In an earlier post, I talked about Why Dealing with People is So Much Harder After College. It’s true, there is no single greater barrier to young professionals success after college than people: the other people who you deal with, and how you deal with them.
Other people are important. Other people pay you, promote you, enable you, and support you. Other people also take from you, compete against you, thwart you, and ignore you. Success doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens with other people. If you want to be as successful a young professional as you can be, you have to train yourself to be great with other people.
Dealing with people to get what you want is a teachable skill. Like any other skill, some people are naturally more gifted at this than others. But like any other skill, if you study how it works, work hard to get better, and practice, you will get better. Unless you already are Bill Clinton (if you are, feel free to submit a guest blog), you have to get better.
There are lots of different play books for personality. Most of them say the same things different ways, since they are, after all, studying the same subject – people. In my own career, I have chosen to apply the Myers Briggs Personality Indicator. I chose it for a few main reasons:
1) It is the most widely taught and applied amongst Fortune 500 companies.
2) It has an enormous amount of research supporting it.
3) It works for me. It is simple, yet not so simple as to be useless.
The Myers Briggs Index categorizes every individual personality by defining its preference on 4 different personality spectrums. A persons preference on each spectrum is labeled with a single letter:
Introversion (I) to Extraversion (E)
Sensing (S) to Intuition (N)
Thinking (T) to Feeling (F)
Judging (J) to Perceiving (P)
For example, my personality profile shows that I have preferences for Extraversion, Intuition, Thinking, and Perceiving. Thus my overall personality is labeled: ENTP. It is important to note that every personality falls under one of these two labels in each spectrum. You can’t be both, even though it is everyone’s gut reaction to instantly say that they are both. This is normal. Your identifying label does not mean that you never act or think as your opposite preference does. It says that your subconscious mind is naturally oriented to respond one way more often. It is a lot like having a favorite flavor of ice cream. While you might prefer chocolate the most, there will still be times when you will order vanilla. Your preference shows that you are more likely, and better able, to use one side of the personality spectrum than the other. For instance, you can’t simultaneously value objectivity over emotion, as a Thinker does, but there are still instances where you will consider the emotional element with more weight, as a Feeler usually does.
You can’t change the preferences that you are born with, and you shouldn’t want to. There are no right or wrong personality preferences. Great people don’t have any more of some specific preference than another. Great people have a better sense for what other people are, and what they want, on all ends of the spectrum. In my next posts, I will describe what those differences are. But for now, just understand that for every way that you think, there are people out there that think completely differently, and none of you are right, and none of you are wrong.
- the Young Professional
