Why companies use MBTI: the American work retreat

A hotel conference room with no windows. A name tent, a workbook, a facilitator who is good at this, and eleven colleagues who would all rather be at their desks. By eleven in the morning the room has been divided into groups by letter, and your manager, who you have never seen do anything unguarded, is standing under a sign explaining why his group hates being interrupted.

For a very large number of Americans, that is where the four letters enter their life. Not on a phone at midnight, not in a magazine, but at work, on the company's time, from a binder.

It is a strange fate for something built to help individuals choose a career, and the reasons it happened say a lot about what the instrument is good at.

Why the corporate room and not the counselor's office

The instrument was designed for personal use. What it found was an institutional market, and the market found it for reasons that have little to do with psychology.

Companies have a recurring problem: people who have to work together do not understand each other, and there is no acceptable way to talk about that. Saying that a colleague is exhausting is a complaint about a person, which is a human resources matter. Saying that you and a colleague work from different letters is a statement about a difference, which is a training matter. The instrument converts an unspeakable conversation into a speakable one, in a single afternoon, and that is a genuinely valuable service.

It also fits the format. A workshop needs something that can be administered to a group, explained in an hour, and used in an exercise before lunch. There is a whole supply chain around it: certified practitioners, published materials, a defined program. A career counselor sees one person at a time. A workshop sees forty, and the economics of the two are not remotely comparable.

What makes it a good training product

Three things, and it is worth being clear that these are strengths rather than tricks.

Nobody loses. Every result is written as a set of strengths, deliberately, going back to the way Isabel Briggs Myers wrote the first descriptions; the history of the instrument explains why that was built in from the start. A tool that told a quarter of the room they had a bad profile would not be bought twice, and more importantly it would poison the afternoon.

It creates a shared vocabulary in one day. After the workshop, people can say things in meetings they could not say the week before. I need to see it written down before I can respond. I am going to want a night on this. Those sentences existed before, and now they have a socially safe wrapper.

And it produces recognition, immediately and reliably. That feeling is real, and it can be manufactured by a description that says nothing at all; why every type description feels like it was written about you is about exactly that, and it is worth reading before deciding the workshop proved anything.

The fourth reason is one nobody puts in the brochure. An afternoon of this is pleasant. People talk about themselves, discover something in common with a colleague from another floor, and go home mildly cheered up, and a training day that leaves a workforce cheerful is doing something an employer wants even if the content evaporates by Friday. Judged as a workshop it succeeds. Judged as a measurement it was never really being judged at all.

The room changes the answers

Here is the part almost nobody accounts for. Taking a questionnaire about yourself in an office, on a Tuesday, surrounded by colleagues, is not the same act as taking it alone.

You answer as your work self, because that is the version of you the room has summoned. Plenty of people behave quite differently at work than anywhere else, often deliberately: more structured, more decisive, more social, more agreeable. The questionnaire cannot tell the difference between a preference and a professional adaptation you have been performing for eleven years.

There is also the small matter of who will see it. Even when the results are private, most people know the exercise is coming and know the groups will be visible on a wall. That is a mild pressure toward the answer you would rather be true, and it does not take much of that to move a letter, which is one of the things behind getting two different results in one day.

The result from the workshop is therefore a description of you at work, offered in front of your employer. It is not nothing. It is also not the same object as a result you got by yourself with nobody watching.

The line the publisher draws, and how often it is crossed

The company that publishes the instrument says it is not to be used for hiring or selection. The result is supposed to be given back to the person, explained, and open to their disagreement, on the grounds that they are the final authority on their own type.

In practice, letters get written on team charts, remembered by managers, and mentioned in conversations about who should lead what. Nobody makes a formal decision on the basis of a four-letter code, and everybody has met somebody whose reputation quietly acquired one. This is the failure mode of the corporate setting, and it is not something the instrument does. It is something a room full of people with a new vocabulary does with it.

If your letters are on a wall at work, the correct amount of weight to give them is very little, and you are entitled to say so. Disagreeing with a reported type is a built-in part of how the thing is supposed to be used, not a refusal to participate.

The cleanest test of this is what happens to the charts. Six months after the workshop, the letters on the wall are still there and the vocabulary is mostly gone. What is left is a handful of specific facts about specific colleagues, which people picked up in conversation and would have picked up eventually anyway. The binder is in a drawer.

What the afternoon is actually worth

More than the skeptics allow and less than the workbook implies.

What survives the workshop is rarely the four letters. It is the two or three moments where somebody said out loud how they work, and a colleague realized they had been reading it as rudeness for two years. The person who needs the agenda in advance. The person who thinks out loud and does not mean the first version. The person who goes silent in a meeting and writes the good email at six, which is the whole of the quiet one in the meeting.

Those exchanges did not need this instrument specifically. They needed an occasion and permission, and the instrument supplied both. That is a modest claim and I think it is the true one.

MBTI is a trademark of The Myers-Briggs Company, and this site has no connection to them; I run it on my own and I am not a psychologist. If you took the questionnaire in a hotel conference room and the result never quite fit, consider taking it again somewhere nobody can see the screen. The two answers are frequently different, and the second one is usually about you rather than about your job.