Building Your Emotional Intelligence with Type

Originally posted by OPP, Ltd.

People don’t leave their jobs, they leave their manager. It’s an old saying, but there’s more than a grain of truth here. A recent survey by the Institute of Leadership and Management showed that 37% of workers planned to leave their jobs in 2015. A quarter of those interviewed cited being unappreciated and undervalued by their manager as the reason. Across all workers, 30% hoped for “better management” in 2015.

Now, it’s hardly news that people leave organizations because of poor management. But, as many sectors of the economy recover and workforces become more mobile, this will become a growing issue for those wishing to retain talent.  And here’s a sobering thought: what if YOU are part of the problem? What if you, or I, are one of the managers that people leave? How can we tell?

The answer might be concerned with how self-aware we are, and with how readily we can apply this knowledge to working with other people. Tools like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® (MBTI^®) can be extremely helpful here. Because at one level the MBTI framework seems very simple, it provides an extremely effective way for us to build our own self-awareness; and it is also a good basis for starting to understand what makes other people tick. This in turn allows us to work more effectively with others, and to manage our employees in a more emotionally intelligent way.

For example, each of us will have a preferred strategy for making decisions, tending to mostly use either the Thinking approach or the Feeling approach:

Many managers have a preference for Thinking; while they can use the Feeling approach, this will not be their natural tendency. A Thinking manager will typically wish to be given recognition (and be rewarded) for results, and on completion of a project. The emotionally intelligent Thinking manager will realise that not everyone has the same worldview as they do. Their Feeling members of staff may want to be appreciated for the effort they put in and throughout the project – and the emotionally intelligent manager will flex their style accordingly.

There is a lot of evidence that emotional intelligence has many benefits in the workplace, including improved performance, more effective teamworking, greater engagement and wellbeing, and enhanced performance as a leader or manager. And, fortunately, emotional intelligence is something that we can develop and build on through our lives. We don’t need to try to change the core of who we are, our underlying personality type; instead we can learn to adapt our behaviour so as to work with other people in a more emotionally intelligent way. Here, the knowledge that we can gain from the MBTI provides an excellent framework for developing our own emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence deals with both intrapersonal and interpersonal factors:

For each of us, the dynamics of our MBTI type show which aspects of our personality we prefer to use in our internal, introverted, interpersonal world, and which we use in our external, extraverted, interpersonal world. For each type, this can help us to see the areas where we may find it most easy to display emotional intelligence, and the areas where we may face developmental challenges.

The effective use of type can enable us to better perceive, understand, and manage our own and others’ emotions, enhancing our performance as leaders, managers, or simply colleagues.

Despite the stereotype of the abrasive, aggressive, go-getting leader, more emotionally intelligent organizations actually perform better. And if you want to be a manager who attracts and retains the best people, it will pay you to be emotionally intelligent too.

For more information on gaining emotional intelligence insights through MBTI type, view a recording of our webinar on this topic. Click here to view our webinar.