In the last post about MBTI, I looked at a fairly in-depth element of MBTI step two – where one of the MBTI-subscales was what we call and OOPS – and Out of Preference Score. For this example I’m going to stick to a more straight-forward example of how Extraverts and Introverts interact.

Please note that for all our training, case studies are real, cleaned and anonymised and used with the necessary permissions. For this article however, I have pulled together several different examples of how things can go wrong when an Extravert comes to seen an Introvert, in their office. In the first instance I’m going to write it from the point of view of the MBIT-Introvert (in which the Extravert is exhibiting challenging behaviour). Then I’ll turn it around and write it from the Extravert’s perspective – where the challenging behaviour will be that of the Introvert!

Ah, the joys of MBTI!

Let’s call our Extravert Suzie and our Introvert Steve. At the start of this interaction, Steve is sitting at his desk, concentrating hard on a report he’s typing. It’s about two months after the whole team had an away-day which included working on MBTI profiles for everyone.

Version one – our poor, put-upon MBTI Introvert’s story!

Suzie arrives and breezes into his office, unannounced. It breaks Steve’s concentration, which makes him a little annoyed, especially because he notices that Suzie didn’t feel the need to knock and wait on his office door! She just barged in unannounced!

What’s more, once she’s inside the office, she stands too close to Steve, causing him to lean back in his chair – not only does that make it hard to concentrate psychologically but it’s uncomfortable too!

To make matters worse, Suzie’s talking (ten to the dozen!) before Steve has had a chance to stop thinking about his report and ‘get his brain in gear’. For the first minute or two of Suzie’s chatter, Steve has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about and is trying hard to figure out what’s so urgent (and about what project!) that Suzie needs urgent help. Once he’s figured out what the project is that’s got Suzie so fired up, he can’t figure out what the crisis is!

It must be, a crisis, mustn’t it?  She wouldn’t walk over to his office, barge in and start talking at him unless it was urgent, would she?

Shaking his head to clear it, Steve tries to interrupt Suzie to ask what it is, specifically, that she needs from him. Suzie, however, is now talking about the weekend – perhaps it wasn’t a crisis after all.

Steve frowns and just as he’s about to say something rude about Suzie’s weekend activities, she’s back talking about the Bridges project and asking “So, anyway, what do you think?”

Perplexed, with no information, Steve can only venture the most vague of responses: “I wonder if we shouldn’t wait for a while and see if we can link it to one of the other projects.”

“Just what I was thinking” says Suzie as she’s half way out of the door…. leaving Steve annoyed that he can still here her talking to some new victim, shoes clacking on the corridor outside.

“If she’d shut the bloody door” thinks Steve, “I”d not need to put up with hearing her talking at David! Poor sod!”

Finally, Steve can stand it no more and gets out of his chair to close the door with a bang, noticing as he does so that Suzie is now telling David the same things as she’s told him!

Annoyed, confused and unable to concentrate, Steve turns back to his report but can’t concentrate for another ten minutes!

Version two – our poor, put out, MBTI Extravert’s story!

Suzie’s stumped. She can’t seem to make up her mind about what to do with the new information on the Bridges Project. She’s been staring at the email with the data in it for about 20 minutes, until the numbers are swimming, but she’s no nearer a decision. She needs a fresh perspective.

If only Steve hadn’t turned his phone off she’d be able to ask him for help: he is often wise and helps her clarify exactly what she should do. Smiling, she thinks of what a good friend Steve is and how helpful it is to talk with him: she’ll tell him as soon as she gets to his office…

Hitting the print button, Suzie grabs the data output and heads over to see Steve. When she arrives she’s excited by the possibility of hearing what Steve has to say and gets into her stride as soon as she can – after all, she doesn’t want to waste any of Steve’s time!

Oh yes, time; that reminds her, she must make time this weekend to see her sister!

