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Personality test from the Detroit Free Press
THIS IS ONLY A TEST
DETROIT FREE PRESS (FP) - SUNDAY February 18, 1990
By: DANIEL GOLDEN
Edition: METRO FINAL Section: MAG Page: 6
Word Count: 5,105
MEMO:
DANIEL GOLDEN is a staff writer for the Boston Globe.
TEXT:
Author's apology to detail-oriented, random, quantitative readers: The
personality tests I have taken over the past few months indicate that I am
intuitive, sequential and abstract -- in other words, just the opposite of
you. Although I've tried to flex my less dominant sides in this article,
I'm afraid it will bore you. Please try to learn my language, and remember
that differences enhance team-building. As Rocky Balboa once said about his
girlfriend, Adrian: "I've got gaps. She's got gaps. Together, we fill
gaps." If a left-brained extrovert like the Italian Stallion and a
right-brained introvert like Adrian can hit it off, so can we.
AFTER A MUTUAL FRIEND INTRODUCED them this past August, it wasn't long
before psychologist Otto Kroeger was offering to work his magic at Ralph
Jacobson's troubled company.
Jacobson, the chief executive officer of Draper Laboratory in Cambridge,
Mass., was intrigued. Draper had long specialized in guidance systems for
underwater missiles, but much of that research had been torpedoed by
glasnost, and the company had taken refuge in a variety of smaller
projects. This shift required a reorganization, and in August 1988,
employees who had worked together for years were divided into specialized
teams. Some were unhappy with the change, and tensions ensued between teams
responsible for scheduling deadlines and those in charge of engineering.
Eventually, the firm laid off 60 employees.
So Jacobson listened to the ebullient Kroeger and read his book, "Type
Talk," an introduction to the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, one of the
world's most frequently used personality tests. In September, the CEO
invited the psychologist to give the MBTI to him and six of his top aides.
The seven executives answered 126 questions, including, "In your way of
living, do you prefer to be original or conventional?" and "Do you prefer
to arrange dates, parties, etc., well in advance or be free to do whatever
looks like fun when the time comes?"
On the basis of their responses, the test-takers were categorized as
Introverts (I) or Extroverts (E), Sensors (S) or Intuitives (N), Thinkers
(T) or Feelers (F), and Judgers (J) or Perceivers (P). Then they discussed
their types. Although Kroeger and Jacobson are reluctant to talk about the
test results, Kroeger does say, "Sixty percent of the managers of any
company are TJs." Top executives tend to be I's: E's are too indiscreet to
advance that far.
Jacobson found the discussion so helpful that he brought Kroeger back
in November to give the test to 40 more managers. "The experience and
outcome of the day produced better understanding," says Joseph O'Connor,
Draper's vice president for human resources and administration, who took
the test in September. "The instrument was an amazingly accurate predictor
of my own personality, and the others felt the same way."
Reflecting the values of the baby boom generation and the influence of
the Japanese model of corporation-as-family, more and more American
businesses are recognizing that their success may depend not on
technological innovation but on human factors such as teamwork,
communication, and leadership -- elusive goals that in the end boil down to
the interaction of personalities.
And, for an inexpensive but supposedly accurate reading on the
personalities of job applicants and employees, U.S. firms increasingly rely
on personality testing.
Long used by career counselors and government agencies but disdained
by most companies out of skepticism or fear of bad publicity, personality
testing is becoming a mainstay of the corporate world. Advocates believe
that testing can help companies ease the pain of layoffs, build support for
affirmative-action policies, and facilitate the transition from
entrepreneurial start-up to established institution. Wayne Camara, director
of scientific affairs for the American Psychological Association, estimates
that in the past five years, the number of tests available to industry has
tripled. Some corporations even have behavioral psychologists on staff who
develop tests for in-house use.
In many offices, guessing your personality type is the hottest fad
since the team decision-making technique known as quality circles. Members
of this cult of personality have Myers-Briggs four-letter type designations
inscribed on their license plates or nameplates. Or they pin schematic
diagrams of their brains on their bulletin boards to identify themselves as
predominantly right- or left-brained.
Ideally, personality tests match employees to tasks, teams, and
environments that suit their temperaments, thereby raising productivity.
One nationwide trucking firm recently hired University of Tulsa psychology
professor Robert Hogan, developer of the Hogan Personality Inventory, to
analyze the personalities of its drivers. The local delivery men were
alienating customers, while long-distance truckers complained of boredom.
