Personal development

If people think ability is innate, it could be holding them back

New research sends clear message to team leaders

Effective conflict management is a pillar of high-performing organizations

At work, there are hidden elements that can make or break team success. This blog post helps managers and leaders understand how inclusion – and inclusive leadership – cultivates the trust and psychological safety that teams need to be effective.

How micro habits are key to the environmental mission of our new charity partner, Take 3 for the Sea

What can you do with an MBTI certification? Learn more about popular applications of the MBTI tool like leadership and team development, and why becoming an MBTI certified practitioner could be your best professional investment.   

Why well-being is crucial to employee and organizational performance

We all have some introverted and some extraverted parts of ourselves, but according to the theory of personality types on which the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® assessment is based, ambiverts don't exist.

What is human synchronization and why is it important for learning and development trainers, consultants and coaches to consider?   

Did you know that interpersonal behaviors can be measured in an objective way? Through the FIRO-B® assessment, HR professionals and leadership consultants can check how well a person’s behaviors cultivate inclusion and success in the workplace.

Research shows there’s a self-perception gap when leaders assess their inclusion efforts

How can MBTI personality type help strengthen relationships? Do people with the same type get along better? Listen to this episode of The Myers-Briggs Company Podcast to find out! 

The world has been flattened by technology and working across county and cultural borders is now the norm. But can you use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment across borders? Here’s what you should know.  

Inclusion in the workplace gives people a voice and drives performance. And the FIRO-B assessment can help your people understand how their interpersonal behaviors are tied to company culture and inclusivity.

New research and data shows how different personality types approach conflict. But what does it mean for Introverted types? 

Awareness of different approaches to conflict could help multi-generational workforces understand each other and work together better. 

Paying closer attention to employee needs is the way to make remote, in-office, and hybrid teams function better

If conflict management is something you dread, here’s how to start turning it around

What should leaders be aware of about these well-known personality differences?

The Myers-Briggs Company is launching a new podcast about psychology, personality, work life, and how to get the best from life. 

If not, you might be part of a hybrid strategy that’s about to fail.

As employees return to the office, they’re expecting more flexibility in their social contracts with employers. How can HR help?

Imagine a gender equal world. A world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination. A world that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive. A world where difference is valued and celebrated... 

HR professionals get insight into team dynamics, individual strengths and more with potential leaders when using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment.

How can personality assessments like the MBTI tool help teams work together more effectively and understand each other better?

What happens at the intersection of race, type and leadership? 

How observing the Platinum Rule builds stronger workplace relationships

What can you do to help maintain positive relationships remotely?

Tips for working from home

How openness and predictability make teams more effective

Gender equality, diversity, leadership and International Women’s Day

Our recommended titles for you this World Book Day

Why is self-awareness important for leadership?

Reflections on our first charity partnership

Celebrating Global Entrepreneurship Week

Read our latest research on well-being

If you aren’t sure, read on…

There’s an important part of business growth that’s often overlooked – change.

What can Dancing on Ice teach us about the transferability of skills?

MBTI Step II facets and the holiday season

How social media and gamification can help employees grow

Gill Coombs, writer and career coach, shares her thoughts on Idealists and activism

Are introverts being limited by misconceptions?

Do people with different type preferences use the same or different methods to develop their self-awareness?

Continue to explore research around self-awareness – this time focusing on the role of your MBTI type.

Research results are in! How do people benefit from improved self-awareness and how do they get there?

Reflections on the first 18 months of an MBTI practitioner.

How do you show your appreciation and thanks of other people? 

How do you show your appreciation and thanks of other people? 

How you can gain instant insight from colourful MBTI type resources.

John Hackston explores recent OPP research. 

Which MBTI book will you add to your collection this World Book Day?

Research Study exploring leadership strengths through the lens of Type

Get the most from the MBTI assessment when coaching individuals.

