Gaarder cautions that his data is skewed toward firm leaders, with whom he normally works. ENTJs accounted for a whopping 31 percent of the architects that Gaarder tested, despite the very low frequency of the type (estimated at 1.8 percent) within the general population. But among Gaarder’s group of 100 architects, just one was an ISFJ, and not a single one scored as an ESFJ.īy contrast, the most frequent type among the architects was ENTJ-extraversion, intuition, thinking, and judging. population, the most frequent types are, according to estimates by the Myers & Briggs Foundation, ISFJ, at 13.8 percent, ESFJ, at 12.3 percent, and ISTJ, at 11.6 percent. When he reached 100, he sat down to review their tests in the aggregate-and was surprised by what he saw. So far, he’s administered Myers-Briggs to about 125 architects. Whenever he works with an individual, he requires that person to take the Myers-Briggs test, as well as submit to what he calls “a 360 review” (a performance review based on feedback from peers and subordinates as well as superiors). He acts as a one-on-one executive coach with the firm’s managing partner, or he advises a team of leaders who want to move the firm in a new direction. There’s been so much research done on it -hundreds or thousands of doctoral dissertations.”įor the past decade, Gaarder has worked mainly with small-to-midsized architecture and engineering firms, for the most part in the Washington, D.C., area. “There’s a high degree of validity and reliability. “There are a lot of instruments out there, but the Myers-Briggs, I find, is the best in terms of leadership development,” he says. in organization behavior and development, first encountered Myers-Briggs in graduate school and has made it an important part of his consulting business. J/P (Judging/Perceiving): like to have matters settled vs. T/F (Thinking/Feeling): decide based on objective logic vs. S/N (Sensing/Intuition): gathering information as concrete data vs.
When the four scales are combined, 16 different four-letter personality types emerge.Į/I (Extraversion/Introversion): action-oriented vs. Its 126 forced-choice questions attempt to classify a person’s innate preferences according to T/F and three other dichotomies: extraversion/introversion (E/I), sensing/intuition (S/N), and judging/perceiving (J/P). Developed by two American women, Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine Briggs, during the 1940s and ’50s and first published in 1962, the Myers-Briggs test is now taken by more than a million people per year worldwide.
T/F is one of four dichotomies that make up the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the popular personality test based on the theories of Carl Jung. It suggests whether you depend primarily on detached thinking (“T”) or empathic feeling (“F”) when making decisions. Your response reveals more than your attitude to youth sports, Gaarder says. Robert Gaarder, a leadership coach and consultant on organization development, has heard dozens of answers to this question over the years, including “Send the best players,” “Have them draw straws,” “Send the kids who’ve been playing on the team the longest” (this reporter’s), and even “Send them all-I’ll pay the airfare out of my own pocket, because it’s just not fair otherwise.” There is enough money to send some team members to the playoffs, but not all of them. The team has a great season and makes it to the championship playoffs, held in a town a plane ride away. Imagine that you are the coach of a kids’ sports team.