The test showed that most of the local drivers were introverts
uncomfortable with personal contact, while the long-distance ones were
extroverts who needed stimulation. The company switched their assignments,
and the complaints decreased.
But testing carries risks as well. The field is largely unregulated by
the government. It is perfectly legal to sell or administer a bogus test as
long as it does not discriminate against protected groups such as
minorities and women. Most tests do not have to be administered by
psychologists, which reduces their price but makes it harder for
organizations such as the APA to monitor them. "We have no good gauge on
test misuse in employment," Camara says.
Although the association and its division of industrial psychologists
publish professional guidelines, many test developers refuse to show their
questions and scoring systems to the APA or Buros' Mental Measurements
Yearbook, the leading review publication. Test developers say they are
worried about plagiarism. "Psychologists steal from each other all the
time," says Arnold Daniels, chairman of Praendex Inc., which markets the
Predictive Index. Daniels' company has never submitted the index to the
yearbook, although it did commission two Harvard Medical School staffers to
analyze the test's reliability.
Some academic psychologists contend that test developers are simply
afraid of scrutiny and that business customers aren't interested in
spending the time or money necessary to learn about what they're buying.
Seymour Epstein, a psychology professor who developed the Constructive
Thinking Inventory several years ago, says several companies contacted him
about using it. But when he declined to let them use the test until
research showed how it applied to their companies, they lost interest. Even
when he told some companies that he would compare his test -- for free --
with the ones they were already using, there were no takers. "It's become
not a scientific thing, it's a business thing," Epstein says. "There's a
lot of black magic and mumbo jumbo."
According to Camara, companies often find themselves deluged with test
offers, but without the sophistication to choose the best one for their
needs. "Organizations that have no expertise are trying to make a decision
from 10 different salesmen all pushing their own test," he says. "They're
exposed to a lot of hype, and they're at an extreme disadvantage."
There is also the risk of oversimplification. People enjoy knowing
about their personality type as much as they like reading their horoscope
-- it's a conversation piece, a way to connect. Yet personalities may be
too varied to be easily categorized, and many people don't fall into any
one type. If they are shoehorned by co-workers or bosses into a type that
doesn't fit them, or if they're regarded as misfits because they won't play
the game, personality typing can turn into a dangerous kind of
stereotyping.
"A lot of management tests put you in categories that aren't justified
statistically," says psychologist Kenneth Kraft, who favors administering
several different tests to avoid pigeonholing employees. "They want you to
walk away with a label: 'I'm a this or I'm a that.' "
PERSONALITY TYPING IS nothing new. Medieval philosophers divided humanity
into four humors, or temperaments: phlegm, melancholy, blood, and choler.
Victorian phrenologists analyzed personality by feeling bumps on the skull.
The advent of modern psychiatry spurred more scientific testing, starting
with the Rorschach, or ink-blot, test, a staple of clinical treatment for
half a century.
The grandfather of modern personality indicators is the Minnesota
Multi-Phasic Inventory. Designed as a clinical measurement of neurosis, it
is also used by many government agencies and private employers to weed out
unstable applicants. Because it includes such true-false questions as "I am
very strongly attracted by members of my own sex" and "I believe in the
second coming of Christ," the MMPI remains controversial. Most recently, a
California department store that administers the MMPI was sued on invasion
of privacy grounds by an applicant for a security guard job. The case is
pending.
Today, the MMPI is just one of hundreds of tests. They are not
proliferating because psychologists are discovering new aspects of
personality; quite the contrary. An increasingly accepted theory among
academic psychologists synthesizes personality traits into five spectrums,
nicknamed the "Big Five": abstract to concrete, self-confident to
depressed, prudent to impulsive, outgoing to shy, and empathic to hostile.
What's happening, instead, is that consultants design tests just
original enough to call their own. Most of the tests on the market try to
assess one or more of the Big Five dimensions, and many of them ask similar
questions. Only the interpretive jargon changes. What the Myers-Briggs
calls intuitive, for example, overlaps considerably with what other tests
label as abstract, conceptual, or right-brained.
Once consultants develop a test, they try it out on executives in the
industries they want as customers until they can show that patterns of
answers correlate with behavior on the job. Then they translate these
patterns into management personas: inspirer, perfectionist, assimilator,
accommodator, implementer, experimenter.
