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A Mutual Understanding
By David Weldon Computerworld, May 1, 1995, pp. 103-111

Computer literacy isn't enough. IS managers and pros need emotional literacy to build teams and work well with users. The Myers-Briggs method of deciphering personality types can help IS and users achieve...

When it comes to personality types, opposites don't always attract. Madeline Weiss recalls a chief information officer and chief financial officer at a large manufacturing company who were forever locking horns. ``The CIO was an extrovert and was always publicizing his successes. He was very focused on results and very deadline oriented,'' says the Bethesda, Md.-based consultant who heads the Society for Information Management's advanced practices council. In contrast, ``the CFO was an introvert. He wasn't into planning, and he wanted to keep his options open. It was difficult for IS to get him to sign off on things.'' Sound familiar? It's a scenario that is played out daily at many companies when people of very different personalities are forced to work closely together. And as companies rely more heavily on project teams and expect employees to partner with their customers, opportunities for conflicts abound. As a result, companies are placing greater emphasis on training tools designed to strengthen people and social skills, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (see chart, page 104). Information systems managers at Corning, Inc., Armstrong World Industries and New York University Medical Center, among others, have used Myers-Briggs for basic team building. But many others haven't realized its value particularly in helping to earn the respect and trust of users. Others fail to follow through on initial Myers-Briggs training; as a result, any value is quickly lost. Used correctly, Myers-Briggs is a method for measuring and understanding individual personality types. It can reveal how people prefer to receive information, how they form opinions and how they communicate. Myers-Briggs is now the most popular tool used in the workplace for analyzing personality types, according to management consultants.

2 The reason: The Myers-Briggs method is backed by reams of hard data. Its profiles of which personality types are attracted to which specific occupations, for instance, are based on 230,000 profiles gathered over 40 years by the Center for Applications of Psychological Type (CAPT) in Gainesville, Fla. a nonprofit clearinghouse for Myers-Briggs data. ``Myers-Briggs helps tell people what personality types they are, what others are, how you react to others and how they react to you,'' says Robyn Alspach, manager of IS development at Armstrong World Industries in Lancaster, Pa. ``It gives people information they may not have thought about, but it's [information that is] important to have. To be successful in IS today, you have to have these softer skills.'' IS and non-IS managers use Myers-Briggs data to help select the best employees to interact with users or when evaluating the members of a project team. By knowing the preferences of the team members, a manager can ensure the team has the right blend of personality types to accomplish the objective. And Myers-Briggs can help team members become aware of their strengths and potential weaknesses in working together. ``Companies often bring in administrators because they have teams that aren't getting the work done. They want to get past the personality problems,'' says Roxanne Emmerich, president of Emmerich Training and Consulting in Minneapolis and author of Finding Solutions to Workplace Problems: A Team's Guide to Using Myers-Briggs. Non-IS managers have found other uses for Myers-Briggs training. They have long hired Myers-Briggs consultants to promote ``emotional literacy'' the ability to understand other people's behavior and motivations. Executives outside IS have also learned the value of Myers-Briggs in helping managers understand how others react to their personality styles. This includes assumptions others may make about whether their views are being understood and respected. This can be a critical insight for IS professionals, who are often viewed as being disconnected from users and the business vision. ``The biggest challenge for IS is to understand what the customer needs to do in the business,'' says Tom Check, senior director of MIS and telecommunications at New York University Medical Center in New York. And the most important question, he says, is how many in IS are up to that challenge. In the case of the embattled CIO and CFO mentioned earlier, the relationship between the two got so bad that even their departments were beginning to avoid each other. Instead of the two sharing in the victories of the new financial system they were developing together, each success became just another opportunity for resentment. ``The financial organization was complaining they were working on systems and IS was getting the credit. They were getting the word out on what they were doing,'' Weiss says. IS, meanwhile, ``would keep thinking they would reach closure on an item, and then finance would change the specs.''

