My recommendation to all Managers, Talent Acquisition folks, and Executives for best utilizing the INTJ goes as follows:
The INTJ is fundamentally a future-oriented strategic thinker who works very well within systems they can understand and can manipulate into the most efficient way possible.
Utilize the INTJ for brainstorming sessions where their creative mindset can reveal ways forward that other people may not be able to see clearly.
Do not bog them down with administrative details or they will tire out quickly and become stressed.
Pair them with a type like the ENFP or the ESFP in order to balance out some of the more hard-line decision-making tendencies. A good P type will be able to present more options or consider alternative ways to proceed that the INTJ is likely overlooking.
When asking for feedback from the INTJ, make sure you give them some time to collect themselves and do not demand an answer right away. Too quick of an answer may not be their true thoughts
Keep their intelligence in check and let them know that although you appreciate their intelligence, that if their attitude of superiority and/or condescension continues, disciplinary action will be required
Overall, the INTJ is a great asset when used for strategy and brainstorming sessions that utilize their future thinking orientation for long-term success of the organization.
People tend to think that the natural progression of a corporate job is management. It’s almost a perfect formula: start at the bottom, put in 5 to 10 years, become a manager. And if you have extraordinary ability, move up into a VP, Director, or C-level role.
In speaking with candidates, the current mindset seems to be that they are ready for management, or rather, they deserve management. Not everyone can be Manager, and not everyone has the chops to effectively do it.
Motivating Factors
The ideal manager is somebody that has an innate tendency towards leadership, and through their sheer attraction and willpower, can convince others to follow them. Others are inspired to take action on their behalf. There are only a handful of leaders in world history who fully achieved this ideal (Napoleon, Caesar, Washington) . In a corporation, these are the types of people you notice right away that are destined for leadership. There’s an aura about them that exudes confidence and influence.
Believing that it is your turn, or that you put in enough time at the company as a qualifier for leadership, is pervasive. It does make sense from a strictly “promote the most senior colleague” point of view, but it might not be the most effective. After all, those that have been there the longest likely know the business the best, the rationale goes.
Now, the worst reason people become managers is that some peoplejust don’t want to grind anymore. If you are in sales, you don’t want to knock on doors or make cold calls. It’s not necessarily negative to want out of that daily struggle, but moving into management to avoid it doesn’t seem like a noble cause. It’s a harsh way to look at it, but we’ve all worked long enough to know this is a reality that can’t be denied.
Interviewing managers
Here are some questions to ask potential managers:
Why do you want to be in management?
What are the skills that qualify you for management?
What is your management style?
In your mind, who exemplifies great leadership?
Will you step in for an underling and do a “low-level” task?
What is your day-to-day plan for personal and professional growth?
Using these questions, you should be able to get a good sense of whether this person is destined for leadership, or if they are hoping for management to “get out of the trenches.” The goal here is to find out if a potential managers has genuine intentions towards leadership.
P.S. You can use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to assess potential managers. The science behind Type and leadership has been proven out.
Everybody wants more power; not in the negative, evil way, but as in more power over their lives, more power over their discipline, more power over their careers and success. If we can agree on a foundational level with the title of this article, then the rest of my argument will be coherent.
Gaining knowledge
If knowledge does equal power, then it’s a simple formula; to acquire more knowledge gets us more power. Then why aren’t we spending a little part of each day becoming more powerful? There are limitless amounts of free, or nearly free, resources to gain a skill, acquire more knowledge, or become a better person.
I’m not talking about knowledge as in following current events or watching the news. In fact, I say you should stop reading the news and only read books. The reason for this is that scrolling through a news feed is a passive, rather than an active action, which is scientifically proven to be a better way for your brain to function. YouTube is also a great source, but the vaunted rabbit hole exists and will probably derail you from your goal.
I have a recommended reading section on this blog that lists the books that helped me with my personal development. Browse through it and find something that sounds interesting to you.
