In the past, as an employee or company leader, you may have had the opportunity to take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the leading personality inventory assessment tool.



For almost 40 years, business leaders have used the MBTI to assist them with managing employees, developing leadership skills, coaching leaders, building teams, training management and staff, resolving conflicts, enhancing communications, motivating employees, and enhancing diversity training.



What is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator?



The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator results in a personality inventory designed to make C. G. Jung's theory of psychological types more understandable and useful in people's lives. Jung's theory states that random variations in behavior are actually quite orderly and consistent over a long period of time. However, it is the basic differences in the ways individuals use both their perception and judgment that cause observable behaviors.



Perception describes the ways people become aware of things, people, events, experiences, or ideas. Judgment, on the other hand, describes the many ways people arrive at conclusions about what they have perceived. Due to systematic differences in perception and judgment, people will differ in their interests, reactions, emotions, values, motivations, and skills.



The MBTI results are organized into four pairs of psychological preferences:





(E) extroversion and (I) introversion: How do you get your personal energy - from the world outside of you or from your internal world?

(S) sensing and (N) intuition: How do you collect information - from pure data and facts or do you like to interpret and add information to existing information?

(T) thinking and (F) feeling: How do you make decisions - logically using your own data or by evaluating the effect your decision will have on others?

(J) judging and (P) perceiving: How do you like to operate in the outside world - with structure and a schedule or with flexibility to make changes?



To learn more about personality types, choose the MBTI instrument for both yourself and your employees. Note: the MBTI does not compare your results to other people's results, nor does it compare you to any normal or pathological standard. Using the MBTI will help everyone understand their own personality strengths and challenges and how each person can contribute to a situation, a task, or the solution to a problem.



In fact, since its existence, hundreds of studies have proven the MBTI tool to be both valid and reliable. These studies show that the MBTI measures what it says it does and the same results are produced when the tool is given more than once to the same person.