YOU'VE GOT PERSONALITY!
But which type?
And does the business world’s most trusted
psychological test reveal the real you?

By Sarah Scott

SO YOU'RE INVITED to one of those team-building exercises that your boss thinks is important, and the trainer hired by human resources asks you beforehand to fill out this questionnaire on the Internet. It’ll only take 20 minutes, she says. You start answering the questions: “Are you more attracted to a person with a quick and brilliant mind or a practical person with a lot of common sense?” Hey, this one is easy. This is kind of fun, like one of those parlour games to loosen people up before the night begins. “Which word appeals to you more: ‘convincing’ or ‘touching’?” Well, both. Flip a coin and carry on.

A couple of days later, the team-building exercise is about to begin, and guess what? You’re an ENTP! It’s a four-letter description of your personality that comes out of the test you just took, the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator. It’s supposed to describe how you prefer to live and work, how you absorb information, how you make decisions. As an ENTP, you’re a gregarious Extrovert, you’re Intuitive (the N, a big-picture person), you’re a Thinking person (logic rules, never mind someone else’s feelings) and you’re a Perceiving person (you’re spontaneous, and your desk is messy). The Myers-Briggs test says you’re an enthusiastic innovator who dislikes routine. So, you wonder, just what are you doing as a Bay Street manager? You’re supposed to be an artist or an entertainer or maybe a writer!

You know what you’re doing there, of course: making money, a lot more than you would as a lounge singer. Maybe this Myers-Briggs test is just a waste of time. But is it? It sure is popular. According to its publisher, CPP Inc., Myers-Briggs is the world’s most trusted and widely used personality assessment tool. It’s administered two million times each year in the United States alone. Eighty-nine of the Fortune 100 companies use it. It’s the most popular of an estimated 2,500 personality tests on the market, a $400-million industry built on the premise that a quick test can somehow reveal key facets of a complex personality.

These days, businesses are herding their employees, and would-be employees, into the offices of personality testers for apparently legitimate reasons. If you want to be a leader, you need the personal skills to understand yourself and your ability to deal with others, in order to motivate people to follow you. If you want to be seen as a good team player, you had better understand how other people behave so you can adjust your personal style accordingly—or at least not get angry when the guy across the table insists on a step-by-step plan to achieve a goal when all you care about is the big picture. You know it’s true: think of all the guys who came in with straight A’s from some fancy MBA school and then flamed out because they couldn’t get along with anybody.

Really, though, does this Myers-Briggs reveal your innate personality, as the test’s proponents say? Or can you forget about your secret wish to be a singer, and go back to your day job, trying to make the big bucks on Bay Street?

It’s easy to find people who criticize this test, and the whole personality-testing industry, as a lot of hogwash. “The use of personality tests is growing despite decades of research casting doubt on their effectiveness,” writes Annie Murphy Paul, author of the 2004 book The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves. “The Myers-Briggs, for example, claims to reveal to test takers their inborn, unchanging personality type, but, in fact, research shows that as many as three-quarters of test takers are assigned a different type when they take the Myers-Briggs again,” she writes.

The accuracy of the test does depend on the circumstances of the people taking the test, says Jean Kummerow, who has co-authored several books on Myers-Briggs that are also published by CPP Inc. Myers-Briggs is supposed to detect your innate characteristics, but “sometimes people might not answer that way, consciously or unconsciously,” she says. The questions may not be the right ones for your individual personality either, she added. “It’s not perfect; we never said it would be.” Still, between 58 and 85 percent of the people who have taken the test agreed with their four-letter profile.

“These are just preferences, natural tendencies, things you would typically do,” she noted. It’s not meant to be used to select people for a job, or rule anyone out, since it cannot predict how people will behave on the job. But it’s extraordinarily useful for team building, said Kummerow. “You can understand that people who are doing things in a different way are not out to annoy you. That’s their style. You’ll understand people are different, and because they’re different, they’re not bad.”

What does this test tell you about you anyway? You could ask Vicky Stikeman, an advertising executive turned executive coach, who now administers the Myers-Briggs test to Rotman School of Management executive MBA students and other corporate clients. She gave the test to the writer of this article and says the ENTP descriptor is dead on. The Myers-Briggs test, she explained, is based on the theories of Carl Jung, who suggested we have opposite ways of gaining energy, gathering information, deciding what to do based on that information, and dealing with the world around us.

Extroverts like Stikeman focus on the outside world to gain energy. They’re expressive, gregarious people who come out of a party energized, not drained. Introverts, on the other hand, gain energy from their inner world. They’re reflective, quiet, the type who’d prefer an intimate conversation to a large gathering. Introverts reflect on information before speaking; extroverts are big talkers. “We can talk and listen at the same time,” says Stikeman. An introvert will listen and wait for a pause before saying something. The misunderstood difference between extroverts and introverts causes a lot of friction at the office, she says. Extroverts will dominate the meeting, while introverts will sit quietly, thinking. That doesn’t mean introverts don’t have something to say. They’re just waiting for a lull in the conversation to pitch their idea. So, Stikeman advises fellow extroverts: remember to give the introverts a chance to contribute to the meeting. It’s easy. Just ask the question: “Charles, do you have a view on this?”

