Leadership development

Delivery nurses and midwives find their voice and better leadership skills to improve patient experience on a large scale, online, in this case study

New research sends clear message to team leaders

Business psychology experts on leadership and people development in organizations

Our consultants share the workplace trends and topics they’re hearing about

Effective conflict management is a pillar of high-performing organizations

There are many psychological factors that affect team success. This article helps managers and leaders understand how those factors affect performance – and why the MBTI personality assessment is one of the best opportunities for growth.

In the workplace, there are hidden elements that can make or break team success. This blog post helps managers and leaders understand the importance of team orientation – and the role inclusive leadership plays in boosting it.

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.

The CPI 260 assessment enables HR and talent development professionals to find and develop high-potential employees, making it an essential tool for your investment in employee training and development.

In the ever-evolving landscape of HR and training and development, organizations are recognizing the significance of assessments in unlocking individual and team potential. Among these assessments, the Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation^™ (FIRO^®) assessment stands out as a powerful tool for team development and leadership growth.

Stress can affect a leader’s approach to risk which is strongly tied to investment and business strategy. But if a leader knows how their personality type affects their natural approach to risk-taking, as well as what stresses them out in the first place, they’re less likely to react to stress by making poor decisions.

Overestimating progress is one of the barriers to an inclusive culture

There are three types of conflict that people experience at work. Fortunately, HR professionals, leadership consultants, and executive coaches can help leaders and employees improve their conflict resolution skills with the FIRO-B^® assessment.

What does inclusion look like for executives and the people they lead? 

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

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.

Is lack of conflict a sign of dysfunction? And what do people feel about conflict today? 

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

Learn the types and causes of conflict to be better prepared in how you manage conflict 

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

How does a skincare giant smooth out the wrinkles of organizational change?

Dr. Martin Boult shares his expertise on leadership and connection in this episode of The Myers-Briggs Company Podcast.

How can conflict management save organizations money?

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

What is change management and why does it matter for organizations?

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... 

Is it possible to get the best of both worlds with hybrid work?

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

Three ways to get leaders on board with an inclusion program

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 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?

Celebrating Global Entrepreneurship Week

Teams and Google’s Project Aristotle

Motivation - more than 'get it done’

6 things managers and executives can do

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?

How social media and gamification can help employees grow

PeopleFWD 2018 promises insights and practical solutions

How can we help you reach better resolutions?

Change your approach to conflict and you can change the outcome

Are introverts being limited by misconceptions?

Fortune 10 senior OD consultant talks about CPI 260 certification experience

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?

How to use research to create MBTI solutions: this post looks at leadership accountability gaps

Gender, leadership and the pressure of organisational culture

Modern leadership in the context of core activities, blind spots and actions for results.

Myers, Briggs and International Women’s Day

Research Study exploring leadership strengths through the lens of Type

Exploring the glass ceiling using MBTI data.

Get the most from the MBTI assessment when coaching individuals.

Personality, gender stereotypes and leadership

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

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. 

Great leaders respond to shifts and changes, riding them like a wave. Welcome to Quantum Leadership!

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.

As I watch my daughter polish off her bowl of porridge at breakfast, I ask “What’s wrong with the bit that’s still left in the bowl?” – a tiny bit closest to her but hidden on the inside curve of the bowl remains uneaten. “There isn’t any left!” she replies, and we both laugh as I say “You must have a ‘porridge’ blindspot!”
How many of our leaders have ‘porridge’ blindspots – everyday behaviours that dismay others somehow and to which they are completely oblivious? Can they avoid these blindspots or should we and they just accept them as an authentic part of their personality?

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...

Few people would argue against the concept of thought leadership. Not listening to the views of leaders in our field, or ignoring ideas for better ways of doing things, is hardly a recipe for success. However, individual opinion leaders don’t always get it right, and the catch is that those who sound most confident in their pronouncements aren’t necessarily the most accurate.

Leaders are quick, decisive, and know what they want; they aren’t afraid to make unpopular decisions and they can be fiercely competitive. This might be a somewhat old-fashioned view of leadership, but new research by OPP suggests there is more than a grain of truth here.

Many leaders leave much of their ‘true’ personality at home and try to present themselves at work in the way they think a leader should operate. Leaders absorb these ‘should’ models of leadership from how they see leaders behaving around them (for good or ill), as well as from hoping to emulate leaders generally held up as great: eg Churchill, Branson, etc. On top of this, over the years leadership courses have advocated different styles of leadership, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Leaders can feel they should be all things to all men; but isn’t it better for leaders to just be themselves, natural and authentic, whether at home or in the workplace?

