the Myers Briggs myth
Once again a training session on Myers Briggs is being offered at work. Once again I feel like screaming, "The Emperor has no clothes!"
All you ever wanted to know about it
Myers Briggs is a method of putting people into personality pigeonholes. You get asked a bunch of questions and the system comes back with a description of your personality based on your answers. For the most part, it's right. That's not the myth. The myth is that businesses can use this information to run better, so they should have their employees wasteeerrrr...spend time with it. You read your description and go, "Yeah, that's dead on! How cool is that?" So from that reaction, I can deduce that you already knew this shit. The little exercise just validated what you already knew, and gave it a label. Wooo hoooooo. That and seven dollars will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. People who hate detail and aren't good with numbers don't become accountants. Introverts with no sense of humor don't become stand-up comics. We don't need a tool to figure that out. Myers Briggs is a very cool parlor game, but what value does it have in the real world (beyond making Myers, Briggs and those perpetuating their myth rich)?
The value of all this is supposed to be knowing how other people you work with are pigeonholed, so you can better communicate with them. In the consulting company I worked for before I got my present job, we bought into this big time. They even paid for me to spend a week in Colorado at a seminar that prominently featured Myers Briggs, where I got into an argument with the people running the show as to the practical usefulness of the process, and therefore the practical usefulness of their existence. Needless to say, they got a bit defensive. In any case, in that company, we all did the questionnaire thing and there was a chart with a 4 X 4 grid, with all our names in the boxes that represented us. Yeah, like I was going to memorize, not only where everyone was on the grid, but what all the boxes meant, so we could more effectively communicate. I had enough on my plate with just my job. The real effect was, we all sat around looking at the grid one morning, noticing where everyone was on it and looking up the descriptions so we could see what the pigeonholes were. Once that morning was wasted, it was pretty much forgotten. We still had the chart, and somebody's admin assistant still updated the thing when someone new was hired and pigeonholed, but nobody paid it any attention, which in my opinion, was exactly what should have happened with it in the first place.
We had a new employee orientation week, and everyone who did presentations had to wear a nametag with their Myers Briggs pigeonhole plastered on it. I did a few of the presentations, so I proudly wrote ESPN on my nametag, a pigeonhole that doesn't exist in Myers Briggs (though it's close), but does represent a sports network. Nobody even batted an eye. For the record, I was pigeonholed an ENTJ. Also for the record, ESPN probably does just as good a job of describing me, and is recognized by more people.
Bottom line (and as always, just my opinion and worth every penny you shelled out for it): When it comes to learning more about those around you for the purposes of better communication, all you really have to do is watch people. You'll figure out how to approach them on any range of topics, maybe not as effectively as possible, but just as effectively as you would after having been pigeonholed. This Myers Briggs thing is about as useful as a horoscope, and for that you don't have to pay money to answer questions. You just have to be born.
All you ever wanted to know about it
Myers Briggs is a method of putting people into personality pigeonholes. You get asked a bunch of questions and the system comes back with a description of your personality based on your answers. For the most part, it's right. That's not the myth. The myth is that businesses can use this information to run better, so they should have their employees wasteeerrrr...spend time with it. You read your description and go, "Yeah, that's dead on! How cool is that?" So from that reaction, I can deduce that you already knew this shit. The little exercise just validated what you already knew, and gave it a label. Wooo hoooooo. That and seven dollars will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. People who hate detail and aren't good with numbers don't become accountants. Introverts with no sense of humor don't become stand-up comics. We don't need a tool to figure that out. Myers Briggs is a very cool parlor game, but what value does it have in the real world (beyond making Myers, Briggs and those perpetuating their myth rich)?
The value of all this is supposed to be knowing how other people you work with are pigeonholed, so you can better communicate with them. In the consulting company I worked for before I got my present job, we bought into this big time. They even paid for me to spend a week in Colorado at a seminar that prominently featured Myers Briggs, where I got into an argument with the people running the show as to the practical usefulness of the process, and therefore the practical usefulness of their existence. Needless to say, they got a bit defensive. In any case, in that company, we all did the questionnaire thing and there was a chart with a 4 X 4 grid, with all our names in the boxes that represented us. Yeah, like I was going to memorize, not only where everyone was on the grid, but what all the boxes meant, so we could more effectively communicate. I had enough on my plate with just my job. The real effect was, we all sat around looking at the grid one morning, noticing where everyone was on it and looking up the descriptions so we could see what the pigeonholes were. Once that morning was wasted, it was pretty much forgotten. We still had the chart, and somebody's admin assistant still updated the thing when someone new was hired and pigeonholed, but nobody paid it any attention, which in my opinion, was exactly what should have happened with it in the first place.
We had a new employee orientation week, and everyone who did presentations had to wear a nametag with their Myers Briggs pigeonhole plastered on it. I did a few of the presentations, so I proudly wrote ESPN on my nametag, a pigeonhole that doesn't exist in Myers Briggs (though it's close), but does represent a sports network. Nobody even batted an eye. For the record, I was pigeonholed an ENTJ. Also for the record, ESPN probably does just as good a job of describing me, and is recognized by more people.
Bottom line (and as always, just my opinion and worth every penny you shelled out for it): When it comes to learning more about those around you for the purposes of better communication, all you really have to do is watch people. You'll figure out how to approach them on any range of topics, maybe not as effectively as possible, but just as effectively as you would after having been pigeonholed. This Myers Briggs thing is about as useful as a horoscope, and for that you don't have to pay money to answer questions. You just have to be born.
John put this out here at 8:09 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home