I hope everyone is having a great build-up to build-season.
I am currently working on this year’s application for our Drive Team and I am trying something a bit different. One section of the application is going to ask those applying to complete a Meyers-Briggs Personality Assessment - specifically one located here: http://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test.
We did this with our leadership at the beginning of the year and its been amazing to see how accurate the assessment of our team leaders has been. On the one hand, its allowed me as a coach to communicate better with each leader dependent on their personality type and on the other it has allowed the members to better understand one another when conflict arises.
I’m curious if anyone else has tried something like this and how it has worked for you. Secondarily - if you want to have some fun - take the quiz. Its pretty interesting.
How many other INTPs are out here? We only make 3% of the general population, but somehow I think the self-selection of chiefdelphi might skew the numbers.
ENTP here. Personally, I’ve never found knowing someone else’s results to help in dealing with them… But I have found that knowing my own results helps me identify how I subconsciously approach a problem, and helped me to be more flexible in dealing with other approaches.
I haven’t read anything definitive saying that the results of that test have much validity. From what I remember (and I would love to be corrected) they are very useful for categorizing people, but not useful for extracting useful data about a person or acting as a predictive tool.
As making predictions about how a person would perform on the field is the most important factor for drive team selection, I wouldn’t use those test results as a part of the selection process.
Stats from all people show green as the least common, but in robotics (for our team), most of us are either green or a combination of green and some other color (I’m green-gold for example).
I’ve taken a decent amount of personality tests over the past year or so in my university leadership courses, and I think one of the biggest benefits of taking them isn’t that they’re some sort of predictive measure of behavior oreven a good way to assign roles, but more that they promote self-awareness in how one shows up in a community, which, while something that comes intuitively so some people, is something I don’t think many people take the time to actually think about. For students specifically, I feel like it might also be an interesting sort of formative tool-- for ones like MBTI or StrengthsFinder, answering and thinking about the questions the test asks you can serve as the basis for some good self-reflection, and can help one answer more thoroughly the question of “who do I want to be?”
Anyhow, I digress. Personally, I’m not a fan of institutional personality testing. I feel like having a test gives people far too much confidence in something as a predictive measure, especially in this case where you’re taking an extremely complicated and multidimensional property (“personality”) and trying to boil it into something useful using binary or stepped preferences. It’s a compressive task, and you lose a lot of important stuff in the process.
INTP-A this time, ‘borderline’ ISTP-A, but I & T are way more solid they the last time. The last time I did this test about 5 years ago I was INTJ. It’s interesting to see how things have changed, in particular given the life events that have happened since the last time I took it. Individually I think it really helps to understand our own types so we’re more self-aware of our interactions with other personality types.
The brains of our students are still highly developmental, so it’s important to remember to not judge them based upon initial impressions of their personalities (especially freshmen). It only takes a little patience, imo.
For what it’s worth, I recently got ISFJ, and the description given hereisn’t accurate to me at all. Some of the questions such as:
You find it difficult to introduce yourself to other people.
are way too general to get good information from. For instance, I have no difficulty introducing myself to people older than myself or in a business setting, but I’m not really big on introducing myself to people my age or just in social situations. My answers vary so widely that whatever I pick will be inaccurate.
If someone does not respond to your e-mail quickly, you start worrying if you said something wrong.
My answer to the above should have been strong disagree because I see email as more of a business tool than a social one and am used to waiting days for any kind of email response, social or business related. I assume they want me to include things like social media messages or texting. If I did then my answer would be in the agree spectrum. I put that I agreed, hoping that I had guessed the test maker’s intentions correctly.
Our team does this exact test (the 16 personalities test) every year just for fun. I am the team captain, and I do associate team members with their personalities. It has helped me communicate better and understand where team members are coming from. The key word here is helped. Its mainly a personal fascination and not something the entire team spends a lot of time thinking about.
It is creepy how accurate the personalities are.
I am an ESFJ.
Most of the members on my team are INTPs, which is the exact opposite of me.
We use the personality test as just one facet our drive team selection. Team leaders decide which personalities would handle each task well as well as how students will work together. We also use an interview process and test on how well the students know the rules. All together these work for us but I don’t think it would be wise to decide solely on this test.
ISFP-T, from that assessment, similar to Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne, and Michael Jackson (maybe I chose the wrong profession…).
I think that I get different results every time I do one of these, and I can never remember my results, let alone what the letters stand for anyways. They always have seemed to provide an accurate description of what I feel like my personality is at the time, though.
I did a DiSC assessment/“training” through work and I’ve found that much more useful for me when assessing others. I don’t think it’s as specific as a Myers-Briggs test, but I personally think it’s easier to use when assessing a group - four categories are easier than 16, especially when you don’t know the people you’re working with well.
I have the same issue and always have.
One is asking subjective opinion about themselves.
When I was younger I was frequently considered introverted but now I am considered extroverted. Question one should be asking: what was the social situation you were in that made it easier to be introverted than risk being extroverted?
On several occasions I was passed by on job interviews where these sorts of metrics were used.
Given the trajectory of my career any time an HR person rolls out this and a Google search to fit a job:
I start to question why I am using HR to hurt myself and my business
It has been said elsewhere the questions themselves are introspectively valuable to get you to ask what kind of person you want to be, you think you are currently and maybe where you came from. I think if you want to be consistent you will be subconsciously consistent on this test but if you are honest it will drift.
I have found this to be a valuable management tool: in breaking conflicts in which both parties express themselves poorly.
Sit them down and have them take the test then share with each other so you let them walk a mile in the other person’s life experience. Just don’t judge as the manager but use it as a guide. A person that doesn’t mind hurting another person’s very sensitive emotions is still a person themselves but perhaps all parties need to understand the team impact.