Even the most ardent proponents of personality testing concede there is
a lack of statistics or studies showing that it improves productivity or
lowers attrition. Yet tests steadily gain ground in the workplace. Because
their results are couched in terms of style and preference rather than
aptitude and intelligence, they seem unthreatening to most employees. And
for employers who are trying to hire, they come at a time when other
sources of information are drying up.
For example, intelligence and aptitude tests are more likely than
personality tests to discriminate on the basis of race -- which makes them
more vulnerable to legal challenge. Another traditional tool, checking an
applicant's references, has lost its usefulness because many past employers
won't speak frankly for fear of being sued. Since Congress outlawed the lie
detector test for private employment in 1988, many companies have turned to
pen-and-pencil honesty tests.
Changes in the corporate world also have triggered the demand for
testing. Some firms use tests to ease tensions associated with affirmative
action and drive home the lesson that personality types know no race or
gender. If a white male and a black female discover at a workshop that they
are both introverted judgers, perhaps that bond will erase any mutual
suspicion.
With deregulation of financial services, many banks want
customer-service workers to change from being passive order-takers to
aggressive salespeople. Testing may show which workers can adapt most
easily. Other companies have shifted from a hierarchical organization to a
structure based on equal and interdependent teams. That structure delegates
more responsibility to midlevel employees and makes chemistry more crucial.
In choosing team members, again, personality testing often plays a role.
A few companies, though, are disillusioned. The Knight-Ridder newspaper
chain, which owns the Detroit Free Press and has long been a proponent of
personality tests, still gives them to managerial candidates and uses them
for workshops. But it has dropped them for prospective reporters because it
could not demonstrate any link between personality traits such as high
levels of energy and the ability to write on deadline. "Tests are not to be
used as an excuse to throw brains out the window," says Ivan Jones,
assistant vice president of personnel research and development for
Knight-Ridder. "That's the trouble with tests. They're quick, they're easy,
their value is easy to overemphasize, so hiring managers rely on them."
Just for fun, let's divide companies that use personality tests into
two types: Communicators and evaluators. Communicators test employees at
workshops in which participation is usually voluntary. Employees often
score their own tests and do not have to share the results with their
bosses. The tests, then, are used not to assess performance or potential
but to spark conversation about morale or team-building. While this
approach reduces concerns about privacy and stereotyping, its benefits are
often limited by a lack of follow-up.
Says one therapist who used to give the Myers-Briggs at businesses:
"It's hard to change patterns that have been going on for a long time
unless a structure is set up, such as a process time to discuss
communication before each meeting. When things get stressed out, when your
profits go down, that's when you most need this stuff, and it's not there."
Unlike communicators, evaluators have enough faith in testing to rely
on it for hiring and promotion. And while communicators boast about their
trendy workshops, evaluators sound defensive. They decline comment or
describe their questionnaire as a tool, an instrument, an indicator --
anything but a test. They realize that many people agree with the woman who
withdrew her application for a management job in the Sheraton hotel chain
after being asked to take a battery of personality tests.
"When you accept a job, it should be based on your skills," she says.
"If a psychologist is making the decision, you don't need to work there. My
interpretation of dots, or whatever they use, is nobody's business."
Tofias Fleishman Shapiro, an accounting firm, is one of the few
companies willing to discuss its personality testing for prospective
employees. For the past five years, TFS has required most applicants to
take the Predictive Index, which has been available since 1955. Praendex
chairman Arnold Daniels based the index on his work in World War II with a
psychologist who studied Air Force bomber crews. The corporations using the
test range from banks to fast-food chains, and their number has more than
doubled in a decade, from 800 in 1979 to 1,700.
The index lists two identical sets of adjectives -- "eloquent,"
"conscientious," "life of the party," etc. --on either side of a sheet of
paper. On one side, applicants check the adjectives that describe their
behavior; on the other, they mark the ones that describe how others expect
them to act. According to Daniels, the self-description indicates
personality traits, and comparing it with the perceived expectations
suggests the individual's pattern of adjustment.
The total number of adjectives checked is supposed to reflect the
individual's energy level. But that seemed dubious in one case. A highly
respected newspaper writer who took the PI anonymously for the purposes of
this article was surprised to be told that, according to Daniels' analysis
of his responses, he held a subordinate position and was frustrated by the
routine nature of his job. When Daniels was asked how he had reached his
conclusion, he said it was because the writer checked only a few
adjectives.
