The MBTI personality preference tool can bring your staff greater self-awareness, improved internal communication, team-building and work productivity by encouraging appreciation for personality type differences, strategies to enhance team work and applications for the workplace.

Evelyn deFrees is a certified MBTI practitioner, administers the assessment and gives interpretive report feedback sessions to individuals and groups. She received MBTI certification training during a week-long Center for Applications of Psychological Type (CAPT) course in November 2013.

Evelyn explains, “I worked at a busy non-profit organization that experienced various internal communication challenges. MBTI training for staff lead to improved internal communication, more effective meetings, and more inclusive decision-making. It changed the culture around the office at that time. Knowing the power of MBTI training to help team members recognize and appreciate differences, I am now pleased to be able to offer this valuable training to individuals and groups here in Maine.”

Contact Evelyn deFrees to bring this tool to your workplace (evelyndefrees@gmail.com).

Background

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment is the best-known and most trusted personality assessment tool available today—as many as 1.5 million assessments are administered annually to individuals including use by most Fortune 500 companies and innumerable organizations worldwide.

The MBTI is a psychological preference tool which measures the normal differences in healthy people regarding how they take in information and how they make decisions. Katherine Myers and Isabel Briggs—a mother and daughter team –developed the MBTI instrument based on the psychological research of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung in order to give individuals access to the self-understanding that comes from recognizing our own preferred ways of functioning. Jung concluded that differences in behavior result from people’s innate tendencies to use their minds in different ways. The essence of the theory is that much seemingly random variation in human behavior is actually quite orderly and consistent, and results from basic differences in the way individuals prefer to use their perception (taking in information) and judgment (making decisions).

Using the MBTI to learn about our individual type preferences can lead to recognition of and respect for the differences among people and an appreciation for the value of the differences. Understanding of these innate personality preferences as a result of staff training and team workshops can lead to improved internal communications, team-building, problem-solving, decision-making, leadership development and conflict resolution at an organization.

In developing the MBTI, Myers and Briggs sought to sort personality preferences using four dichotomies which Carl Jung had presented in his studies. The MBTI assessment (a 93-item forced choice questionnaire) reports preferences on the four dichotomies, or pairs of preferences:

• Where people prefer to focus their attention and get energy from—shows preference for Extraversion or Introversion;
• The way people prefer to take in information—shows preference for Sensing or Intuition;
• The way people prefer to make decisions—shows preference for Thinking or Feeling;
• The way people orient themselves to the external world, with a judging or a perceiving process—shows preference for Judging or Perceiving.

There is no right or wrong about the preferences.  Each preference identifies normal, valuable human behaviors. Each of us has all eight of the dichotomies, but prefers using one part of the dichotomy or another. Psychological type is an underlying personality pattern that emerges as a result of the dynamic interaction of our four preferences, environmental influences and our own choices. As staff learns about their own and each other’s type preferences and ways to accommodate differences, there can be positive results for organizational communication and decision-making that increases effectiveness overall.

For more information

CAPT—Center for Applications of Psychological Type, Inc—since 1975, providing MBTI training, publishing and distributing MBTI materials, conducting MBTI research and data collection:
http://www.capt.org/mbti-assessment/mbti-overview.htm

CPP, Inc.—since 1975, the exclusive publisher of the MBTI assessment:
https://www.cpp.com/products/mbti/mbti_info.aspx