Type and Leadership

The 10 Percent Stretch

The broader the range of behaviors leaders can choose from, the more effective they can become. Successful leaders enlist others to achieve the organization’s goals by exercising a range of leadership styles. This often requires leaders to act outside their usual set of habits, or comfort zone. A key concept for leaders of all types is to consciously look for ways to push to make a “10 percent stretch” beyond their comfort zone and into their growth zone.

In the growth zone, some leaders will feel slightly uncomfortable, as if they are taking a manageable risk. Don’t overstretch. Moving too far outside your comfort zone can land you in the danger zone, where learning is negated by the stress of excess risk. When behaviors become habitual, they are harder to change; they can even seem unchangeable. And while it is true that personality type influences behavior, personality doesn’t predict behavior, and it most certainly doesn’t limit one’s choices as a leader. Because behaviors are chosen, success as a leader lies largely within an individual’s control. Now that’s empowerment.

10 Percent Stretch for the 16 MBTI® Types

Select a type:

istj
S I
isfj
S
infj
N
intj
N J
istp
I
isfp
infp
intp
P
estp
E
esfp
enfp
entp
P
estj
T E
esfj
F
enfj
F
entj
J T

10 Percent Stretch for ISTJ Leaders

Expanding Your Leadership Mind-Set

  • In addition to making sure tasks get completed, recognize the value of building personal connections and of using those connections over time to achieve results. Strong relationships also deepen team members’ commitment to one another and to their tasks.
  • Authority is derived from more than one’s position in an organization or on a career ladder. You must skillfully exert interpersonal influence, using tailored approaches to motivate different people based on what they seem to care about.
  • Time spent expressing your gratitude for others’ contributions is time well spent. Showing appreciation helps you reinforce productive behaviors, build relationships, gain influence, and increase employees’ engagement in their work.

Developing Additional Skills

  • Coaching. Learn to coach others for their own development rather than to accomplish a specific task.
  • Speaking up. Insert your ideas and reactions into group discussions sooner. Your clarity and ability to synthesize perspectives may help the group progress faster.

Broadening Your Style

  • Your habit of accomplishing tasks quietly and efficiently may lead you to avoid the spotlight and be too humble. Humility is a virtue, but you may need to help others appreciate your contributions, not overlook them.
  • When appropriate, practice leadership styles you find less comfortable. For example, you might decide a democratic approach will work best when a decision will affect everyone and you need exceptional commitment from all to succeed.
  • Share more about yourself, including your development goals, and invite others to tell you more about themselves, too. You will become a more influential leader when you are better known by your colleagues.

Changing How You Relate to Your Context

  • Develop a deeper awareness of your own and others’ values, or a sense of what really matters. How can you exercise your values in the workplace and play to others’ values to influence them?
  • Increase your comfort with ambiguity and lack of clarity. Interview colleagues who manage ambiguity/lack of clarity well to find new ways to respond to it.

10 Percent Stretch for ISFJ Leaders

Expanding Your Leadership Mind-Set

  • In addition to leading by service and example, recognize the power of publicizing productive behaviors and achievements. Celebrating success in a creative way helps you reach employees who may not see the example you are trying to set.
  • A “no-surprises” environment fits your belief in the importance of dependability, yet organizations are full of surprises and need some creativity and innovation. Try establishing a process you trust to bring important innovations to the forefront.
  • Extend your ability to help people bring their best to their work by developing your persona as a leader who can build passion in the group, perhaps by expressing common values and purpose.

Developing Additional Skills

  • Delegating. Learn to delegate effectively, using coaching to help people when they get stuck rather than taking work back from them.
  • Long-term planning. Practice developing a long-range picture of the future, building off the specifics you know about your industry.

