In order for companies to get things done, people need to work together. Quite often, poor communication and misunderstanding get in the way.

Meyers-Briggs personality profiles can help. The testing is amazingly accurate, and the detailed profiles, when shared with other members of a work team, go a long way toward helping people understand where the other person is coming from.

Here is a sample profile, which I selected randomly. It would be useful enough for the person to understand his/her own profile, but the real power of Meyers-Briggs kicks in when a member of the work team with an opposite profile reads it.

Normally, we make assumptions about a person’s motivations and behavior based on how we ourselves would think and act. When you see more clearly how differently our personalities are put together, it gets much easier to accept different points of view and work styles.

I’ve seen Meyers-Briggs turn dysfunctional teams into well oiled machines. For larger organizations, M-B can bring in trainers and coaches to work with employees around the personality profiling concepts.

Further reading …

Liz Strauss and enlightening comments on M-B.

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