Individual Development, EQ, Jung, Pearman Personality Integrator

If the CEO of your company announced that everyone in the organization needed to develop the perspective of “taking nothing for granted,” how would you interpret the instruction?   We’ll come back to the question in a moment. For decades I’ve been working with individuals to look at the link between their personality and how they are in the world.—how their behavior impacts the world around them.  The manager who is incessantly critical because “that is what I’m paid to do” seems oblivious to the impact of that behavior on others.  Sure, people want to do a good job and people approach their work differently from others in the same role due to their personal history and their personality.  The learning agile manager begins to understand that being incessantly critical works only a small portion of the time.  Being expressively supportive, open to new ideas, and demonstrating positive regard for others usually leads to better performance and long term commitment to the work.

I believe that type development requires flexibility.   Any enrichment of flexibility has the residual of building capability for type development. The ability to flex from what is comfortable to what may be required was the only definition that others have offered and has been repeated many times. The often repeated statement is that type development is knowing which function to use and using it.  But to do so requires flexibility. A second element of development is flexing between functions and attitudes.  Such that the individual who is constantly reliant on, say, Extraverted Thinking learns that a particular situation may really call upon Introverted Intuiting and she flexes to achieve that shift from judgment to perception.  This requires awareness of the nature of the functions, the impact of the functions, and the capability to select the function that will achieve a desired outcome.  So if you really want to develop a greater resource in your Introverted Intuiting (Ni), y

A relatively new, young professional leader coach emailed to ask what patterns in leader behavior had I observed in my coaching practice that seem to be the most problematic for the manager/leader.  After some thought, I pondered the levels of leaders---team leads, managers, senior managers, c-suite executives, leaders in all sectors--and felt there was one red thread that was through all levels and contexts.  It is easy enough to say supervisors who fail to learn to work with peers don't become general managers, and general mangers who have difficulty adapting to working through people, or executives who fail to develop their strategic muscles are generally unsuccessful.  To answer the question posed, four issues kept surfacing as I thought about the coaching I’ve done over the last several years.  The pattern, the red thread through it all, failed relationships, failed efforts at influencing others, and failed efforts to work with diversity is the failure to listen generously