Raising awareness of challenges to early Type development that we can all consider and explore

Damian Killen reveals the role MBTI Type has on successful influencing

Penny Moyle reflects on an inspiring MBTI user event

How knowing your MBTI Type and Core Character can help you recover from stress

How can we make it easier to talk about the real power of MBTI: Type dynamics?

What the FIRO questionnaire can tell us about interpersonal compatibility

This post explores Richard's experience in struggling to decide on his best-fit Type and how he finally felt comfortable with his preference for Thinking.

Alexis Hutson, professional coach and mentor, shares her experience of using MBTI Step II for team development. A great example of the differences between Step I and Step II.

Aidan Millar explores how coaches can help clients flex between operating with their natural MBTI preferences and outside them when necessary. 

If the goal of the MBTI assessment is to establish best-fit Type, why bother with the questionnaire?

Great feedback exercise for practitioners, helping to convey the brilliance of the MBTI framework.

The employment market seems to be improving, which is good news for jobseekers but not necessarily for employers; having more jobs available means that there are more opportunities for workers to leave. All the more important, then, that managers don’t give their people that extra incentive to start looking elsewhere. Here are five of the most common ways in which managers can (and unfortunately do) alienate their staff.

Extraverts? Haven’t heard from them in a while. Introverts? They’re SO last year. There are some new kids on the block – the Ambiverts – and they are sweeping everything before them. Apparently, Ambiverts are better leaders, make better salespeople, and are just all round better human beings. It appears that psychologists have just discovered that Ambiverts exist (hence all the recent press coverage); as a result, the old idea of a forced choice between Extraversion and Introversion, as encapsulated in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), is clearly outmoded and should be abandoned.

I am coaching the CEO of a large charity. He’s 55 and has been in his job for nine years. He looks grey and anxious, slumping in his chair. “I’m tired of my team treating me like their parent. It’s hard enough being a parent at home. I’m exhausted, our funding is under threat, I don’t think I want to do this job any more”. He tells me readily that he’s been what he calls ‘psychometrified’ many times; but he’s never taken the FIRO- B assessment...

In the last few days of the race, the media buzz around the Tour de France reached a crescendo in the UK – not least because Team Sky’s champion rider Chris Froome was dominating the race, and the chances for others to put the brakes on him were narrowing. In an unprecedented move, Team Sky released Froome’s physiological “power data” to enable “a greater understanding of his performance”, following accusations that his advances in stage 10 of the race were beyond normal physical abilities. The data revealed that the speed with which Froome achieved the daunting climb to La Pierre-Saint-Martin in stage 10 was exceptional, but well within his means.

This is the second posting based on Jean Kummerow’s keynote presentation at OPP’s MBTI User’s Conference on 16 June 2015. The first post gave background on the ‘Four Crucial Cs’ Adlerian model. This second part describes how to use type within that model.

As you already know, the practice of Coaching has many iterations and even several definitions. The one I like to use is “a method of assisting individuals to improve their performance in some area”, from Davison & Gasiorwski in the 2006 Journal of Individual Psychology. That definition encompasses so much of what we do with personality type.

What's your idea of the perfect break? This holiday Type table looks at 16 vacations custom-made for each of the MBTI Types.

How do you best represent yourself to potential employers? How do you bring your professional reputation to the forefront? Up to now, the answer has been to craft and polish a CV. However, we know that prospective employers are likely to spend just eight seconds reading each CV submitted with a job application. The new way to get yourself noticed is to display your qualifications on a site like LinkedIn with the use of digital badges.

Well, not necessarily. But it is true that her demise could have been attributed to an all-too-common Sensing blind spot: a failure to quickly and accurately recognise how facts and present realities connect to a bigger picture – and often, a very meaningful one.

Whether or not you are a sales professional, and even if you don’t see selling as part of your job, there are times when everyone needs to influence or persuade. OPP recently worked with a regional sales team in a financial services organisation to help them become more successful. The same techniques we applied there can easily be adapted to create more persuasive communication for anyone – not just sales people.

