Recently it has been my honor to be one of the speakers at the promotion of the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) project that is jointly hosted by the state government and Brown University.
As part of the project, I hosted a workshop relating to leadership ability and style. The workshop mainly used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to test and assess these young leaders’ leadership ability and styles. MBTI is a character assessment theory that was developed based on a Swiss psychiatrist, Jung’s theory of psychological types. Approximately 3.5 million people participate in the MBTI assessment annually. 80% of the top 500 financial corporations in the world utilize the MBTI assessment for important decisions such as recruitment, the pairing of staff and roles, establishment of teams and departments etc. MBTI can also be used for career planning, social network development and interaction, marriage education, improvement of learning and workplace efficiency etc.
MBTI indicates a personality trend, there is no right or wrong answer because every person has different habits. MBTI suggests that every person would express his personal behavior, skills and attitude based on his own personality type, and every MBTI personality type has its potential as well as shortcomings.
MBTI assesses and describes a person’s personality trend in receiving messages, making decisions and perceiving life in four dimensions. These four dimensions are:
How we get energized:Extraversion (E) – Introversion (I)
How we take in information: Sensing (S) – Intuition (N)
How we make decisions:Thinking (T) – Feeling (F)
How fast we make decisions:Judging (J) – Perceiving (P)
None of these personality results are better or worse, our society needs different types of talents. The important point is to understand one’s direction of development and make a wise career plan, improve learning and workplace efficiency and improve interaction with others. Similarly, a corporation can only design the appropriate encouragement mechanism, establish the ideal team to fulfill its needs and improve interaction between different departments if it has a full understanding of its staff.