Personality tests, such as the Myers-Briggs assessment, can be beneficial tools to help people better align themselves with a career that fits their personalities. These assessments can also benefit companies as the assessments can guide leaders to develop high performance teams based on different personalities, allowing for more diversity (Jordan, 2012).  I believe that these tests are becoming increasingly more important as the work force shifts toward a new direction where employees are not staying in the same job forever.  Younger workers now have access to a variety of tools that can highlight potential opportunities globally, allowing them to move between jobs easily. I feel like these types of personality assessments have the potential to be very beneficial, as long as you don’t end up pigeonholing yourself into one career path. The assessments provide an opportunity to understand your strengths, as well as your weaknesses, and link them to a career path that fits with your leadership style. These tests also offer insight into your “leadership potential, and what skills sets may need work” (Lok, 2012).        

            I have always enjoyed taking these types of assessments and reading into personality characteristics.  Previously, I had just enjoyed them for self-reflection opportunities and never really considered the benefits they could provide in a career and leadership path. I am still young in my career and leadership experience and have not had the opportunity to gain as much insight into what path is right for me; therefore, assessments such as the Myers-Briggs can provide an excellent opportunity for guidance, especially for the new work force generation. After taking the assessment multiple times, I have always scored as an INFP.  INFP personality types refer to introvert (22%), intuitive (25%), feeling (56%), and perceiving (9%). INFP’s are considered the “mediators” of the different personality types and generally see the world in an idealistic perspective. INFP’s lives must have variety and meaning and enjoy helping others grow and find success (Druhot, 2007).  According to psychologist Dr. George Simon, INFP personality types are “values-driven idealist who strive to heal the world”, and while this is an optimistic view, INFP’s can sometimes get too caught up in the world of ideas and lofty dreams (2013). Simon goes on to discuss that INFP personality types are often effective at communicating their vision, ideals, and passion due to their deep desire to create positive change (2012).  INFP’s are also very adaptable and welcome new concepts, information, and ideas.  They also tend to value creativity and passion and are not generally motivated by money or recognition (Druhot, 2007). While these traits offer a lot of opportunity to for me to grow as a leader, there are also many difficulties and struggles of this personality type as well including setting goals too high that are unreachable, becoming disinterested and detached from work they don’t see purpose in, and are reluctant to give criticism or constructive feedback and at times will let emotion effect their judgment (NERIS Analytics, 2015).

These are definitely characteristics that I see in myself in a lot of different areas of my life.  I recently reviewed my management assessment scores with Tom Labrecque of NextSteps, I found a lot of parallels in my personality score with the Myers-Briggs test and the management assessment with Mr. Labrecque.  The most obvious similarity between the two scores was in career paths.  Both the management assessment and the MBTI results stated that my strengths and career paths include jobs that serve the community and offer me the ability to set goals, stay innovative, offer diversity, and provide some direction, but still allow for a certain level of independence.  Jobs in this path generally include education, graphic design or fine arts, psychology, and anthropology.  The common theme between the two assessments and the career paths suggested is that they all offer an opportunity to work in an environment that can be directed by my values, achievement levels, ability to innovate, and most importantly, share my vision and passion with others.  For the most part, I feel like I have aligned myself without realizing it toward the careers that appear to suite me best.  After talking with Mr. Labrecque, he pointed out that whatever career path I end up following, finding an environment that challenges me to utilize all of my strengths and build off my weaknesses, is most important. Mr. Labrecque also noted that I landed in the “diplomatic” quadrant of the “Leadership Management Styles” assessment and was more specifically described as a “confident, introverted diplomatic leader”.  Diplomatic leaders tend to take a more people-oriented leadership approach and are generally more driven by “why” things happen instead of “how”.  I felt like this assessment matched up well with the MBTI results as a mediator to conflicts and problems.  The benefits of being able to mediate situations and offer a diplomatic approach, I feel, would be useful in a group or team setting within an organization. These traits would allow me to bridge any conflicts with other team members, as well as provide motivational support and the ability to inspire people to achieve visionary goals. Having the ability to be a diplomatic leader in situations where conflict might arise or when members lose focus would benefit an organization by potentially encouraging a smoother approach to sharing ideas and working in teams.