Last week, I had the pleasure of joining an MBTI Step II qualification workshop for the first time in several years. This revamped workshop incorporates several new ideas to help practitioners to engage their clients in MBTI in general, and the Step II instrument in particular.

In my work with individuals across all sectors and at all organisational levels, I am hearing more and more from managers and their HR colleagues about the importance of ‘Emotional Intelligence’. It’s a concept that has been around for a while and it looks like it is no longer the latest fad, but a permanent part of our people development “business as usual” tool kit. However, Emotional Intelligence has become a ‘catch all’ panacea for desirable interpersonal skills, a rather mixed bag of the positive qualities one might hope for in a colleague or leader.

Coaching has always been an important part of the L&D service that OPP’s consultancy offers. It’s also the mainstay of the practice for many of our independent practitioner customers. Why is there such a demand? In short, organisations need their leaders to develop a great range of responses to the challenges they face, and to develop greater psychological resilience. Additionally, many organisations are seeking to develop coaching skills among line managers, knowing that this too can have a significant and positive impact on organisational performance.

It’s that time of year again... having reflected back on 2014, many will now be looking ahead to 2015 and identifying their self-improvement resolutions and goals for the year ahead.  Although I don’t personally set New Year’s resolutions, goal setting helps focus my intention, effort and actions. It seems timely to reflect on how we set goals, as many in organisations will be in the midst of reviewing performance against targets or key performance indicators (KPIs) and engaging in personal development planning for the year ahead.

Visits to our Personality Matters Blog were at an all-time high in 2014, and we covered a wide range of topics in our weekly posts. Over the last 12 months we've talked about the best MBTI-based books and the various resources available for L&D teams. We’ve promoted Movember, and we’ve chipped in to the Paul Flowers furore. We've continued to thrive as thought leaders in a diverse range of workplace psychology issues, from recruitment and assessment centres to polarity management. But what are the top five posts that readers have returned to again and again?

I love MBTI Step II. My first consulting role working with the MBTI framework was for an HR consultancy that always used the MBTI Step II assessment in preference to MBTI Step I. So I got to know it really well, really quickly and although I always use my Step II knowledge to underpin conversations with people who have only completed MBTI Step I, I never find it as satisfying as being able to get into the depth that one can reach with MBTI Step II insights.

We all know from personal experience that we trust some people and not others. Likewise we trust some organisations, and yet find we are sceptical of the motives of others. This tendency to categorise entities in this way is part of an understandable strategy to manage risk.

Time. An ethereal concept, or a real resource? Something elastic, or an uncompromising task master? Sometimes there seems to be too much of it, and at other times never enough. Our relationship with time is one that travels with us through the stages of life and helps us to get things done .... or not… or eventually! Do we live in the future, the past, or the here and now? And what about the person next to you? You are both here and now, but are you really?

Training aids that are memorable and that bring clarity to descriptions of MBTI^® type are like gold dust. One of the commonest questions I come across in the various MBTI-related Linked In groups, including OPP’s own OPP Qualified Practitioners, is the plea for good exercises to help illustrate the MBTI preferences and dichotomies.

Twenty years ago when I first started using MBTI in management development work, training room props were thin on the ground. I would often lead a development session armed with nothing more exotic than flip charts and masking tape for ‘living type table’ exercises.

In the second of our blog posts looking at 20 invaluable books about MBTI^® and type, we review another ten titles that have impressed MBTI practitioners or been a key support in their work with the MBTI assessment. As with the first batch, the books featured here are listed in no particular order, and comments are from individual reviewers who responded to our request for reviews on the Linked In group OPP Qualified Professionals.

One of the criticisms that people often level at the MBTI questionnaire is that it ‘puts you in a box’. MBTI practitioners, however, know that this isn’t true – although we will have many similarities to people of the same type, there are also many ways in which we are unique. Whatever our underlying psychological type, we have all been brought up in different environments, and this will have a big influence on our personality and behaviour too.

