Self-Leadership and Personal Mastery by Lesley Tayor
Self-Leadership and Personal Mastery
Peter Senge popularized the concept of “personal mastery” in his classic book The Fifth Discipline.
A huge part of personal mastery is the ability to know and develop aspects of one’s personality.
It is human nature to want to understand what makes us “tick”: What are we good at? Where are our weaknesses or our areas for growth? What do other people think about us? What does our personality say about us?
Self-assessment is a skill that can be learned and doing this work (and sometimes it does feel like work) is a life-long journey in which we take responsibility for our own development.
There are many tools and resources that we can use to help us as we seek to learn more about ourselves. The MBTI or Myers Briggs Type Indicator is one such tool. As many of you know the MBTI is used by millions of people around the world and is popular with human resources professionals.
A few weeks ago I completed the Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator certification, something I’d considered doing over the years but never had the opportunity to do until recently.
In taking the MBTI training I was surprised to learn that Myers Briggs is more than just the 16 – 4 letter type combinations, e g INTJ or ESFP. And going into the training I have to admit I was rather sceptical.
Apart from learning about my own personality type, I was surprised to discover that the MBTI is not a personality test at all and should not be used to predict job fit or leadership potential. The instructor dealt with some of my scepticism by explaining the important difference between personality type and personality traits.
She also explained that the MBTI, if used properly, can help us gain insights into the following:
- Where and how we focus our attention which is related to where we get our energy from
- How we prefer to take in information
- How we prefer to make decisions based on that information
- How we prefer to deal with the external world
Knowing and acting on this knowledge can help us to become better leaders.
It’s important to recognize that personality traits are different from personality type. Psychologists study and measure what are referred to as the big five personality traits (OCEAN):
- Openness
- Conscientiousness
- Extroversion/Introversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism
Personality psychologists are able to measure our personality traits and determine how much of a particular trait each of us has and how we compare with other people on these measures.
If you are planning to hire someone for a job that requires a large measure of agreeableness, for example, a personality test may help you to determine which of your candidates is the best “fit”. The Myers Briggs Indicator does not measure personality and so cannot assist you in this aspect of your hiring process. I will share some of what I learned about the MBTI in future posts.
There are many different personality tests all with their own strengths, weakness and limitations. It’s also important to note that our personalities are partly determined by genetics and partly determined by the environment that we grew up in. We can also influence our personalities by consciously developing our skills and choosing to adapt our behaviors.
Despite helping us to better understand ourselves and others, it is important to remember that personality tests are not the answer to everything and should be used accordingly.
Cheers!