Your Personality At Work

Using The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator To Find The Best Work For You!
By Ron Visconti

In job search and career development, the want ads usually advertise what skills are needed to being successful in a job. And of course, job skills are an important component of a good job match.

However, what is currently discussed and should be more emphasized is the role of personality in work. How is our success at work impacted by our personality? Does our personality assist or detract in certain instances? How can personality influence our choices for a better match? Can personality add to the skill set we have?

Even if unconsciously, personality does definitely influence success on the job and your initial job choice. Good interviewers will look not only at your skill set, but at the whole picture: you, your skills, personality and goals.

A well-known personality test, the Meyers-Briggs Type indicator (MBTI), is currently used by over 3 million people in career centers, colleges and corporate settings and has been taken by over 50 million worldwide.

In the 1920s Katherine Briggs and Isabelle Meyers developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, based on the work of Carl Jung, who states that since childhood, we have innate preferences from which 16 personality types emerge. This test gives a glimpse of how personality types affect patterns of behavior and how those patterns affect different aspects of one’s life, including work. The MBTI can be used in a variety of contexts on and off the job.

For example:

• • How to better work as a team
• • How to understand and appreciate others’ differences in personality, work-styles (diversity in the workplace)
• • How to understand your own personality, preferences and strengths and weaknesses and access those qualities to further your own development on and off the job
• • How to look at communication patterns with family, friends and coworkers
• • How to enhance your work environment

The 16 personality types are derived from the eight basic personality preferences:

Extroversion Introversion
Sensing Intuitive
Thinking Feeling
Judging Perceptive

Jung defined these terms differently from what one would find in Webster’s Dictionary. Here’s a short summary of how these terms are used in the MBTI:

• Extroversion vs. Introversion
  Where do I get my energy? From the external world or people (extroverts), or from data, ideas, or things (introverts).
• Sensing vs. Intuitive
  How do I perceive information? Sensing types relate to information from their senses (visual, tactile, auditory, etc.) Intuitive types look at the “big” picture – global, spiritual, the possible, the infinite...
• Thinking vs. Feeling
  How do I make decisions? Through logic (thinking) or through person-center modes (feeling)?
• Judging vs. Perceptive
  How do I prefer to live? Judging types prefer to live planned, structured lives, while perceptive like flexibility and keeping their options open.

Here’s where you can go to take the test from a qualified examiner:
• Schools
• Colleges
• Career Centers (such as CEC)
• Marriage and Family Counselors

If you’d like to read about the test, there are probably scores of books about it. Here’s a sample of some excellent resources:
David Keirsey’s Please Understand Me
Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger
Do What You Are - Sandra Hirsh & Jean Kummerow, Life Types

The Myers-Briggs is a fascinating test, which is both simple and complex at the same time. It will certainly give you something to “chew on” about yourself and how you relate to the world around you, including how to get a job that matches your personality type.