Empowering career search and enrichment

Many of you already use the MBTI® assessment to help your students during the career development process. Are there other ways you use the tool? I have spoken with a few educators who use the tool for team building in classrooms, depending on the major. They feel its important to use for students once they’ve declared their majors, as most often than not, they will be encountering the same classmates throughout their remaining time in school until graduation. This is a great way to help students learn to work with one another early on, so they can take these skills to the workplace after graduation. Working on teambuilding with your own coworkers is also a great way to improve productivity.

For that reason, I wanted to share an indispensable tool if you are considering holding a workshop: The third edition of the MBTI® Team Building Program – Leader’s Resource Guide. This edition includes plenty of new handouts and activities for you to use to conduct a teambuilding workshop. Truthfully, I had never gone through any of our binders before, so I thought this was a perfect opportunity to do so. I found the binder to be overwhelmingly filled with resources.

Here is a broad overview of what the MBTI Team Building Program binder includes, as it is divided into five parts:

1) Beginning the Teambuilding Process – This part includes all the prep work of the workshop, such as the initial student contact and the recommended steps in the contracting and interviewing process. There is a section that includes several resources on how to “sell” your student on teambuilding. You will find samples such as interview questions, interview forms, a teambuilding contract and more. These are all intended to be reproducible materials.

2) The Teambuilding Workshop – This second part includes things to cover during the workshop, as well as post-workshop ideas of how to conduct a follow-up session and an understanding of how and why teambuilding interventions can go awry. Also includes a pre-workshop checklist, a sample one-day teambuilding workshop agenda, two activities to “break the ice” when starting a workshop, handouts, more activities, and an evaluation form to help you assess your teambuilding effectiveness.

3) Team Analysis Using the Type Table and the Lenses – Includes tools to help you conduct a team analysis in which you analyze the types that make up your team. This part also describes the Lens approach, which is a useful way to group types according to common attributes.

4) Applying Type Lenses to Core Issues of Teambuilding – This part will review each Lens (Function, Quadrants, Temperaments and Dynamics) in depth showing how each relates to communication, team culture, leadership, change, problem solving/conflict resolution, and stress. It will cover three components of each lens including: about the lens; applying the lens; one activity for each core issue, for a total of six activities to use with your clients.

5) Additional Resources – There is an alternative workshop format here for you to use, along with more team-building activities for you to use. You’ll also find a handy bibliography to the sources mentioned throughout as well as organizations you can contact to deepen your knowledge on the MBTI® instrument.

In addition to all this, a CD of handouts and templates for you to print as well as training slides to use during your presentation is included. You’ll notice that a big theme in all five parts is ‘activities’. There is a wealth of information in this binder, so I hope this overview was helpful! To learn more, click here.