3 Eventually the chief executive officer stepped in to referee the bout. He brought in Weiss to clear the air at the top and introduce the two executives to Myers-Briggs. When they were done, they had developed a new understanding and respect for each other ``and a new level of professional intimacy,'' Weiss says. But getting intimate with someone who really isn't your type can be awkward at best. For many IS professionals, it just isn't them at all. That picture must change quickly, Emmerich says. ``In the future, employees will need to be emotionally literate. We're moving to a different type of organization, where people will work more as teams. [And they will be] built around functions.'' Different is good To promote this new cooperation, Myers-Briggs administrators help employees focus on the advantages that different personality types can bring to a team or work environment. There are no rights or wrongs in the personality types, merely preferences. ``Myers-Briggs is a 16 room house,'' consultant Timothy Irwin, at Atlanta-based Irwin & Browning, says of the 16 personality types set forth by the method. ``We all have our favorite room in the house the place where we say, `I feel good here.''' But, as in any house, communicating with someone else starts by knowing where you are and what room hes in. And in many ways, IS professionals are spending a lot of time in very different rooms than their users. ``There is a tremendous amount of disconnect with IS among other departments,'' Emmerich says. Users generally recognize IS staff as being intelligent. But they often think IS is clueless on how systems will actually be used. ``Meanwhile, IS can have a hard time realizing they're looked at so poorly. The breakdown is with the communications skills.'' Trust between IS and non-IS organizations is another casualty of poor communication. Charles Savage, president of Knowledge Era Enterprises, Inc., a consultancy in Wellesley, Mass., says, ``IS considers itself beleaguered and misunderstood constantly under attack for not delivering. But what IS is feeling is not unlike what any staff function is feeling.'' The problem, Savage says, is the basic distrust all employees have of one another and their managers. Overcoming distrust may be especially hard for IS professionals and managers, who historically rank very low on the Myers-Briggs ``feeling'' scale. In other words, when IS professionals discuss how a task needs to be accomplished, they tend to be poor at verbalizing how the task affects the people involved. In fact, the greatest difference between IS and the general population is the percentage who take action based on what they think rather than what they feel. That doesn't help bring the IS staff closer to their customers.

4 The short shrift IS professionals tend to give to feelings also doesn't help them learn to work in teams, which is a difficult process for any employee to learn, Myers-Briggs administrators agree. ``I've worked with many organizations to create teams,'' Weiss says, ``and the most challenging have been the ones with the most technical people.'' And then there are self-directed and cross-functional project teams. ``This is where the bullets can really start flying,'' Alspach says. ``In self-directed teams, IS really has to move into the feeling side of things because they have no intermediaries.'' Alspach says her IS group began putting all IS employees through Myers-Briggs training three years ago when they began working in self-directed teams. All IS staffers in the group now work on teams, some on more than one team, and some on cross-functional teams with users. ``As they went through the training, it made them really aware of the different personality types. It was a rude awakening,'' Alspach says. Carol Smallback, one of four team coaches in the technical services group at Corning in Corning, N.Y., had the same experience when her IS group began implementing self-directed teams five years ago. ``It became a revelation,'' she says. ``Team members suddenly started understanding the dynamics behind other people that they otherwise might have thought were just different. They started listening to their opinions.'' But sometimes it's IS managers who lack communication skills. Check at NYU said he knows that problem firsthand. When his IS organization wanted to implement project teams in the application development group four years ago, it brought in a consultant to help. But after the consultant met with the top eight managers in the group, the task of team building took a backseat to the more immediate problem getting the IS managers to work together well. ``The consultants said that one of the first things that had to happen was for the top two or three layers of management to better understand each other [because] there was a disconnect between managers and employees,'' Check says. The solution: The managers were given their first introduction to Myers-Briggs. ``It was very enlightening,'' Check says. ``What we found was that most of the [managers] in the group were bundled around the same [personality] type. But two managers were very different from the rest.'' It shed light on why those two managers had so often been at odds with the rest of the group and why there always seemed to be poor communication, Check says. Everyone agreed the problem had existed, but no one had understood why. After completing the Myers-Briggs session, Check says, the managers were energized and ready to work together and tackle team building.

5 But the energy didn't last. ``There wasn't any follow-through,'' Check says. The original group of IS managers were the only members to take Myers-Briggs training, and they had only the one introduction. The result was that ``we retained value on a personal level,'' Check says. But ``on the group level, the value was lost.'' And that is one of the most common complaints about the use of Myers-Briggs in corporations. If employees don't follow up their new insights into different personalities, they forget what they've learned and fail to build on the knowledge. ``It requires some repetition to be successful,'' Irwin says. And if a project team is operating under a sense of urgency, then Myers-Briggs isn't the tool for them, he added.

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