Which books about MBTI^® and type have had the biggest impact on practitioners? We posted this question on the Linked In group OPP Qualified Professionals earlier this year, to discover the titles that had most impressed and inspired practitioners or been a key support in their work with the MBTI assessment. Twenty books rose to the top of the pile. Here are the first ten – in no particular order – with comments from the individual reviewers.

Understanding personality type helps us see how our minds are wired - how we like to get energised, take in information, make decisions, and orient ourselves to the outer world. Understanding interpersonal needs gives us insight into another aspect of our personality - what motivates our behaviour in regard to how much interaction we want with others.

I'm reading a book at the moment – Thanks for the feedback: the science and art of receiving feedback well by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen (Harvard Law School). I bought it on the strength of an article in the Saturday Guardian by Oliver Burkeman, which included a comment that really made me chuckle: “Tell me what I did well, tell me what I should do differently and don't confuse the two. If I wanted a sandwich, I'd go to the office canteen.” If only receiving feedback was as straightforward as eating a sandwich!

Few things in life are free – but OPP has some really cool free resources to support you in your work! To help celebrate our 25 years in the business, we’ve taken a trawl through the various goodies available for zero outlay on our website. They range from white papers and feedback materials to fun quick guides and infographics – many of which can also be found on our practitioner downloads page.

"Improve your self-esteem and you’ll rapidly improve your chances of fulfilment, success and happiness in life." The above statement seems to makes perfect sense. (I made it up, but it’s typical of what you’ll find on the creaking self-help shelves of any bookshop). It appears both logical and emotionally appealing, probably in part because it sounds like something that might be easily fixed. Many self-appointed gurus and counsellors have made a good living off this expectation, and some pedal a myth that low-self-esteem is at epidemic proportions. However, scratch the surface and there are a couple of issues with self-esteem.

According to a recent CIPD report, job turnover has slowed significantly over the past 15 years. This means that, in general, people are choosing to stay in their current roles rather than make voluntary exits (ie resignations and retirement). On the surface it might appear to be nothing but good news for an organisation that much-valued members of staff are choosing to stay. However, for this to be a wholly positive trend, people need to be staying put for the right reasons...

One of the differences we often talk about between Thinking types and Feeling types is their approach to a 'problem'.  Usually Thinking types want to fix or solve the problem, and Feeling types prefer first that someone just listen and offer empathy. They are both showing how they 'care', but do so in very different ways.

I met up with an ex-colleague from a previous organisation recently. During our catch-up he bemoaned the fact that a number of his clients wanted to engage in organisational benchmarking without seeming to know why or having a clear idea of how benchmarking might add value. The response to his question “Why?” was “Well, everyone else is doing it so we feel we should too.”

Is it just us, or has anyone else noticed that organisations seem generally reluctant to promote their people-development work? This might be understandable if a programme has not been too successful, or if it has been carried out in an area where heightened levels of sensitivity and privacy are required. But where the development work shows all parties involved in the best possible light (people-focused, progressive, innovative and adaptable, for example) why wouldn’t you want to tell the world about it?

With Andy Murray clinching victory in the Wimbledon final, the England cricket team winning the Ashes, Chris Froome becoming the second British winner of the Tour de France and Christine Ohuruogu scooping gold in the 400m at the World Athletics Championships, it's been another great summer of British sporting success. Of course, physical prowess and natural sporting ability are essential ingredients for elite athletes, but here we consider which personality traits might make the difference between the good and the great in the sporting world.

A Wall Street Journal article appeared recently that’s firmly in OPP’s area of interest. It claims that if you are an introvert and you’d like to be happier, you’d be better off acting like an extravert.

We expect employees and teams with different MBTI preferences to manage time and, more importantly, attention in the same way. Yet our experience tells us that putting a colleague on a traditional time-management course won’t work, as habits, behaviours, values and preferences run deep and are often hidden from view.

When I speak to people who have ‘done the MBTI’, all too often all they can recall from their experience is their four-letter MBTI type (sometimes even that is a stretch!). The initial impact has been lost, and the ongoing learning that should have opened up after cracking their four-letter code has eluded them.

