Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator—A Tool for Building Great Teams

Personality assessment tests are a great way to learn about a person’s innate traits. An employer can better understand a person’s disposition, needs, and aspirations basis these traits. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test is such a personality-based assessment that has found much favor with hiring managers and HR. It has gained sizeable popularity, with more than 1.5 million people taking the test annually. Here is how you can use MBTI to select the right people. 

The MBTI assesses a person on a 16-section grid, based on four spectrums. These are Extraversion-Introversion, Intuitive-Sensing, Thinking-Feeling, and Perceiving-Judging. MBTI can be used for a variety of purposes, and not limited merely to employee hiring. It however finds very useful applications in the IT domain, for example in team-building. Many technology companies have used it to better understand collaboration within IT project teams. This is possible since it helps understand what motivates and drives individual team members, and this knowledge can be woven into the team scenario by applying group and culture dynamics. Here is how you can apply the MBTI to get to know your team better. 

1. Break the ice within the team: New project teams are constantly being dismantled and re-formed in the IT world. It is important that new teams gel with each other and come up to speed. For this, ice-breaking is a critical intervention that project leaders must bring about. Understanding different team members with MBTI can help the leader egg everyone to participate and to communicate openly. This will hasten the group’s advancement through the forming-storming-norming stages and ultimately to the performance stage. 

2.Know strengths and weaknesses: The MBTI assessment gives a fair idea of how a person will interact with others (say team members), and hence enable the employer to tailor the management approach to individuals’ unique needs. An example is a team member who over-thinks and constantly changes the project scope and plan—such a person needs to be reined in for stability, perhaps by providing him or her more specific deliverables. An introvert must be encouraged to share and speak up, lest his or her ideas be washed out in the din of louder voices. This becomes important in the tech domain, where a constant flux and humdrum is the ongoing state of affairs. 

3. Establish trust: Some team members may be gifted with unique traits such as a high emotional quotient or high empathy. Team leaders must be able to gauge this through MBTI and put it to the overall good of the group. This approach helps establish a friendly connect amongst team members, thereby developing a culture of openness and trust. Once trust is established, a person feels psychologically safe, and he or she will feel that the boss or company understands him or her as a human being, and not just another resource. 

4. Encourage diversity: MBTI is a powerful tool to understand innate thought processes, and it can be very well used to build a diverse team, particularly diversity of thought. It can be used as the stepping stone to spark an attitude of innovation and creativity. An MBTI assessment of a team can be a great starting point to know how much diversity of thought and experience you have in any team, and then take ahead the diversity agenda from here. 

These are only some of the various benefits of MBTI for the IT world. Though the test has been criticized for the lack of a scientific base for hiring and selection, its usefulness can be leveraged in other new ways as mentioned above.