Broadening Your Style

  • Your friendly, thorough approach to work motivates some people, but not all. To lead diverse groups and reach people with different needs, practice giving clear directives, providing outcomes to reach for, and granting people freedom in how they do their work.
  • Although a backstage, collaborative approach may feel most comfortable, practice more public and vocal ways of communicating so that you have several styles to use, as may be called for in different situations.
  • If your thorough style becomes problematic in situations that require quick action, develop a small group of people whose decisions you respect and use them as an advisory council. This will help you consider options fully and take faster action with confidence.

Changing How You Relate to Your Context

  • Challenge your assumption that there is little you can do to change your organization’s habitual constraints. Be willing to regularly revisit processes in search of greater efficiencies.
  • Be prepared for others’ competitive overtures and depersonalize them. People need to know that, as leader, you can stand your ground against opposition when appropriate.

10 Percent Stretch for INFJ Leaders

Expanding Your Leadership Mind-Set

  • In addition to guiding a team toward an enlightened vision, recognize that debate and overt arguments are part of a democratic approach that improves process and yields results.
  • Tailoring systems to meet individual needs is valuable for gaining commitment, but organizational needs rightly take priority over individual concerns at times. Try seeing the organization as an entity that, when healthy, contributes to individual and global well-being. Such a view will help you advocate more strongly for your organization’s interests.
  • Imagine situations that would require directive leadership and exercising strong authority. Then be prepared to use such an approach when a situation in your organization requires a stronger voice than you may typically use.

Developing Additional Skills

  • Public speaking. Learn strong speaking skills to reach more people publicly with your view of the future.
  • Conflict facilitation. Become comfortable with having uncomfortable discussions in the group and then letting the group sort out the issues.

Broadening Your Style

  • Your innate optimism can cause you to skip over unpleasant details, so practice staying in the moment. Identify what exactly is happening now rather than what you imagine will happen next.
  • While remaining sensitive to people issues and being supportive, encourage open communication. By asking individuals to state their views publicly, you may find you can build commitment within the group more quickly.
  • Your internal focus and desire to take quick action may divert your attention from communication. Before you start implementing a change, ask yourself whether you have explicitly stated your thoughts to others. To strengthen buy-in, be sure to be transparent with your organization or group about your intended plans.

Changing How You Relate to Your Context

  • Balance your coaching and developmental orientation with stating clear expectations for others’ performance. Work with people on aligning their beliefs and mind-set in support of the behaviors you want to see.
  • You may be so driven to take action that you skip important data gathered early on. Make sure to share your ideas and seek feedback before you create your action plan.

10 Percent Stretch for INTJ Leaders

Expanding Your Leadership Mind-Set

  • In addition to developing logical and visionary plans, recognize the importance of gaining broad support from others as you work to develop more trusting relationships.
  • Quality does matter, but rather than driving for 110 percent from everyone at all times, look for those times when 90 percent not only will suffice but actually will improve overall performance and boost spirits.
  • Consider how ideas derived from the servant leadership model might enhance your effectiveness. As a leader, how could you better serve your followers? What effect might this have on them? On you?

Developing Additional Skills

  • Inquiry skills. Add to your interpersonal tool kit by developing inquiry skills, such as listening actively, suspending judgment, and asking open-ended questions.
  • Overt decision making. Articulate your decision-making process more clearly: Who is going to decide, and how will others be involved? When others are clear on those issues, you are more likely to fully engage their best thinking.

Broadening Your Style

  • It is your nature to critique ideas, which may make you seem mistrustful or disrespectful to others. Practice first asking others what opportunities they see for improvement. Learn to explicitly state the positive accomplishments you see before diving into your critique.
  • Rather than getting defensive when others disagree with your ideas, get curious about how they came to their conclusions. Even if you stick to your ideas, you will learn how others think. Such information can be a strategic asset.
  • Personal relationships smooth the way for your success. Place more value on friendly, social conversation. Once people warm up to you personally, they may be more open to your ideas or provide you with valuable information, or both.