The second dimension in the Myers-Briggs world is sensing versus intuition. People who prefer sensing are the step-by-step linear types. They trust facts, details, tangible reality. Intuitive people, on the other hand, are big-picture thinkers—imaginative, creative. These two polar opposites can easily rub each other the wrong way, says Stikeman. If you’re intuitive, you need to be more patient as the sensing type describes in detail what he’s done. Or you can just say: “I’m the big-picture type. I don’t need all the steps. Just give me the bottom line.” The sensing type, on the other hand, might say to Ms. Intuitive: “Great idea, but how are you going to get there? Describe the steps.” If you’re intuitive, you might not like it, but you should at least know that the sensing individual isn’t just trying to drive you nuts.

Then there’s thinking versus feeling. Stikeman says she can always spot a thinker. When he or she is trying to decide something, they look out the window. A feeler, on the one hand, looks down. Thinkers make decisions using logical, objective analysis. Feelers, on the other hand, try to create harmony and consider other people’s feelings. They’re empathetic, compassionate, accommodating.

The fourth dimension of the Myers-Briggs personality indicator is judging versus perceiving. You can tell a judger: look at his desk. It’s neat, organized—just like him. He plans carefully, lives by the schedule, maps out his activities in a methodical way. Perceivers are messy, spontaneous, casual. They work best when a deadline is looming. They pull all-nighters to get the job done.

Stikeman says that once you understand the four polar opposites (extroverts-introverts, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling, judging-perceiving), you can read other people’s styles and adapt your style to theirs in a meeting, on a team or even in personal encounters. “Once you realize others operate differently, you can adjust, and not jump to the wrong conclusions,” says Stikeman.

Each person who takes the test ends up with a four-letter description of their personality preferences. “Its biggest strength is also, in a sense, one of its biggest weaknesses,” says Reg Ellis, a senior partner at Ellis Associates, a Toronto firm that administers a wide variety of tests for the hiring and development of executives. “The simplicity of the Myers-Briggs makes it quite useful in helping people understand important differences in how they see the world and how they respond to one another. But sometimes people treat the four-letter MBTI code as if it says everything there is to say about the individual involved, when that’s manifestly not the case. This can lead to oversimplifying the reasons behind another person’s behaviour and a sort of labelling that can interfere with real insight into people.”

How should tests be used? Critics of the Myers-Briggs test and its defenders both agree on one thing: it should never be used to hire, or to rule out, anybody for a job, because it doesn’t predict how one will perform on the job. For one thing, it has not been constructed to detect lying. If you want a job in a customer-focused company that’s looking for extroverts, it’s easy to answer the questions in a way that makes you look like one. “There is no correlation between performance in this test and performance in the workplace,” said Mary Jo Ducharme, assistant professor of human resources at York University. You might be rated an extrovert, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be good at making cold calls.

There’s also a limited relationship between a person’s four-letter type and his or her leadership style, according to a 2003 review of the research on Myers-Briggs in The Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies by James Michael, a business professor at Wagner College in Staten Island, N.Y. It turns out that people are often more influenced by their company culture or their position than their personality type. What’s more, an executive’s needs—for power, affection, achievement—are probably more important in determining their leadership style than their personality type. So, should Myers-Briggs be used in leadership training? “Use with caution,” counsels Michael. “Understand that their type provides a limited view of what their behaviour might be.”

Well, what about teamwork? That’s why you had to do this test in the first place, right? It might be a fun way to open a conversation between co-workers that will eventually make them understand one another better and improve lines of communication, says Ducharme. But John Oesch, assistant professor of organizational behaviour at the Rotman school, is skeptical. “I cannot say it’s useless if people reflect on themselves ... and learn something,” he said. But consider the bottom line: does a team act effectively? A good team makes explicit goals—ones that everyone agrees on and acknowledges. Second, a team plans a process, says Oesch: “Usually, the amount of time planning is inverse to the amount of scrambling at the end.” Naturally, it’s vital to get to know other people on the team, but taking a Myers-Briggs test to discover personality types isn’t necessary, he said. You can get to know your team members over lunch.

Still, it sure is fun guessing what four-letter type your co-workers are, and who is made for the job they’ve chosen. There are many free tests on the Internet you can do at lunch to see what you should be doing, if you didn’t have to pay the mortgage on that house that’s bigger than what you need. You’re an ENTP: you would prefer to work on something new and exciting every day—writing or art or some other creative pursuit. But then, that would neglect the need you have, wouldn’t it, the need that drives you to the BMW dealership on the way home to that million-dollar house. Maybe that professor in New York has a point: your basic need is more powerful than your preference.