Executive Coaching – The Value of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

This is a personal view of the value of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to the Executive Coaching clients with whom I work. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the MBTI so there is no description of how it works and the different personality types.

When to Use MBTI in Executive Coaching?

Much of the coaching work that I do is with clients who are trying to build their relationships and influence others within an organisation. This may not always be the immediate coaching topic, but often behind say an issue about ‘being less emotional’, is a desire to exert more influence through relationships. What the MBTI offers clients is a lens to understand them self and how others might see them. Through this awareness comes the ability to better manage relationships.

It’s Not about Being Right or Wrong

With many personality profiling instruments the person doing the profile is compared with others in a norm group e.g. 16PF or OPQ. This approach has its place, but I do not find it particularly helpful in executive coaching. With this type of instrument, I have found that clients tend to feel happy if they score where they want to against the norm group and can become quite defensive where they don’t.

Whereas the MBTI does not offer any comparison with a norm group, and each of the type profiles are considered to be equally valuable. This allows a constructive exploration of my client’s type and how may be perceived by others with a different type description. It is important to highlight in the feedback that if a client has a preference say for Sensing, it does not mean that they cannot use Intuition. It’s just that Intuition will take more energy. As a result clients do not need to feel they have been categorised as four letters – they have the facility, if they so wish, to use the other preferences as well.

Easy to Understand

The majority of my executive coaching clients find the MBTI easy to understand and have a good understanding of their personality type within an hour. They are able to remember their type and preferences and relate to them in future coaching sessions. This creates a common language for us to use in the ongoing coaching sessions.

MBTI has Significant Depth

I often find clients have at some point done the MBTI and know their type letters. However that’s as far as they have got – an understanding of their own type and behaviour patterns. What the MBTI also offers is the opportunity to get a deeper understanding of:

• How others may perceive you
• Simple things that you can do to reduce potential conflict and work more effectively with those of a different type
• Obtain further personal insight through an understanding of dominant, auxiliary and inferior functions
• What might cause stress and how you might react in a stressful situation

In most cases the clients I work with find these deeper levels of understanding valuable to achieving their personal development goals. Where the coaching contract does not offer the time to do this a refresher on what the type letters mean and how others of a different type might see you is often enough.

As a result of the insights provided by the MBTI my clients are able to change the way they look at relationships and understand why they find some relationships in the organisation more difficult than others.  They also find ways which suit them to change some of the ways they work to build much stronger and fruitful relationships with others that are different to them. Overall I am not a big advocate of using psychometrics in executive coaching. However I do find that the MBTI enables clients to have a new way of understanding them self and the value of others that are different to them.

Tony Goddard

Keywords: Executive Coaching, MBTI, Myers Briggs Type Indicator, Gifts Differing, Relationships, Psychometrics, Use of Psychometrics in Coaching