Leadership, Personality and Change

In “Introduction to Type and Change” by Barger and Kirby, 2004, CPP Inc., the authors reviewed inter alia, “common” profiles for leaders in terms of the Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator (MBTI®). Although the results should be treated with care as there is room for further research regarding cause and effect analysis, within the MBTI® framework, 70-80% of leaders prefer “thinking” to “intuition” and 70% prefer “judging” to “perceiving”. Without going further into the details, the conclusion is that the “average” leader is likely to prefer “organising their external world in a logical manner”: they like to get the facts, decide, plan and then get things done!

In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005, vol 89, no 3, “Personality Profiles of Cultures: Aggregate Personality Traits”, McCrae, Terracciano et al, reviewed 51 cultures to see if there was a correlation between average personality types and the respective group culture (which was usually, but not always, a “national” culture). One of the principle findings was that Europeans and Americans generally scored higher on “extraversion” than Asians and Africans. Given that the average leader in a Western organisation is therefore likely to be extravert as well as preferring “logical decision making in the external world”, it might be worth noting the advice Barger and Kirby give on how to “deal” with these personalities in terms of change.

Here is a summary followed by a consideration of further implications (“et alors”).

Leadership, Personality and Change

The authors proposed that (regardless of whether “intuitive” or “sensing”) the following should be considered when dealing with extroverted thinking type-preferences during a change process:

Strengths and Weaknesses

• Strengths are that they organise resources and people and then work hard to achieve set goals. They appear calm, confident and self-assured and are generally fair and consistent.
• Weaknesses are that they might tend to exclude others from the decision making process and may decide too quickly, moving to action before others are ready.

Influencing their behaviour

1. Identify the problem and its negative impact on the efficient achievement of the organisation’s goals;
2. Identify possible solutions and the consequences of each as logically as possible; and
3. Ask for what is needed, with a logical explanation for how getting it will make the change more effective.

What they want

• Information which must be presented in a logical cause-and-effect manner.
• To be included in the decision process; in developing the plans; and in evaluating the results.

Et alors?

The above only relates to the expected mean personality type of a “leader” in a Western organisation. For any one organisation however the distribution can vary enormously from one “extreme” where there are clusters of this type of personality preference amongst the leaders due to industry or educational “norms”; through to the other “extreme” where all the leaders’ personality preferences are as diverse as possible. Moreover, it is arguable that adaptive change in an organisation is more likely to occur when there are diverse personality preferences (where not everyone says or agrees to the same thing). In terms of leadership and change, this highlights a key paradigm:

Cultures tend to be self-replicating. In other words, those with the power in any group or organisation tend to replace themselves with those who demonstrate similar values and behaviours. Personality preferences are a key influence on behaviour. According to the statistics, leaders with preferences for “thinking” and “judging” therefore appear to be replacing themselves with other leaders who have the same preferences (hence the need for further research on cause and effect…). To the detriment of the diversity of personality preferences which by virtue of being diverse could assist change, the “old-guard” does not change…

So if the organisation does not already have a culture that is adaptive to change, how can leaders introduce change in order to become adaptive? For an average Western organisation, the answer can be found in “influencing their behaviour” (above)! This does however highlight the fact that to get out of the “groove” and make the initial change there has to be willingness and a motive amongst the external thinking types to increase personality diversity and move to a culture that is adaptive to change. The starting point seems to lie in presenting the information in a logical cause-and-effect manner…