Suzie notices that Steve’s a bit distracted; maybe she hasn’t been clear enough in what she was asking, and she knows Steve likes a bit time to think (hey, she listened at the MBTI training course!) so she puts the print-out in his lap. As he grabs the paper, she asks what he thinks.

He’s shaking his head! Is there a problem? Has she not spotted a mistake in the data? Nervous, Suzie steps a little closer to Steve for some reassurance. If only he wasn’t so flipping stand-off-ish it would be a lot easier to chat: how can you chat to someone who’s continually trying to push you away!

There’s a long, long silence after she asks for his opinion. He must be worried about what he’s going to say! Surely it’s not that serious! Surely there can’t be such a big problem that she didn’t see it! Anxiously, Suzie fills the painful silence: “So… So… What do you think? Am I right about the next steps?”.

Finally, with the irritating habit Steve has of speaking like he is bloody God Almighty himself Steve gives his verdict!  Half annoyed at the fact it’s taken so long to say anything and half relieved that it’s not a disaster Suzie reassures Steve that she was thinking exactly the same thing. Exactly the same. She wasn’t sure until now but now that Steve says it, that’s what it ways – she just couldn’t put her finger on it.

Excited to know she’s on the right track Suzie gets out of Steve’s way as soon as she can! Oh, look, here’s Dave…

…. “I wonder” thinks Suzie “What Dave thinks of the problem. I’ll just float my ideas passed him to firm them up!”

Summary – the MBTI perspective

It’s harder for me to write one of those perspectives than the other: does it show? Have I got the kinds of things that go on right?  With my own MBTI preference, I’m instinctively more sympathetic with one of the people here and – frankly – more experienced in their point of view.

But that’s the point of MBTI – there’s not best Type, no worst Type, just different Types. With a little more sensitivity to the MBIT Type of the other person, neither Steve or Suzie would have needed to feel so miffed at the other person, or so anxious.

The point is, Steve’s productivity was shot to pieces for half an hour and Suzie still needed to talk to Dave. Neither of them got what they wanted.

Looking at it from an MBTI perspective, what could either or both of them have done differently?

In the last case study, I looked at a semi-fictional interaction between an Introvert (in MBTI terms) and an Extravert.

This time I’d like to very briefly look at how people who have an iNtuitive preference (MBTI uses the letter N for intuitive because the I has already been used for Introvert) and someone they work with, who has a strong Sensing preference.

In MBTI terms these preferences can be summarised like this:

• iNtuitive people instinctively look first at potential, linkage, pattern, change and what could be
• people with an Sensing (S) preference tend to look first instinctively at detail, realism, precision, what is actually there.

It’s a short and sweet little MBTI case study.  Our hero’s MBTI Type is fairly strongly iNtutive, and he had what he thought was a brilliant but admittedly radical idea. Unfortunately it was going to take him a couple of days to write it up and he didn’t want to spend two days sorting out and writing up something that might (when other people looked at it) be a dumb idea.

His solution was to cobble together, very quickly, a single side of A4 which had the barest outlines of the plan so that he could get a second opinion: let’s call this second person the ‘Checker’. If the Checker thought the plan was a good one, our hero would write it up, properly.

The person our hero asked to give his idea the once-over happened to have a Sensing preference – an MBTI preference for detail and practical stuff over ideas and concepts.

So…..

As our hero passed over his one-side of material (as a typical MBTI N-preference person with diagrammes included as well as text) what our N-preference hero actually said was

“What do you think of this?”

However, being an MBTI N-preference what he heard in his head was:

“What do you think of this idea?”

And being a typical MBTI S-preference person, what the checker heard was:

“What do you think of this document?”

Documents are real, actual, concrete and tactile. No wonder Checker (who had an MBTI S preference, remember) concentrated on what they’d actually got in their hands. The unfortunate (but entirely predictable) consequence was that instead of giving feedback the our original hero had wanted and expected, the reader/checker of the document/idea gave him a proof-reading.

No useful result and a lot of wasted effort, where (with a little more MBTI orientated thought) the outcome could have been very different.

