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Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Insights for working with challenging Strong profiles

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Have you come across any challenging profiles while interpreting the Strong Interest Inventory® assessment with your students? Most of these profiles normally fall into two groups: 1) Profiles with few elevations, referred to as “Flat Profiles” and 2) Profiles with many elevations, referred to as “Elevated Profiles”.

So what are Flat Profiles? According to the Strong Interest Inventory® College Profile User’s Guide, written by Jeffrey P. Prince, profiles with scores on all the General Occupational Themes (GOTs) and Basic Interest Scales (BISs) at the “Moderate” level or below are generally considered to be “flat”. The students in this case indicated “little” or “very little” interest level to most of the items on the assessment. These are fairly uncommon for general client populations, but they occur frequently with younger college students.

Elevated Profiles are those with a large number of high scores on the General Occupational Themes and Basic Interest Scales. This usually means that the students indicated “like” or “strongly like” to most of the items on the assessment. This can be frustrating to both the interpreter and the student as the results won’t offer clear direction.

I’ll be sharing some common causes of both Flat Profiles and Elevated Profiles, as well some insights on how to interpret these in the next few weeks on both our Facebook and Twitter pages. If you are not already part of our community, please join us!

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Monday, July 26, 2010

Have you used the #MBTI Tool for teambuilding with your students?

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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.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Using #MBTI Type to Improve the Innovation Process

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We all have creative and unique ideas. But how can you implement these ideas to be successful? This is where the process of innovation comes into play.

According to Talent Management magazine, the greatest obstacle many leaders face is creating an innovative organization where good ideas convert into profitable products and services.

In order to harvest innovation within a team or organization, you first must understand that innovation is a process and requires different strengths during different phases. Second, you should know how personality type is connected to innovation and learn how each type adds value to the overall process. This may sound overwhelming, but the booklet,
Introduction to Type® and Innovation can serve as a helpful guide and starting point.

If you are working with a colleague or student on this particular topic, here are some coaching tips for how to increase a type’s effectiveness when involved in the innovation process:

ISTJ: Brainstorm ideas (on your own or with others), not solutions.


ISFJ: Use past experiences to spur rather than stifle innovation.


INFJ: Engage sooner with others to allow them time to understand your internalized idea generation process.


INTJ: Consider that simple, observable facts or common sense can contribute significantly to the innovation process.


ISTP: Make decisions promptly when possible, as this can also be an efficient use of time.


ISFP: Take a leap of faith sometimes and believe that your decision will be the right one.


INFP: Check in with others continuously throughout the innovation process.


INTP: Learn how to simplify your language so that others can understand your thoughts, which tend to be complex.


ESTP: Slow down to ensure that key insights or pieces of information are not overlooked.


ESFP: Increase your creativity by looking for what is missing; asking what it is you can’t see, hear, and so on.


ENFP: Show others the building blocks of your novel ideas to gain buy-in.


ENTP: Thank others for contributing to your innovative ideas to ensure ongoing buy-in to the process.


ESTJ: Remember that loose ends are an inevitable part of innovation.


ESFJ: Brainstorm with others to understand the problem better and remember that the first idea is rarely the best idea.


ENFJ: Be sure to have time alone to tap into your talent for idea generation.


ENTJ: Spend time trying out new ways before deciding.



To learn more about the booklet Introduction to Type® and Innovation, click here.