This world of ours is changing. That’s hardly an earth-shattering statement. What’s less obvious is that change is happening more and more quickly – it’s difficult to visualise what the world will be like in five years time, still less in 10, 20 or 30 years. And yet this is what organisations need to do. Today’s new entrants, graduates and management trainees will be tomorrow’s leaders, and we need to prepare them for the challenges ahead.

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.

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 commented on the Paul Flowers furore. We've also 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?

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.

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.

I work with many companies wanting to improve their leadership development, and time and time again I hear the same challenges voiced. That is, previous leadership development initiatives have not actually delivered better leaders, and they want to try something different. In my experience, many programmes fail to meet their objectives – and all too often it is assumed that as long as “we are doing something”, it must be working.

To predict how people are going to perform in a new role takes a bit of detective work. You design an assessment centre around a series of tests and exercises, you compute the results, and the best candidates turn out to be the most suitable... don't they? Unfortunately, this is not always how assessment centres pan out. The individual assessment methods might be good in themselves, and yet all too often the sum of the outcomes is not equal to the parts. So what’s going on? How can a combination of good tests and exercises produce a bad result?

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...

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?

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.

He has it all. Application, vision, guts, ambition, determination, a record of success and with it, a developing charisma. These are the very things we seek in our leaders. Should we make Andy Murray Prime Minister or Chairman of a Trust focused on getting unemployed youth into work?

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.

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.

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.

If bosses are to be the paragons of virtue and excellence that we would all like them to be, they need support and guidance in how to achieve such excellence. An understanding of personality can prove invaluable. For example, through training and development in a repertoire of management styles, managers are better equipped to meet the needs of the diverse range of people in their teams.

Since the UK recession kicked in a few years ago, the shadow of redundancy has been cast over many organisations. In such testing times a combination of strong, focused leadership and agreed practical guidelines is vital.

Guest blogger Kaveh Mir of Deep Values Coaching assesses the impact of conflict on organisations when senior leaders are at war. Workplace conflict, no matter how small, tends to divide individuals into distinct factions, much like nations or alliances in a war – especially when these factions are allied under one leader. Many of the differences that arise in the workplace can be seen as ‘turf wars’: that is, employees will come into conflict over responsibility, recognition, credit or blame. One party perceives that another party is infringing on their turf; the first party fires verbal shots, and war is engaged. Those outside the front lines choose sides, opting to stand behind one party or the other.

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.

The development of effective leaders within an organisation delivers tangible benefits. Increased output and sales follow in the wake of good management, enhancing the success of the company. And one of the most effective ways of identifying needs and kick-starting the whole process is through business simulations. These use role-playing to address real workplace issues and challenges, replicating relationships and decisions in a business environment to give ‘live’ information about interpersonal style, intellect and drive.

In a results-driven culture, leadership development often revolves around outcomes, competencies and skills. At face value this appears to make business sense; but in their chase for success, do leaders receive the continuous feedback and support they need to meet these high demands?

The liabilities of a strong personality at the top of an organisation.

Though the Apprentice is hardly the pinnacle of great business practice, the progression of the candidates can teach us some valuable lessons.

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.

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

Through appointing a personnel director, Tesco have made engaging their workforce a focal point for the executive board.

Was it Azhar's apparent preference for Introversion that caused him to be overlooked? And will Alan Sugar lose out by not heeding his contribution?

Situational leadership demands that a leader demonstrates appropriate behaviour, even when they come under fire.

The proper functioning of a team depends on the leaders ability to forge strong bonds between its members.

OPP’s 2011 16PF study showed that senior executives are more likely to be cool, calm and collected than other managers.

The ability to predict who will have the potential to exercise good judgment is useful when choosing a leader.

Good leadership is dependent on a myriad of factors. But are leaders born or made?

Good leadership means being able to navigate through both good times and bad. So where are the political leaders as the riots unfold in London and elsewhere?

A victory for Tom. And OPP.

OPP's predictions for this year's winner...

So here we are in the penultimate week of the series, with the remaining five candidates fighting it out to be part of the final four…

Melody is nodded out of the boardroom.

In tough economic times, how can we keep everyone engaged, motivated and supported - including those at the top of the food chain?

EveryDog had its day...

Moving a top hat from Mayfair to the Strand.

Would you download them?

The first in a series of tongue-in-cheek blog articles analysing what went on in BBC1’s The Apprentice - the gossip, the psychological insight, and the sheer blatant mockery. Get it all here!

Can we make people better leaders if we measure their personalities and then try to shape their behaviour? If we can, does this hold true when we work internationally to build the talent pool of multinational organisations?