I would ask each of the other members if they agreed with the answer and the response was:

  • Yup,
  • Yup,
  • Yup,
  • Yup,
  • Yup,
  • Yup!

All of the other six members responding with a pleasant smile and a subtle nod of the head!

OK, let’s ask a different question: “Could we look at this question from a different perspective and maybe come up with a different answer?”

  • Nope,
  • Nope,
  • Nope,
  • Nope,
  • Nope,

All of the other six members responding with a pleasant smile and a subtle twist of the head!

Different Perspectives

Even when I tried some of the more off-the-wall approaches to perspective shifts:

“How would a gorilla solve this problem?

  • He would grab it by the head and beat it to death!
  • Yup,
  • Yup,
  • Yup,
  • Yup,
  • Yup,
  • Yup!

“How would a giraffe solve this problem?

  • He couldn’t. He’s not strong enough to beat it to death!
  • Nope,
  • Nope,
  • Nope,
  • Nope,
  • Nope,

Change of Scenery

After a few more tries at this I was finally convinced that the members of this team needed to be split up and combined with other people with different perspectives.  My assumption is that didn’t go well.  This team had been together for a long time and in the early days had been extremely productive at getting projects completed.  But the environment had changed and they not only needed to be good project managers, they needed to adapt to changing environments.  Most of them probably had a difficult time blending into teams that didn’t all think alike and in particular didn’t think like they did.

Diversity

Knowing your Myers-Briggs type is not about (or should not be about) what type preference you have and if that’s the “right” way to view the world or not.  The point is that there are 16 healthy type preferences that will each view the world slightly differently.  The point is to use the diversity for the betterment of the team.  You accomplish that be showing respect for and learning from each view point and then determining together the best route for the team to pursue.  Together!

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