Myers Briggs: Celebrate or Reevaluate?

Chief Learning Officer
April 2006
Guest Editorial
By Vincent M. Cramer

Myers Briggs: Celebrate or Reevaluate?
Corporate executives should take a fresh look at psychometrics through a 21st-century lens

Fifty years ago, Isabel Myers and Katherine Briggs developed psychological profiling methods for defining an individual's underlying temperament. Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator (MBTI) has achieved widespread acceptance and deployment, especially among Fortune 100 companies. In many corporations, people can quickly recite their MBTI classification, and possibly their colleagues'.

Just think about it―50 years ago. That was before the civil rights movement, before the space program, before the discovery of DNA, before the modern women's movement, before Title IX, before the Internet and before the global economy. Corporations were not multinational and they surely weren't multicultural.

Today, the United States is rich with diversity, and many corporations now mirror that diversity. Ironically, many of these corporations are strong proponents of psychometrics. According to Annie Murphy Paul, author of "Cult of Personality," 89 percent of Fortune 100 companies practice the personality typing methods of Myers-Briggs.

Do corporations see the dichotomy in having diversity programs that extol the richness of individuality and psychometrics that defines people by 16 behavioral classifications? Is organizational effectiveness and diversity enrichment enhanced by MBTI? Corporations should determine whether their commitment to multiculturalism is enhanced or hindered by these methods of profiling.

Dedicated and courageous people struggled over those 50 years to shed the shackles of labels and stereotypes. Their struggles effected great change in our society. Our individual empowerment is their legacy.

Corporate executives should take a fresh look at psychometrics through a 21st-century lens. If Chief Diversity Officers (CDO) and Chief Learning Officers (CLO) co-chaired a review of the efficacy of MBTI in context with corporate diversity initiatives, it would be enlightening. For starters, the CLO might want to determine if everyone is comfortable with MBTI. Ask the employees, both individually and in groups, if they are comfortable with the methods that are used and the labels that are assigned.

The collection of the data and the analysis of the information can be exhaustive or brief, scientifically certifiable or merely collegial. Whatever approach is used, the CDO and the CLO will be taking an important step down the 21st-century road of organizational effectiveness and diversity advancement.

MBTI has flourished because it appears to be a means to a desired end. People who understand and appreciate each other will accomplish more. Now might be the time to transpose that premise. It might be more productive and symbiotic for CDOs and CLOs to develop programs based on the premise that people who work together to accomplish something will understand and appreciate each other.

In the corporate environment, psychometrics was always intended to be a means to an end. Leaders should rethink and redefine those ends, which can then be articulated into an objective and assigned to internal and external workgroups to develop a solution. This approach ensures that programs will be inclusive and probably innovative. I am confident that any program that is recommended or created will not be based on psychometric profiling. Let's find out. Wouldn't it be radical and innovative if corporate leaders involved their own people in selecting the methods that would be deployed to fill an MBTI void?

A colleague told me that in her career as a behavioral therapist, she concluded that categorical typing is "like explicating a poem, it can have its uses." She quit the "therapy business" because she was required to assign labels and numbers from the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) to her patients. Liberated from the constraints of a codified listing of psychological disorders, she is now a humanistic therapist instead of a psychodynamic or behavioral therapist. It does not appear that corporate America shares her aversion to typing.

Stay tuned! CLOs and CDOs have not yet weighed in on the matter.

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Vincent M. Cramer is the author of Cramer’s Cube. He is also the founder of Winchester Consulting Group, an Organizational Development and Training company specializing in the confluence of collaboration, innovation and diversity. www.cramerscube.com