Understanding your personality type to be a better leader

Personality type has a big influence on your natural leadership style — and what doesn’t come naturally can be learned. Understanding your personality type and those of the people you lead is key in bettering your leadership skills. “Leadership is not just about yourself, it’s about connecting with others.” --— Joanne Weston, leadership coach and certified MBTI practitioner The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assesses four opposite pairs of personality tendencies: extraversion versus introversion; sensing versus intuition; thinking versus feeling; and judging versus perceiving. Depending on which tendencies you lean toward, the indicator determines which of the possible 16 personality types you are. Understanding your type can help you to recognize your own strengths and weaknesses; understand how to build relationships with colleagues who have different personality types; and identify how to improve your leadership skills. Devex spoke with Joanne Weston, leadership coach and certified MBTI practitioner, to get her insights on how the MBTI assessment can help you understand these personality tendencies to become a better leader in global development. Among others, Weston has worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development and Asian Development Bank in this field. Leadership starts with self-awareness The first step to becoming a good leader is recognizing your own strengths and blind spots, Weston said. Knowing and improving on these weaknesses will serve you in your role, she explained. Equally, leadership is about the people you lead — you need to “be able to build a high-performing team as a leader, based on the strengths and blind spots of your team members,” Weston said. Connecting with others Once you have identified your own personality traits, you need to explore how other people’s traits differ, and subsequently, how different traits can best work together. “Leadership is not just about yourself, it’s about connecting with others: helping others be great and helping the team be great.” Connecting with people is how you get results, Weston explained: “The best way of connecting is empathizing.” Being able to empathize as a leader means understanding where others are coming from and whether that’s because of their culture or their natural personality. Exploring personality types is therefore “very rich for multicultural teams… [and] international development by definition is going to be involving multicultural teams [and] multicultural organizations.” “The best way of connecting is empathizing.” --— Cultural norms versus innate preferences “It’s very important to make the distinction that it’s [personality type and] only a natural preference — it’s not set in stone,” she said. Once you have identified your personality trait blind spots, tendencies that go against your natural preferences can be learned. Your surrounding culture may also condition certain behaviors that go against your inherent personality type. Cultural factors that influence behavior include your nationality, the culture you were brought up in, and the culture of your work department or team. “Personality and culture are two pieces of the same puzzle. You can’t look at one without the other,” she said. In the Philippines, Weston worked with international development and finance professionals who tend to be analytical, critical thinking, decision-makers — traits representative of a stronger “thinking over feeling” preference. Yet looking deeper, she found a number of professionals had one or two very “out-of-preference facets” — namely they were highly “accepting” and “accommodating,” which are cultural behaviors expected in the Philippines, she explained. Recognizing culturally conditioned behaviors is key to identifying when they are necessary or not. For example, if you’ve been raised in the Philippines, being accommodating may be expected at home, “but if you’re working for an Australian bank for an Australian boss ... you’re expected to be upfront and straightforward and matter of fact,” Weston explained. Another thing to consider is, “if you’re in a situation where you’re expected to behave in a way that is different from your natural preferences, that can cause stress,” she said. You need to recognize when this is happening, then later take the time to recover and feed your natural preferences. This can be anything that helps you personally: “Taking 10 minutes out of your day to daydream — because daydreaming rests your mind — or it might be taking up a musical instrument in your spare time,” Weston advised. The largest influences on leadership qualities Weston has found that the “thinking versus feeling” and “sensing versus intuition” tendencies have the largest impact on a person’s natural leadership qualities. Likewise, the L4 Model — another model based on these two tendencies of the MBTI — focuses specifically on leadership. For example, entrepreneurs often have thinking and intuition natural preferences, and therefore tend to be “big-picture and high achieving system thinkers.” They look at things as systems — something you can picture without thinking about people. “That is great for what they’re doing … but that brings with it blind spots,” Weston said. “They [entrepreneurs] might be less inspiring and nurturing of the team they’re trying to create … they might not be so concerned with helping people do their job, which is really important as a leader — that you nurture everyone and help.” Understanding these tendencies helps you to channel leadership efforts. For instance, as a team leader, you can alter how you run meetings depending on the participants to best suit the team as a whole. “If there’s someone who really needs to process a problem before talking about it, then you provide that opportunity,” Weston explained. Your personality type won’t determine your career or success No matter your personality type, behaviors can always be learned — meaning there is no job, role, or sector better suited to one personality type over another. “There’s nothing that prevents any personality type from doing anything because it doesn’t speak to skills that you have … and it doesn’t speak to interest,” Weston said.