Changing How You Relate to Your Context

  • Try spending less time creating the grand plan and more time implementing. Your practical example will better convince others of the systems changes you see as necessary.
  • Practice self-responsibility (self-management) when people seem to be the main frustration in your role. Make certain you are not blaming others for things that are within your control. Hold yourself to a higher standard and act first to correct what is off course.

10 Percent Stretch for ISTP Leaders

Expanding Your Leadership Mind-Set

  • In addition to setting a skillful example for others to follow, recognize that getting to know others helps you meet people’s specific, practical needs and removes barriers to getting the job done.
  • It is important to have the right technology for the job, but tools are of little use if people lack the motivation or skill to use them. Spend time coaching others and developing their skills to better leverage the organization’s technological and physical assets.
  • Try seeing the core goal of leadership as getting others to give their best. Mobilize others to top performance by sharing your extensive experience, setting challenging targets, helping them grow, and expressing appreciation for their contributions.

Developing Additional Skills

  • Strategic forecasting. Explore trends in your company and your industry to consider what the future may hold.
  • Interpersonal skills. Practice being patient with others. Some people may need to analyze or discuss things more than you do in order to learn from their experiences.

Broadening Your Style

  • Your quiet, detached, independent style may lead others to think that you intentionally withhold information. When you uncover important facts, ask yourself who else could benefit from your findings and then offer the information to them.
  • Work to suppress your snap judgments of others’ worth. Instead, train yourself to ask questions such as these: How did this person reach his or her conclusion? What concerns this person about this course of action? What is getting in the way of his or her doing a good job?
  • Being able to see a plan’s flaws is an asset, but others may feel discounted by how you critique their plan. To minimize others’ defensive reactions, first discuss the plan’s strengths before getting to its potential flaws.

Changing How You Relate to Your Context

  • Reconsider your view of yourself as a loner. People are more willing to be influenced by those they can influence. Be more flexible to get what you want in return.
  • Think about how changes you introduce in your area may affect other parts of the organization. Treat your organization as a whole, larger than the sum of its parts, when planning changes.

10 Percent Stretch for ISFP Leaders

Expanding Your Leadership Mind-Set

  • In addition to seeing the value in providing friendly, gentle guidance, accept your role as steward of your organization’s service-oriented purpose. This view will enable you to pick the right approach for a situation: authoritative and decisive as needed, flexible when appropriate.
  • Your free spirit and resistance to rules and structure may cause you to see yourself as unsuited to leadership. However, your approach may fit well in a decentralized organization whose purpose aligns with your values.
  • Work to depersonalize reactions from others. People are likely reacting to your leadership role as they see it, not to you as a person.

Developing Additional Skills

  • Self-assuredness. Develop an intrinsic sense of self. Doing so will help minimize your concerns about whether people like you or agree with your direction.
  • Organization. Learn practical tips for getting organized, or hire someone who will help you keep your work organized.

Broadening Your Style

  • Your leading-from-behind style may be comfortable for you, but it might limit your ability to advance the organization’s mission. Think of situations when a forceful, but diplomatic, style may be required—a life-threatening event, for example. If you, as leader, had to protect others, how would your style change?
  • Build a small cohort of trusted advisers who complement your strengths. Work closely with them to help you fulfill your leadership role.
  • Work to welcome the expression of diverse views in a respectful way. Debate over ideas can lead to a well-thought-out approach; differences don’t have to result in a loss of harmony when handled productively.

Changing How You Relate to Your Context

  • Challenge yourself to imagine the long-term outcome of pursuing a particular opportunity before you look at the historical context.
  • Question organizational norms sooner. Rather than waiting for a crisis to erupt in your organization, ask why your organization does things as it does rather than the way you think it should. If you haven’t yet asked that question, how can you be sure you can’t help change things?