While I see a lot of benefits to having this type of personality, I have also discovered a lot of potential set-backs in having a more idealistic approach to problem solving and setting goals.  In my own personal life, some of these drawbacks are abundantly clear for me.  I often pile too much on my plate with the idea that I will be able to handle all of the obligation I put on myself.  I end up putting a lot of pressure and stress on my successes and failures and end up causes a lot of unnecessary stress to myself.  I’ve discovered that being an individual who likes to be challenges, but is also a lofty dreamer and idealist, can oftentimes be a bad mix.  There have been countless times that I’ve agreed to something or overbooked myself with work, school, volunteer work, side project, potential future business ideas that I suddenly feel like I can make work in my free time, and thinking I can find a way to squeeze in another activity! I brought this up during the management assessment and asked about methods to control the overload of ideas and dreams, so that I can focus on a single vision.  Mr. Labrecque suggested that because my personality assessment showed a strong ability to identify problems, but a weaker ability to solve them, that I should work developing a method to take ideas out my head and work on identifying the ones that will definitely not work.  This strategy is one that definitely makes sense for me as I enjoy brainstorming opportunities and programs such as The Brain.  In my professional experience, I have found that when conflict arises and people are disagreeing, I tend to try and encourage other team members to take on strategies such as brainstorming ideas to identify problems.  As I continue to work on and develop more self-awareness in this area, I think the tools that I discover work for me will also be useful in my strategies to be an effective leader. 

As it stands, my current goal is to work with children who are struggling to grasps foundational concepts that are the building blocks in education. Whether they are struggling with a learning disability or are simply not being challenged enough, I feel like the tools that have helped me to internally set challenges for myself would also benefit in an educational structure to encourage students to set internal goals and be motivated by their accomplishments. INFP’s are considered to be a good fit in education or human development areas because they focus on seeing the good and potential in every person and/or situation (Druhot, 2007).  I do think it will be important for me as I continue to develop more self-awareness to continue to ask questions from others who have more experience or different perspectives, as I get very hyper focused on a problem or process and potentially side track myself from the vision or goal.  It will be important for me as I work on my leadership to continue to put myself in a challenging environment that allows me to share my ideals, goals, and visions with others.  This type of environment would offer the ability to express creativity and my desire to come up with innovative ideas with people, while also encouraging a sharing of perspectives and and solutions with other people.  I also think it will be essential to my ability to grow as a leader to work on my confidence in myself and with my visions and dreams. Building more confidence in myself will encourage me to communicate my passion more effectively, while also allowing myself to explore my ideas and the opportunities that they bring to me. Overall, I think that assessments such as the Myers-Briggs, as well as the management assessment, have the potential to offer valuable perspectives and insights into how we function as leaders and followers.  They also offer a constructive feedback on weaknesses both personally and professional, as well as strengths or opportunities to grow.  These assessments; however, are only effective if understood and utilized in a productive manner. While they highlight areas that you may be most successful in, they also provide valuable tools for developing higher emotional intelligence, as well as self-awareness into who you are as a leader, and what you can become.

References

Butt, J. (2015). Functional Analysis Of The INFP. Retrieved December 12, 2015, from http://www.humanmetrics.com/personality/infp

Druhot, G. (2007). Assess Where You Are. In Career directioning: A practical guide for jobseekers. (p. 174). Xlibris Corporation.

INFP in the Workplace. (2015). Retrieved December 12, 2015, from http://www.16personalities.com/infps-at-work

Lok, C. (2012, August 23). What‘s your type. Nature, 488, 545 – 547. Retrieved from https://www.box.com/s/14bbyljg5oxinclatg26 

Simon, G. (2013). The INFP Personality Type: More than a Dreamer. Retrieved December 12, 2015, from http://counsellingresource.com/features/2013/09/03/infp-personality-dreamer/