Since we weren’t trying to sell him any aluminum siding during his visit with the One Man Brand show, we are glad to call Dr. Richard Grant by his more casual/friend name of Nick and sit back while he dispensed with endless deep insights into behavioral traits and personality types that can affect businesses at every level.
Nick has been one of the long-tenured gurus at the Wizard of Ads group here in Austin, stopping in regularly to wisen us up about the distinct pieces of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator that is used to break down the four dimensions of someone’s personality.
For the uninitiated, the traits are introvert/extrovert, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling and judging/perceiving. For generations professionals like Nick have used Myers Briggs as a codex to help people learn how to relate to each other, because it provides a beyond-basic sketch of how we are different and how we can help each other.
In business this has numerous applications, from managers learning how to motivate and utilize talented employees to sales people needing to quickly intuit and decipher how a customer goes about making a purchasing decision.
For workplace collaborations, Nick points out that an introvert will be much more responsive to thoughtful written work and idea generation rather than verbalized brainstorming sessions. Because of that, he said scheduled creative times with follow-up discussions will yield better results from an introvert.
And for the intuition versus sensory dynamic, he said while we all have both abilities there will always been one side that is heavier than another. The benefit of this is that the two types are complementary.
“Check with someone who’s opposite from you to help get unstuck in problem solving,” he said. “This works on project teams very well.”