In a world where recruitment agencies charge $10,000 to find an
entry-level accountant, TFS executives regard the Predictive Index as
insurance against making an expensive hiring mistake. The additional cost
of personality testing for TFS is minuscule: $1,400 to train recruiting
director Laura Share to administer the index, plus a $400 annual licensing
fee.
Share says that the ideal entry-level accountant is a detail-oriented
extrovert, equally at ease with numbers and clients. If the results signal
introversion or inattention to detail, TFS executives probe those areas in
interviewing the applicant and calling references. "If we see someone who's
opposite to everyone here, we want to make sure they'd be happy here,"
Share says. "Otherwise, chances are they won't stay long."
TFS executives recognize that using the Predictive Index could drive away
potentially valuable employees. Occasionally, they waive the test for
especially desirable applicants. After praising the index for the better
part of an hour, Tracy Gallagher, director of administration, concedes that
he decided not to give it to Lawrence Kaye, for fear of alienating him.
Kaye is now manager of training and education.
On the other hand, since an important part of happiness at the office is
getting along with the boss, TFS often tests not only the job applicant but
also the supervisor for that position, to see if their personalities would
be compatible. Share says, "If the supervisors say they want someone who is
independent, and they're dominant themselves, you ask, 'Are you sure? Do
you really want someone like yourself?' "
IT DOESN'T TAKE LONG TO REALIZE that Manny Elkind is artistic, visionary,
turned off by sequences and numbers -- in a word, right-brained. When a
reporter interrupts Elkind's fluid exposition of the left-brained
personality ("You like to think it through, then you say, 'OK, let's get it
done' ") to ask permission to accompany him to a workshop, Elkind agrees.
Checking his calendar, he says he will lead a session on brain dominance
technology at an insurance company the following Monday. Elkind calls the
company and informs an answering machine of the reporter's wish: "I've got
a good feeling about this guy," he tells the machine. Only after hanging up
the phone does he realize that he has the date wrong. He conducted the
workshop the previous week.
Like a cat in a dog pound, Elkind worked for years as an operations
manager in the left-brained milieu of Polaroid. There, he says, he saw
promising innovations, such as a plan for cameras to be put together by
small teams rather than on assembly lines, thwarted by supervisors
reluctant to give up control. Realizing that managers need to understand
themselves to work effectively with others, he began attending workshops on
self-awareness -- including est, the controversial California-based
movement that flourished in the late 1970s. In 1979, Elkind became
Polaroid's senior manager of experimental projects, with an opportunity to
implement what he had learned.
Ned Herrmann, developer of the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument,
visited Polaroid in 1983 and gave a seminar on left- and right-brained
personalities. According to Herrmann, everyone prefers one or more of four
styles: cerebral left (analytical, mathematical); cerebral right (creative,
holistic); limbic left (controlled, conservative); and limbic right
(interpersonal, emotional). "This technology was the best combination of
most valuable and least threatening," Elkind says. "It's a whole-brain
concept. It appeals to everyone. I had an immediate vision of what I could
do with it."
The following year, Elkind began using Herrmann's test for workshops he
conducted at Polaroid. They were so popular that he invited other
corporations to send their employees. The number of people enrolled in his
seminars increased from 300 in 1984 to 4,000 in 1988. Then Elkind became
concerned about Polaroid's future after a takeover attempt, and he grew
frustrated because, as he puts it, the company would not support "the more
intensive training people need to move into." He left to start Mind-Tech
Inc. His workshop remains popular with companies in his native
Massachusetts: It is required for loan officers at Bank of Boston and for
senior managers at John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co.
Among his other activities, Elkind gives a daylong workshop every month
at Bentley College, open to anyone. Last November, about 30 people paid
either $215 apiece, the corporate rate, or $125, the rate for employees of
nonprofit enterprises, to attend the session. The group, which had twice as
many women as men, included a dozen employees from Bank of Boston's
customer relations division, a Bank of New England employee who was
evaluating the workshop for use in the bank's training program, and four
employees of a Texas Air subsidiary that has suffered from high turnover
and low morale.
Elkind's genial manner makes the group feel at home. He encourages its
members to change seats every 45 minutes: By the afternoon, everyone has
met everybody else. The activities are a fast-paced melange of lecture,
films, discussion, and exercises. Asked to draw a flower, left-brainers
depict no-frills stems and petals of mathematical exactness, while
right-brainers, emptying their crayon boxes, scrawl impressionistic
blossoms.
"The thinking preferences affect you at every level of your life,"
Elkind says. "The way you choose cars, the way you choose clothes, the way
you choose careers."