Becoming Complacent
Right now, there are endless advertisements for subscription streaming services that only serve to pacify and distract you from utilizing your valuable time to gain more knowledge/power. You’ve always said, “Man, if I only had the time I would read that book, learn that skill, or get back into (insert passion) .” Entertainment as it exists today is a weapon of mass distraction meant to hypnotize you into regression, not progression.
People you idolize
90% of extremely successful people (my own statistic) are well-read and have a profound desire to learn and understand more than everybody else. They are never satisfied with just “knowing enough to be dangerous.” It’s been widely circulated that Bill Gates reads 50 books a year which, for someone as busy as he is, can’t be easy. He never said he “didn’t have the time to read.” You can surmise the importance he puts on gaining knowledge as a cornerstone of his success.
Gary V, a very influential hype-man and beanie-wearing motivational speaker, has been a proponent of obsessively studying your passion to the point where you know all there is to know about it. This follows the same general idea that says to become a professional, one needs to be put in at least 10,000 hours of practice. This applies to any industry or career without fail.
If you desire to become a digital marketing expert, you should have:
a giant stack of books on your nightstand
a queue of YouTube videos waiting to be devoured
100 LinkedIn messages out to professional digital marketers asking for their advice.
Your goal is to be a giant sponge that soaks up as much information as humanly possible.
Becoming Powerful
If you do not try to acquire more knowledge, then you can never attain more power. You will always be somebody that is dictated to by others. How to live, how to work, how to be happy. I don’t want anybody to settle for mediocrity.
The very first thing you need to do is take the Myers-Briggs type indicator assessment and figure out who you are. This is the foundational knowledge from which everything else blossoms. Once you do that, you can begin to direct your life towards that which gives you happiness, and utilizes your best characteristics.
Contact me if you would like a personal Myers-Briggs consultation.
Communication, according to corporate consultants, is the #1 factor for any and all issues within the workplace. And they would be correct. However, the solutions that are typically employed are unable to solve the underlying issue– personality type amongst colleagues.
The 3 solutions implemented are:
Increased communication, even “over communication”
Clearer and more concise communication
CC’ing a superior to accelerate response times
You can pick and choose the cases where these methods were effective, but an alternative may have longer lasting results.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
Most are familiar with the Myers-Briggs Assessment that breaks down everyone into 1 of 16 personality types, designated by a 4-letter acronym (ex. ESFP, ENTJ, ISTJ, etc.). Each letter has a distinct opposite, as follows:
• E vs I (extroversion vs introversion) • N vs T (intuition vs thinking) • T vs F (thinking vs feeling) • J vs P (judging vs perceiving)
The focus here is on the Judging vs Perceiving function that I believe is where most communication breaks down. Therefore, an increase in communication only exacerbates the problem instead of clearing it up.
Judgers have their minds made up about nearly everything. Things are black and white and there is a finality to their opinions on every topic. They tend to stick to deadlines and draw lines in the sand, remaining uncompromisingly rigid.
Perceivers weigh their options and never lock themselves into a concrete answer. New information could arrive at any moment that would negate their past beliefs. They see both sides of an argument and the pros/cons of nearly every form of action. They tend to be flexible with schedules and keep the door open to new ideas.
Example
Being as clear and concise as possible, you ask, “Can you come into the office on Monday?” As a Judger (J), there is no possible way to misinterpret this question. As a Perceiver (P), there are several responses and interpretations: • “Mondays are tough for me, I might not be able to make it…” • “What time? • “It depends on my schedule”
This is infuriating for the Judger as the answer is clearly either Yes or No. The unclear response demands a longer conversation that to the (J) is not needed. To the (P), there is simply not enough information in the question to give the right answer. The Perceiver is frustrated with this question as it forces them to make an ill-informed decision.
Compromise
At the bare minimum, let’s compromise and start out with Yes/No and then the rationale. • “Yes, depending on the time “ • “Yes, but only after 10am” • “No, I am out of town that day”
Relating back to “clearer and more concise communication,” the above compromise is what should be implemented. Understand the type you are communicating with and proceed accordingly.
