What Personality Types Do You Work Best With?
Dear Editor:
My MBTI assessment says that I'm an ENFJ. What personality types would I work best/worst with?
Dear Reader:
As an ENFJ, you are likely to be inter-personally focused, understanding, tolerant, appreciative, and a facilitator of good communication. You probably enjoy working with others on a variety of tasks focused on the development of people. That said, I'm guessing that you have the capacity to work well with many different types of people. ENFJs typically value a harmonious working environment and work to foster collaboration.
A general rule of thumb regarding personality type is that the more letters two people have in common, the easier it will be to work together. This is because typologically similar individuals share the same ways of being energized, gathering information, making decisions, and approaching life. For example, from a personality type standpoint, I would expect that you and your boss probably see eye-to-eye on many things since you have three letters - E, F, and J - in common.
Conversely, the more dissimilar people are related to type preferences, the more likely they are to struggle to work well together since they prefer to operate in very different ways. For you, as an ENFJ, that means that you might find someone with preferences for ISTP (your exact opposite) particularly challenging to work with. The goal, of course, is to use your knowledge of personality type to develop an appreciation for type diversity and to look for ways that others with opposite preferences can compliment your blind spots.
If you (as an ENFJ) find yourself being irritated by people who ...
* Are overly skeptical or critical
* Fail to acknowledge social niceties in the communication process
* Are competitive or argumentative, or who fail to collaborate
* Don't show their commitment to team values or goals
* Value expediency and efficiency over cooperation and harmony
* Focus on specifics and logistics with little regard for the people involved
... these may be clues that the person in question has type preferences that differ from your own.
Best regards,
Jeff Thoren, DVM, ACC
ICF Certified Coach
References:
* Introduction to Type and Teams by Elizabeth Hirsh, Katherine Hirsh and Sandra Krebs Hirsh, CPP, Inc., 2003
* Introduction to Type in Organizations by Sandra Krebs Hirsh and Jean Kummerow, CPP, Inc., 1998