At one point, Elkind tells the group that Herrmann's theory does not
depict the brain's actual division of labor: It is just a schematic, a
metaphor, with no more claim to a physiological basis than other models of
personality. He urges his audience to explore other typologies, such as the
distinction between matchers and mismatchers. Matchers, he says, notice
similarities, while mismatchers see differences.
"I'm a matcher, and my wife is a mismatcher," Elkind says. "I'd suggest
going out to dinner, and she'd say, 'I can't do it either Tuesday or
Thursday.' I'd get angry, thinking she was negative. I'd tell her, 'Don't
tell me when you can't do it. Tell me when you can do it.' I finally
realized that her mind worked by process of elimination. She was telling me
that she could do it Monday, Wednesday, and Friday."
AFTER A 1988 FEDERAL LAW banned the use of lie detector tests for job
applicants in private industry, Wackenhut Corp. had to find a substitute.
The international security firm based in Coral Gables, Fla., chose the
Phase 2 Profile Integrity Status Inventory, a questionnaire that claims to
measure, among other things, "Basic Dishonest Attitudes," "Ability to
Measure Dishonesty," and "How Often a Person Thinks or Plans About Doing
Something Dishonest."
Today, Wackenhut officials say that the Phase 2 is more accurate than the
polygraph. They boast that only 10 percent of employees who passed the test
turn out to be dishonest, although a skeptic might wonder whether other
Phase 2-approved workers might be stealing undetected. The firm uses it in
every state except Massachusetts, where honesty testing has been prohibited
since 1986. Without the test, Boston-area manager James Healey complains,
he has to conduct in-depth background checks, which are both more expensive
and less reliable.
Honesty tests are the fastest-growing type of personality test in the
United States, and the most controversial. Desperate to arrest employee
theft, which costs American business an estimated $40 billion per year,
10,000 companies now administer the tests to 3 million people annually.
Test marketers do not guarantee that an applicant with a passing score is
honest or that one with a failing score is crooked, but they do claim that
failing applicants represent a higher risk to the employer.
Critics of the tests contend that they are meaningless and that, even
if they are valid in the aggregate, it is unfair to reject an individual
because he or she has a 30 percent or 40 percent probability of stealing on
the job. Both the APA and the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment are now
studying the issue.
"The use of so-called honesty tests to make hiring or promotion decisions
is on the same shaky ground as are the polygraphs . . . and is the
equivalent of a random procedure," wrote University of Illinois psychology
professor Benjamin Kleinmuntz in a review of the Phase 2 in Buros' Mental
Measurements Yearbook. "They are themselves dishonest devices. They are
dishonest toward employers because they reject many potentially productive
workers, hence causing greater costs than savings. And they are dishonest
toward prospective employees because they constitute an unfair method of
screening."
Kleinmuntz and other critics point out that such testing rests on a
paradox: It relies on dishonest people to make honest admissions of
dishonest acts. Yet marketers say that no matter how strange it seems, many
applicants confess to crimes. Of 10,000 applicants in 1988 who took a test
developed by Reid Psychological Systems of Chicago, seven percent admitted
stealing money or merchandise from an employer, and 5.6 percent admitted
using marijuana, amphetamines, or cocaine at work.
The reason for these admissions, according to test marketers, is that
dishonest people rationalize their behavior by convincing themselves that
the rest of mankind is more corrupt than they are. If they don't
acknowledge a few bad acts, they think, they will look like liars. That is
why, besides directly asking about criminal behavior, most tests probe the
applicant's view of human morality. Anyone who answers "No" to "Do you
think police officers are usually honest?" is off to a bad start.
The flaw in this approach is that workers in certain world-weary
professions tend to believe, regardless of their own conduct, that other
people are crooks. Reporters usually fail honesty tests -- unless they take
the Phase 2, which has a built-in cynicism factor, according to its
designer, Gregory Lousig-Nont. Another assumption underlying the tests is
that honest people want harsher penalties for crime than dishonest people
do. There are exceptions to this rule as well, the best-known being a nun
who sought a job in a Minneapolis bookstore and was given an honesty test.
As a believer in Christian mercy, she favored leniency for thieving
employees. She flunked.
YOUR WIFE WILL DIE OF cancer tomorrow unless she takes a new miracle drug.
It costs $2,000, but you only have $1,000. Should you steal it from the
drugstore?
