"The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” - Joseph Campbell

Today, I find myself reflecting on what I’ve learned during my career about how our personality types and traits influence the way we do our work, and how work together. I’m thinking about how taking these into account helps us build stronger teams by ensuring we have diverse strengths and skills represented. I’m also thinking about how I have learned to play the roles I do in the workplace, and other settings, and especially those that have required me to learn to work “against type”, or against my basic temperament.

I’ve had experience using the results from a number of different personality and temperament assessment tools to help understand what different people bring to building a strong team, and strong relationships, by recognizing and respecting the different strengths we each have. I’ve worked with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®), Effectiveness Institute Behavior Style profile®, Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument® (HBDI®), DiSC®,True Colors®, the Keirsey Temperament Sorter®-II (KTS®-II), and others. While each of these valuable tools brings a slightly different perspective to assessing and describing temperament and personality, they all have value in helping us see how very different temperaments and personalities can be exceptionally complementary and how diversity can equate to strength, agility, and innovation.

I’ve always had an interest in how people can work, and live, together in harmony by sharing their different perspectives and strengths. From an early interest in being a minister, to a desire to see different denominations and faiths emphasize what they have in common more than their differences, to my undergraduate studies in psychology with a goal to becoming a clinical psychologist, this desire to help people come together has been a thread running through my life. While I ran out of money to pursue an advanced degree, and thankfully found a good career in IT, I’ve continued to pursue this interest in my work as a manager and leader. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if it had occurred to me to take out a student loan!

Over the years, I’ve come to understand how very helpful it can be for members of a team to understand each other’s different strengths, styles, and preferences. When we recognize which of us bring stronger analytical skills, a preference for action versus deliberation, the ability to engage and persuade others, or a greater ability to understand how others feel about and experience change, we can benefit more from these strengths, styles and preferences. This understanding can also help us learn how to work together more effectively by learning how we can best work with those whose styles are different from our own. I’ve also found it very helpful to gain a better understanding of the differences between temperament, a person's underlying nature, and the behaviors they’ve learned to help them be effective in the workplace.

We can learn to work “against type” and to develop strength in areas that don’t come as naturally to us. Understanding our own strengths, and those of others with different styles and temperaments, can help us recognize opportunities for this kind of growth. In my own experience, I learned from an early age how to be more outgoing. My mother helped me learn this while still valuing the quiet, gentle, little boy who tended to enjoy reading inside and playing by himself. Recently, I’ve been reading Susan Cain’s book “Quiet”, and I’ve learned that this push to help children be more outgoing and extroverted was widely encouraged in the US in the 1950s. My mother’s talking with me about this, and giving me books written for children about how to meet friends and make conversation, may have been influenced by that climate of seeking “A health personality for every child.”

I want to be clear that I feel everything my mother did was motivated by love and that I have benefited from what she taught me. Still, I've always known that this ability to talk with just about anyone was something I learned to do as opposed to something that just came naturally. I’ve become so accustomed to working at being outgoing that, sometimes, it’s only by noticing that I’m feeling awkward or tired that I realize it’s something I am working hard to do. Working “against type” usually requires a significant investment of energy for me, as it does for most people, but there have been situations where this has been absolutely necessary, and sometimes very beneficial, in my career. When I am called on, as a manager, to give direction and set priorities, and especially when I must discipline an employee, I am working hard against type and it tires me out. I am at my best, and most at ease as a leader, when I can work as an advocate for the needs of the people I am leading because that comes naturally for me.

Understanding the differences in our styles, temperaments, strengths, and preferences has been invaluable to me in my work with others. It was this understanding that helped me learn how to work more effectively with executives who had a natural ability to make decisions and exercise control over an organization. These leaders needed me to bring them concise, actionable, alternatives based on data so that they could exercise their ability to choose the best course of action. By learning that the more analytical members of our teams placed very great value on the accuracy of their results, I was able to see why they needed the time to do their work thoroughly and well, and that it could help for me to clearly constrain the results I needed to help them do this in less time. Recognizing which members of the team were naturally outgoing and enthusiastic, and which were strong by being quiet and thoughtful, helped me honor and support each of these styles as we did our work together.

As I’ve used the various tools to understand my own temperament and behavior, I’ve learned a lot about myself, and also about these tools. For instance, I’ve been told that some, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® can tend to measure your personality within a given setting. For me this test, taken in the work environment where I felt most comfortable engaging with others and believed most strongly in the shared goals and values of our organization, my volunteer work with the SHARE Board of Directors, resulted in a type of ENFP. A type characterised by extroverted, intuitive, feeling, and perceiving behaviors.

I took a similar test, the Keirsey Temperament Sorter®-II, as they suggest, from the perspective of what feels real for me and not trying to give answers that I think would sound like how I should behave in any particular situation. The result was that I was classified as an INFJ. A type characterized by introverted, intuitive, feeling, and judging behaviors. Ultimately, after some reflection, I’m not surprised by this result. When I took the quick diagnostic quiz in “Quiet” I also scored as an introvert. I realize that my choices when left to my own devices reflect my comfort with the inner world of thoughts and feelings.

So, these different tools can reveal different things about us, and some results can differ depending on how we take them. It can be helpful to understand how to make good use of this information. For instance, a man I have great respect for, who has worked to develop one of the assessments I’ve used, talked about the difference between who we are versus how we “show up” to others in the workplace. Throughout most of my career, I have identified as an extrovert, and in the workplace I play this role well. With my most trusted loved ones I still tend toward gregarious, outgoing, behavior. I am very open about my feelings of love for these special ones and, with them, I can also be my quiet self and I’ve been re-learning that this is ok.

Our differences present opportunities for us to be more together than we can be alone. My wonderful partner has a significantly different personality from my own and this is one of the things that makes our relationship, and the life we share, so rewarding. One of my best friends and I both took the Myers-Briggs test together and discovered that our types were just about opposite from each other. I’ve come to learn over the years of our friendship just how strong this can make us, and how delightful it can be, as we work, and play, together. Another precious friend has helped show me the special beauty of quiet time in a way that is helping my rediscover that quiet little boy, and who he has grown up to be within the man I have become. This is a wonderful, comforting, gift that I am just beginning to unwrap and explore. Far beyond the world of work, our differences make the lives we share together so much richer. I am grateful for each of my loved ones and for their uniquely beautiful selves.

My darling wife tells me she’s not very surprised that I may actually be more of an introvert than I’d realized. As I look forward, she tells me that it seems clear than many of the things I most want to do in retirement seem more individual and solitary. Carl Jung wrote that introverts are drawn to the inner world of thought and feeling, and extroverts to the external life of people and activities. I guess my sense that I might essentially be an introvert who has learned to play extrovert very well may prove true. Among the insights in the report I received from the Keirsey test I took are that “you may find great personal fulfillment interacting with others to nurture their personal development” and “you also seem to do quite well connecting with both individuals and groups so long as your interactions together aren't superficial”. Perhaps in retirement, I’ll find opportunities to work to these strengths. I do seem to talk an awful lot for an introvert!