The Limitations for Coaching and Development of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and other Preference-Based Personality Questionnaires

“When you understand your type preferences, you can approach your own work in a manner that best suits your style, including how you manage your time, problem solving, best approaches to decision making, and dealing with stress. Knowledge of type can help you deal with the culture of the place you work, the development of new skills, understanding your participation on teams, and coping with change in the workplace.”

It sounds pretty good right? But is it enough? And is there a catch?

What if, like Einstein suggested, your personality preferences – and your personality framework – becomes part of the problem? In other words, what if your attempts to eradicate the behaviours that hamper your performance end up reinforcing the problematic behaviour? Unfortunately this will always happen when we only change surface level behaviours and preferences without addressing and shifting the underlying thought patterns and emotional drivers that motivate those behaviours.

Let’s illustrate this dilemma with a practical example:

Paul, an employee Sally is coaching, is struggling with assertiveness and procrastination. His productivity has been dropping and his colleagues are getting really frustrated with him. Paul is a likable guy, but he’s clearly not performing at his peak. He seems to just “zone out” at work, often taking breaks or playing solitaire on his laptop.

In Sally’s second coaching session with Paul she asks him why he thinks he is struggling with deadlines at work. Paul says that he feels it is part of his personality and that he has tried to change, but that he doesn’t know where to start.

Paul describes how he was once assessed on the MBTI and that he came out as an INFP (Introverted-Intuitive-Feeling-Perceiving Type). He tells Sally that as an INFP he is introverted and prefers not to ‘rock the boat’ or stand up to people in team meetings when he’s not happy with something.

Paul tells Sally how he has always used a feeling-based decision-making style, which makes his decisions and actions seem so complicated. He says that is why he has been avoiding his colleagues and procrastinating so much. Paul goes on to tell Sally that he also avoids his mountains of admin, because INFP’s are more focused on the big picture than on details.

As the coaching session continues, Paul struggles to define his goals for the coaching process. He seems to have a low level of motivation and struggles to stay focused on the specific challenges and questions Sally is posing to help him figure out the way forward.

Sally is an action-oriented person and tries to get the coaching process moving forward. She decides to teach Paul some assertiveness skills, which he seems to respond well to. Sally also uses some cognitive-behavioural techniques to help Paul sift through his usual feeling-orientated approach with some rational thinking. Lastly Sally tries to show him how the details of admin are part of the bigger picture of gaining promotion and achievement. Paul responds well to the intervention and for the first week or two things seem to improve.

But then Paul starts cancelling his weekly coaching appointments. Sally hears from his line manager that he has been absent from work recently and that he has a lot of work overdue. His team are once again frustrated, because he seems to have slipped back into his old mode.

What happened?

First and Second-order Change

Identifying his personality preferences through the MBTI, a preference-based personality questionnaire, had revealed to Paul (and Sally) where his problem areas lay. But knowing this did not in itself lead to any kind of lasting change. To understand better why Paul slipped back into his old negative patterns we need first to distinguish between two kinds of change that can occur in the people development and coaching process.

Mary Bast, co-author of Out the Box Coaching with the Enneagram (2005), differentiates between first-order and second-order change in describing what can happen in the coaching process.

First-Order Change and Personality Preferences

First-order change is generally the level at which personality-preference questionnaires are able to stimulate some kind of awareness.

“First-order change occurs when we solve a problem without examining the framework within which the problem was created; the immediate solution may provide a temporary fix but the habitual patterns of response remain unaltered. Because the system is unchanged, the problem recurs, perhaps in different forms.” (Mary Bast, 2005)

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