If you are restructuring your org chart, this is going to be the most useful way to decide how teams are put together, who leads them, and who makes the decisions.
In the following short articles, I will go over the 3 other functions of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and dig deeper into possible workplace solutions.
There is a common post-interview plague that is tragically infecting job seekers. It is in regards to not understanding how the interview went and going as far as to say you “killed the interview.” From my experience in being the middleman in this process, those who claim the interview went amazingly well, don’t get the job. Those who said the interview was OK, or they “think it went alright” are the ones who usually get the role.
Lack of Awareness
There is a disconnect between what you perceive as building rapport and being jovial, and the true reality of the situation. Candidates will tell me they were joking and laughing and the conversation was very light-hearted, as trademark signs that the interview was going swimmingly. What’s happening is the laughter is the nervous kind, and the jokes were off-putting. The laid back nature of the interview is because they’ve already decided you aren’t a fit and they don’t need to get deeper into the details of the job. Generally, this is recurrent theme with these candidates and is something that can be reversed by focusing on MBTI and the way in which one interacts and perceives the world.
Myers- Briggs and Interview Style
We have to start by understanding ourselves. And the way we do that is by first reading, Please Understand Me by David Kiersey. Once we discover the way our specific type (out of 16) perceives and relates to others– in a way I guarantee most of us haven’t fully conceptualized– we can fix some of the recurring potholes we always stumble in.
I think I can offer one straightforward explanation as to why your type is affecting your interviews and potential job offers. If you are an Extrovert in general, you are going to get your energy from the outer world. If along with your extroverted-ness, you also have a preference for Feeling vs Thinking, you are going to internalize your outer world. So when you get the laughter and smiles and eye contact in the interview, you are going to say, “hey, I am doing pretty well here!”
Unfortunately, you may be reading the situation on a very superficial plane. Your S and T functions will come in handy here if you make a wholehearted effort to develop them. Learning to strengthen your Sensing (S) and Thinking (T) functions will help you pick up on physical clues that can alert you to points when the interview might be taking a wrong turn and you need to course correct.
Obviously, there are millions more words to be written on the finer points of using MBTI to help with JUST how to interview better and be more aware of our faults. Though our tendency is to find a way to externalize our blame onto the interviewer, we should first make certain the interviewee truly knows themselves.
What managers get wrong about developing and using talent correctly, is not utilizing the Myers Briggs Type Indicator to bring out the absolute best in each individual. Educators, HR managers, and corporate recruiters have moved away from evaluating people’s innate nature and DNA-level talents in favor of surface-level assessments like the DiSC profile and StrengthsFinder (now called CliftonStrengths).
Speaking with certified MBTI individuals has shed some light on what’s happened in the last decade. MBTI is deemed too complex and requires a deeper discussion about psychology, temperament, and sometimes abstract concepts to fully wrap your head around its application to the business world. Thus, management has implemented broader assessments to get a general consensus about individuals. I would argue most assessments today are simply MBTI-lite and have poached the best concepts of it to make it more digestible to the masses.
Understanding MBTI was a radical shift in my understanding of team dynamics, communication, and individual values. I realized that the reason we have conflict in our work environments can be traced back to PERSONALITY TYPE, rather than our current go-to’s which are blaming intelligence, work ethic, or motivation. This does not address the underlying problem, thus managers are unable to solve inter-office disputes.
Undeniably, people have different innate abilities that make them better suited for certain roles and careers. They also have different ways of communicating and interpreting information. In previous articles I discussed how communication, the centerpiece for all workplace conflict, is largely based on MBTI type over anything else. In subsequent videos and articles, I will address in further detail the ways managers can use “typing” to get the absolute best out of their team.
Please do take a look at some of these YT channels that truly influenced me and my understanding of myself and others. You will find something here that you like.
