Deliverance from Dysfunction: How MBTI^® and TKI^® Assessments Can Guide Leadership Teams

By Andrew Bell

When working with senior leadership teams, “Focus on the Positive” is a mantra that I want to believe in more than reality seems to allow. Perhaps that mantra is better suited to individual development, where maximizing strengths is generally perceived to be more effective than is addressing weaknesses. In my experience, when working with intact leadership teams that equation is quite often reversed.

It is, of course, always rewarding to work with a high-performing team and to contribute to a “tune-up” of performance. On such occasions, instruments such as the MBTI^® assessment provide a valuable framework for explaining the “what” and “why” of effective team performance. However, I find that the MBTI^® and TKI^® assessments really come into their own when I am working with an intact team that has challenges, particularly when those challenges only emerge over the course of a workshop or a consulting assignment. I recall a number of workshops in which the pre-briefing and the first session of the morning gave no indication of seriously dysfunctional issues that would subsequently emerge in informal conversations at the morning break and when the oh-so-powerful Team Type Table was compiled and discussed.

Let me stress that this is not meant to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, where if you seek dysfunction it is sure to be found. Those of us who work as consultants have no personal agenda to seek out and address dysfunction. It is the client’s prerogative to frame the purpose and boundaries of the assignment, and that is to be respected. Likewise, we all have our own experience and indeed our own role in arriving at dysfunction, and there are many ways for it to be resolved or tolerated.

Where I have found the MBTI and TKI assessments to be invaluable is in helping senior leadership teams acknowledge and address dysfunction that is seriously affecting their ability to deliver. The examples I will share at the 2016 MBTI^® Users Conference are drawn from personal experience in Asia Pacific and the United States, including one top team that, in its own words, was tearing itself apart. In another, there was a 50:50 schism between two camps that I had not been briefed on, but which emerged as the Team Type Table was compiled (three STJs, one SFJ, and four NTPs). Another interesting example includes the additional factor of a cultural dynamic, as a mostly Western top team strove to lead a major organizational change initiative across the Asia Pacific region.