Is there a way to read clients?
Yes, is the simple answer. We all know that the self-help business market place is riddled with books that have one page of real content and hundreds of unsubstantiated, ego massaging, anecdotes. Myers Briggs personality profiling is different. Its model goes back to Jung, one of psychology’s founding fathers, and it is rigorous in its approach.
The great benefit of MB is that client types and necessary approaches for sales can be determined from it.
Carl Gustav Jung in the early 20th century postulated personality types exist that are comprised of processes that are chosen in childhood. People’s behaviours can be predicted from these types and processes. Jung postulated that all human psychological behaviour is divided into perception and judgment; we perceive the world and make behavioural decisions by judging. As children we experiment with four basic processes and choose whatever works best for us. The processes chosen become dominant in our behaviour, but it must be noted that mature balanced adults develop the corresponding auxiliary processes to qualify and check the dominant one.
We either perceive the world predominantly via our senses S or through intuition N. Perception through our five senses viscerally connects us with the immediate world around us and makes for an immediate and facts based as they exist now approach to perception, and this corresponds with S. Intuitive perception causes us to desire understanding of our world and its rules, which is consequently less coupled with what our senses are telling us now and more with the rules necessary to predict outcomes, and this corresponds with N.
Armed with a perception of the world to have an impact and live in it, we must make judgements. We judge either from feeling F (gut feel and emotion) or what Myers-Briggs terms thinking T (logic). Feeling is dominated by how it makes an individual feel about himself/herself and/or others. It is a people-orientated way of making judgements. Thinking is based on logic and is dominated by consequences that could result as facts. In philosophical terms, feeling is subjective, and thinking is objective.
Whilst these classifications are profound and real people show these traits; balanced people are not so binary. The following tenets are intended to guide:
- All balanced adults develop the weaker processes and allow them to check the dominant one, e.g., an NT person can unknowingly upset others through an absence of feeling when making judgements. A balanced NT adult will allow his/her feeling auxiliary to check logic when it is clearly having unsatisfactory results.
- An underdeveloped auxiliary will manifest itself as childish behaviour centred on the weak auxiliary process, e.g., feeling.
- Unbalanced personality types will show as a very dominant process with all others being childish in their manifestation. Such people will display only the faults of their personality type.
- Since there are no absolutes, probability and Venn diagrams can be used to predict real behaviour.
- Feeling is the strongest of all the processes. No matter what a person’s type, if feeling gets out of control it will swamp and dominate all other processes. This is an unstable state and not used in the analysis of this report.
The explanation above covers the processes that make up a personality type. According to the Myers-Briggs model, two more processes act on perception and judgement. These are whether the person is introvert (I) or extrovert (E) and the dominance of judgement (J) or perception (P). This makes for a four-process classification of personality type. The author’s self-classification is INTJ. Myers-Briggs, intentionally or otherwise, doesn’t conform to Jung’s model of extroversion/introversion. Jung postulates that each process can be either I or E independent of the other processes. MB explicitly states that it is either one or the other for all processes. Practical experience leads the author to believe MB are wrong and Jung right.
An evolution of MB is the DISC profiling system, but the author believes this is of limited value because it strips the practitioner of the ability to analyse from first principles (typical N!). No discussion of DISC is in this report.
Having decided on a personality profile, how do I apply it to the business world?
Myers Briggs is surprisingly accurate, and yes, it can be applied to the business world. The best way to illustrate this is by example.
Imagine a business meeting with a prospective client that has a novel invention to bring to market. The people in the client’s team or all highly qualified and technical. They are essentially scientists. You form the other half of the meeting and classify as a practical business person.
Let’s start by mapping the clients workforce. Scientists want to work out how things work. They are intuitive, and they judge using logic. NT to the core. The problem is they are also individualistic and can conveniently allow intuitive imagination to pass over inconvenient existing realities. They behave as though the realities are simple obstacles that shouldn’t trespass on N’s territory.
You, as a down to earth business person, are probably SF (sales bias) or ST (business and finance). You deal in real world facts. The above probably exasperates you, and you will probably exasperate the scientists.
The key is to bring your mind into the creative cloud of your client, but find ways to steer them to practical actions. The above does ease the task of explaining why differences exist between personalities and opens the way to solutions.
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