A quick note before we start: all the case studies we use in our training etc are real studies, anonymised, cleaned and checked and used with permissions. This example, however, is a stylization and shouldn’t be taken as being indicative of any given client or organization. In other words, I’ve made this one up! 🙂

The MBTI step two is a remarkably powerful psychometric tool.  It takes the MBTI approach to an even more powerful and sophisticated level. In this article I’d like to briefly unpack one example of how the different elements of the MBTI-2 profile build together and interact. I’m going to assume you know quite a bit about MBTI in general, a lot about MBTI step one and even a bit about MBTI step 2.  (You may want to skip back to this article to check up on the step two stuff if you’re not sure.)

Let’s call my stylized MBTI client ‘Peter’.

Peter’s overall preference for Extraversion vs Introversion was to be an Introvert. All his five subscales were on the Introvert side of the scale – although one of them, the last – was only marginally so, suggesting that the way Peter recharged his batteries was fairly conditional on what he’d been doing that made him need of recharging his batteries! 🙂 )    (The scale of Enthusiastic to Quiet measures how people typically tend to prefer to recharge.)

Peter works in a research team, with some administrative and leadership responsibilities which mean interacting not only with the people he works with on a day to day basis, but also with his peers (in terms of seniority) from other departments.

So far so good. Introverts can, after all, be just as good at leadership as Extraverts and can handle meetings just as well.

This is where the power of the step 2 for MBTI comes into its own. Peter’s overall preference for Thinking vs Feeling as clearly as a Feeler. He did, however, have one strong OOPS (something that is a-typical of the overall preference). In Peter’s case this was a high Questioning score. Questioning is typically a Thinking preference score (with the opposite end of the scale, Accommodating, being more typical of ‘Feelers’).

The result of this particular combination was that Peter didn’t say much in meetings – particularly at the start of them, until he had ‘found his feet’. However, later on in a meeting Peter was inclined to allow his Questioning score show itself.

A high Questioning score is associated with such features as:

• being an independent and critical thinker
• using questions to sort out clarify what you think you understand
• using questions to sort out what other people are thinking
• asking questions even if you agree with what other people are proposing and saying
• being quite stubborn about getting answers sometimes.

Because Peter is intelligent, his questions often cut right to the heart of the matter, incisively.  People often found them challenging, even when Peter intended them to be simply for clarification or to be helpful.

The issues were that

• the questions came later on in a meeting – because of Peter’s Introversion. If Peter had asked the question earlier in the meeting, a lot of time could have been saved as his questions often uncovered an assumption, problem or mistake. People felt he was just being spiteful by allowing them to make fools of themselves before ‘pulling the rug out from under them’.
• the questions were precisely targeted. What I mean by this is that they weren’t vague but instead were well thought out, incisive and perceptive. Again this is because of Peter’s MBTI Introversion, which means he didn’t speak until he’d thought out what he wanted to ask. The effect, however, is that the question often looked malicious, pre-meditated and carefully crafted for maximum embarrassment – especially to the other people in the room who were Extraverts and who tended to think out loud!
• Peter was known to be, generally, someone with a clear, strong preference towards Feeling. Challenging questions from people who routinely ask challenging questions is one thing: challenging questions from people who are perceived as being much mores supportive, warm, people-orientated people is quite another!

Another way of looking at this is that Peter’s OOPS (Out Of Preference Score) for being Questioning was taking people by surprise and making his questions seem more negative than he intended them to be. His Introversion was acting as a kind of multiplier of this effect, making it more dramatic; his questions are targeted and more noticeable because of the fact that there weren’t many of them!

By looking at Peter’s MBTI-2 subscales as a whole (looking at their pattern) it was possible to explore with Peter where the issue arose. Peter himself, up until this point, was aware that there was a problem – but had been unable to put his finger on what was causing it: his questions, after all, were intended to be supportive and helpful… and besides, he commented, there weren’t many of them!