Our guest blogger Joanne Weston, ICF Associate Certified Coach and MBTI^® practitioner, shares some practical tips for using the MBTI tool cross-culturally.

If you think stress is everywhere, you’re right! But do you know how to cut the seemingly inevitable tie between the stressors of modern life, and the type of distress that sends people off sick, off the radar or off the rails? Our infographic takes a peek - find out more in our stress white paper.

When we asked some of our customers about their use of MBTI recently, we loved the positive responses and wanted to summarise the comments we received. Just as the MBTI instrument distils the complexity of personality into a simple framework for understanding people, word clouds distil large swathes of text into an intuitive visual image, helping you get to the core of a message. We’ve picked out a few of our favourite aspects of the word clouds that we developed from answers to the following questions about the world’s favourite personality assessment. We’d love to hear which your favourites are too.

Employers despair at how unprepared graduates are, and how ill-equipped they seem to be for taking control of their career paths and longer-term development. Modern companies expect individuals to be in the driving seat, to know themselves and to have a clear idea of what they want to achieve. And yet, without good career services in schools and colleges, how can young people get the insights and self-knowledge they so desperately need?

Get out the cake and candles, wrap the carefully chosen presents, prepare your singing voice: the MBTI questionnaire turns 70 this year! The Myers Briggs Type Indicator is the most well-known and trusted personality assessment in the world, so on the occasion of its 70th birthday, I’ve been reflecting on why it has such enduring appeal. At OPP, we’re proud to be experts in an assessment that is the biggest player in the market – and this doesn’t just happen overnight.

Having blogged on the theme of leadership through the last quarter of 2012, OPP presents 10 top tips for keeping leaders in top condition during 2013 and beyond.

After two years of intensive work, the Office for National Statistics has published a new report on how happy we are in the UK (Measuring National Well-being: Life in the UK, 2012).  Inevitably, the news media have picked up on the “happiest places to live in the UK” (the Outer Hebrides, Shetlands and the Orkney Islands), but overall the survey shows that things are not as bad as we might have feared, despite the downturn.

MBTI Step II provides the necessary depth that can bring clarity and insight to business and leadership development. Long time MBTI practitioner Niels-Peter Thoms extols the virtues of the instrument.

How separate am I from my environment and its influences? Can I influence (and thus change) my surrounding systems so they are more supportive of my true and complete self? Ralph Kilmann looks at how conflict-handling tools might address these fundamental issues.

Type dynamics is all about the interaction of preferences. The sixteen MBTI types are a useful starting point, but it is these complex interactions that lead to the wide variations we see from person to person.

A recent study examines the relationship between personality and how individuals maintained the benefits gained from taking annual leave.

By seeing your assumptions face-to-face, you have the chance to revise them, which will surely inspire you to change your beliefs or modify your behaviour.

Maintaining an optimum level of stress is crucial to good performance in the workplace.

Other people tend to view us rather differently to how we view ourselves.

In this week's episode, Lord Sugar's confirmation bias seems to influence his decision on who to fire.

Lack of self-awareness about their capabilities can leave managers underperforming in the eyes of their employees.

By Nancy Barger, MBTI trainer and author of Introduction to Type and Change.

This week, the essential qualitites to master were commercial acumen, interpersonal skills, the ability to influence, and knowledge of the subject area.

There is a socially desirable bias towards extraversion in most western cultures.

Shared business ownership can have many benefits in the workplace.

Can certain personality traits mean you're more likely to be a happy person who can focus on the positive?

Regardless of gender, physical apperance has an evident effect on how people are treated in the workplace.

Affirmations as a form of positive reinforcement aren't useful for people who have low levels of self-esteem.

What does your pet say about you? Recent research by OPP reveals some links to personality!

Contrary to popular belief, a person's handshake doesn't reveal much at all about their personality.

Though a candidate may, on paper, have all the qualities required for a role, their personality may not be as suitable.