In a cozy Prudential Center apartment, its window shades half-drawn to
keep out the light, 10 managers ponder this hypothetical question. Some say
they would do anything to save their spouse's life. Others object, asking
what would happen if everyone broke the law when it suited their needs.
There is no right answer, organizational consultant Emily Souvaine tells
the group. The differing responses reflect personality types. F's --
feelers -- make decisions subjectively. T's -- thinkers -- make them
objectively. In the business world there is pressure to be a T. "This day
is a way of honoring the F side of decision-making, as well as the T side,"
Souvaine says.
Based on the work of Carl Jung, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
theorizes that there are 16 different personalities, derived from four
pairs of contrasting types. ISTJs (or introverted, sensing, thinking
judgers), for example, are serious and quiet and succeed by concentration
and thoroughness. Among their most popular careers is pollution control,
and their least favorite is dental hygiene.
Developed from 1945 to 1962 by a mother-and-daughter team, the MBTI was
available only for research until 1975. During the next decade it was
mainly used in religious organizations, government, and higher education.
In 1980, the University of Maine at Orono began giving the test to all
incoming freshmen. As often as possible, it matched roommates who shared
two of their four types so that they would support each other while leaving
room for understanding differences. The university found that roommates
selected with the MBTI had higher grade point averages and lower dropout
rates.
The indicator proved equally helpful in explaining a rash of vandalism in
one dormitory. By studying the types of residents, university officials
found that the dorm contained more than its share of EPs -- extroverted
perceivers, who need lots of stimulation and physical activity. The
university started a health club and aerobics classes in the dorm, and
vandalism returned to normal levels.
Now corporations are supplanting universities as leading users of the
MBTI. Of the nearly 2 million MBTI answer sheets sold each year in the
United States, 30 percent go to private industry. (Until 1985, the Japanese
were the world's largest users of the MBTI, and they still rank second.)
The Type Reporter, a promotional newsletter, has devoted several recent
issues to the MBTI's role in the workplace, using headlines such as, "How
to Keep S's from Getting Stuck on Specifics," "How to Keep P's from
Procrastinating," and "How to Keep J's from Jumping to Conclusions."
A study by Jean Kummerow, co-author of "Introduction to Type in
Organizational Settings," found that 62 percent of workers who took the
MBTI in one study felt that it assessed their types correctly. Of the 10
people in Souvaine's workshop, five agreed with their MBTI results, and
four said that it had identified three of their four types. One person said
that only two types were correct.
For those who disagree with their type, a frequent comment is that the
MBTI has no middle ground: You must be either E or I, S or N, and so on.
Yet some people lack a strong preference in at least one dimension. This
analysis applies to most personality tests. They tend to be more
vindicating for people with strongly defined personalities, such as Manny
Elkind or Miriam Kronish. Those in the middle of the spectrum -- call them
well-balanced or, in MBTI jargon, "undifferentiated" -- may find their
results more perplexing than revealing.
The MBTI is not recommended for hiring, mainly because it is rather
transparent, and takers could skew answers to fit the job description.
Computer Sciences Corp., a high-tech company with 21,000 employees, uses
the indicator to improve its hiringindirectly: Its instructors take the
MBTI before training managers to interview job applicants. At the San Jose
Mercury News, a group of editors used to interview each job applicant
together. After being exposed to the MBTI, they realized that this process
felt threatening to introverts, and they considered switching to one-on-one
interviews.
The workshops at the Globe indicate that 70 percent of its managers are
introverted -- a surprising finding, since 70 percent of Americans are
extroverted. Dolly King, the Charlotte Observer's director of
organizational development, says most editors in the Knight-Ridder
newspaper chain are ENTJs -- "hearty, frank, decisive leaders."
To tell you the truth, I'm still a bit confused about my personality. On
the Myers-Briggs, I come out as an INTJ --skeptical, critical, independent,
stubborn, most likely to become an architect and least likely to become a
food-counter worker. The Predictive Index concurs: I am analytical,
quick-thinking, tense and driven, although I'm trying to conform to demands
made by an organization or leader and be more patient than I really am. "
When we're out selling our program, people like you are among our toughest
prospects," says Arnold Daniels, who developed the PI.
But the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument sees me differently. Like
"the clear majority of women," I'm creative, holistic, interpersonal, and
feeling -- right-brained to the max. I'm suited to be a teacher, social
worker, or nurse.
So what's the true me?
Guess I'd better take some more tests.
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