By Ayesha Ashley, A Brandt Group Trainer
Do you need a translator at work?
Do you feel as if you are not understood by your boss or colleagues at work? Do they sometimes give instructions that make little sense to you? This is very likely to be a question of Personality Type.
When we study Personality Types, we begin to see how often our built-in ways of seeing the world become points of misunderstanding for other types of people.
To simplify our example, we can imagine two types of people in the communication world–the Sensor and the Intuitive. See if you can identify yourself….it’s fun and it can open your eyes!
The Sensor wants the facts, the details, and hard, concrete data while the Intuitive wants to know Why? What if… what’s the concept/Big Picture? These two types are opposites and they get into each others hair, especially when it comes to instructions or ways of reporting results.
Has this ever happened to you? You are given a project or report to do and you have a meeting with your supervisor. S/he says, ‘This is an important report. We need to know how the way the grant is funded will impact our options in the next two years. I’d like you to look at all the categories of expenditures and create a report so we can plan more effectively.’
You’re thinking, ‘How long should it be? What categories are most important? When is it due? Who will work with me on this? How would they like this report organized? How many copies will I need? Whose signatures will be needed? My boss is setting me up to fail. S/he won’t give me the information I need to do this the right way.’
In fact, your boss is talking like the Intuitive s/he is! You will have to ask about the details, because s/he probably has not thought about them! Just knowing about Types can relieve you of the need for blame/complaint, etc…just ask for what YOU need to know to do your report.
Remember when you were in third grade and you had to write some sentences? No doubt, your teacher (56% of grade school teachers are Sensors) told you to write your name in the upper left hand corner, one inch from the left margin and one inch from the top of the paper. Then there were more very detailed directions for each part of the paper.
If you’re a Sensor, you’re happy-now you know the right way to do this.
If you’re an Intuitive, you’re thinking, ‘My name on the paper identifies who wrote it—what earthly difference could it make where I put it as long as it’s visible and legible?’ For the intuitive the WHY trumps the HOW every time.
If you’re a Sensor boss and you meet your Intuitive admin assistant, and you start off with a list of tasks in great detail, like ‘Tomorrow make sure you assemble all of the files on the 2008-9 ad campaigns, collate them by product and quarter and then make sure each file contains all invoices, etc etc …’ Your intuitive might ask you, ‘WHY are we doing this?’
Are they challenging your authority? Not at all-they just don’t understand how all those activities are connected and why it’s important to do them in that order. They probably could find a more efficient way to accomplish the task if you said, ‘We need to get last year’s advertising costs ready by product and quarter so we can compare them with current bids.’
Which type are YOU? Your boss? (Your spouse?) Do you see how this may have been a place of ongoing-and unnecessary– irritation for both of you?
Just knowing that they-and you!– are wired to be the way they are is a big help–if you love details, you may bore your Intuitive friends with them. If you love the big picture, you may sound to your Sensor friends as if you are not grounded or just don’t know the details.
In any company or team, we need BOTH types of people to give us the fullest perspective on any task. Our trainings on Personality and Type can help maximize your productivity, customer service and work satisfaction noticeably!
Ayesha Ashley of The Brandt Group has been a management trainer, life coach, mentor and educator for over 30 years. She has two Masters degrees and has Certifications in the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory, NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) and Conflict Resolution/ Mediation. In addition to her formal credentials, Ayesha has honed her presentation skills through acting and improvisational theater and adds these to her trainings, which include lots of interaction, humor and practical exercises which make it easy to incorporate new strategies into your daily life.