10 Percent Stretch for INFP Leaders

Expanding Your Leadership Mind-Set

  • In addition to helping others develop their potential and contribute their talents, recognize that leadership is power in action. Accept your role as an authority and welcome the chance to influence outcomes for the common good.
  • Self-driven is different from selfish. Leaders need to set priorities for themselves and their organization. Getting everyone’s input is laudable, but not when such an inclusive approach delays critical decisions or leads to missed opportunities. Some decisions cannot include all players.
  • Instead of judging uncritically enthusiastic approaches as always phony, notice situations when this kind of group enthusiasm is helpful. Encouragement that comes from the heart can give a team the boost it needs to redouble its efforts.

Developing Additional Skills

  • Social presence. Consider taking an acting, voice, or improvisation class to learn how to modulate your voice and project the image you choose for particular situations. Your quiet style may be holding you back.
  • Budget and project oversight. Get tutored or take a class in project management, budget oversight, or financial analysis if your skills in these important areas could be improved.

Broadening Your Style

  • Your idealistic views may attract you to human services or development organizations. Note that to achieve the organization’s altruistic goals, at times you will also need a strong negotiating style and sales persona.
  • Exercise your authoritative style, a visionary approach that enables you to influence a whole group to follow your lead toward the vision that is so clear to you.
  • Learn how to say no in a firm yet kind way. Pursuing too many objectives at the same time may dilute your efforts and make it impossible to achieve truly significant and lasting results. Others may be less disheartened by an honest no than they would be by your failing to accomplish an important mission due to lack of focus.

Changing How You Relate to Your Context

  • Learn to read the signs of “not possible here” so that you don’t waste your energy on a losing battle. Moving on to a more hospitable environment is sometimes the best response to hearing too much “That’s not how we do it here.”
  • Often you focus on your own limitations rather than the organization’s. For example, you may decide that your inability to close a large deal is due to your not reading the client well enough rather than to your organization’s inflexibility in meeting the client’s needs. Try to view the system as a whole and seek holistic solutions.

10 Percent Stretch for INTP Leaders

Expanding Your Leadership Mind-Set

  • In addition to being top experts in their field, effective leaders recognize the importance of getting their ideas accepted. To influence more senior employees and peers, understand what they care about and triangulate an approach that will best influence them.
  • Independent, autonomous work may suit you, but don’t miss out on the creativity that can come from the collaborative work of a team of experts. Leaders who work well with teams find ways to get the best in the field working on their organization’s vision. How can you?
  • Instead of insisting on your point, try to listen with a more open mind to others’ views. Respectful dialogue generates multiple ideas that can make your conceptual systems more practical and user-friendly.

Developing Additional Skills

  • Reality-based planning. Use action plans to bring your ideas to life rather than leaving them in your head. While the thought may be more important to you than the action, others can only assess based on how your ideas work.
  • Meeting skills. Lead meetings that accomplish work and don’t waste your or others’ time. Try getting input on agenda items, managing both time and topics, balancing participation, and conducting meetings standing up. Include on the agenda things others find valuable, too, so that they will attend when you need them to.

Broadening Your Style

  • Your preference for working independently needs to be augmented with outreach efforts. If you have an office door, keep it open sometimes. Walk around for five minutes a few times a day to talk casually with colleagues. Face-to-face conversation may seem less important to you, but it helps people relate to you better and builds trust in your vision.
  • Shift from criticizing to critiquing. Find the pros as well as the cons and take time to acknowledge one thing you truly appreciate before critiquing. This more positive style will help you gain influence.
  • Clarify what matters most to you and act in accordance with your values. This authentic style attracts others and gains you respect. Knowing your values also helps you make durable decisions.

Changing How You Relate to Your Context

  • Treating rules as rough guidelines or deadlines as suggested goals may leave others feeling disrespected. Find out what impact your actions have on others. You want to make sure you are not losing the respect of people whose opinions you value.
  • While you tend to have a far lower need for interpersonal connection than others do, your colleagues may need more contact with you. Rather than working remotely so often, or in your own work space, consider investing a bit more time in interacting with other people.

10 Percent Stretch for ESTP Leaders

Expanding Your Leadership Mind-Set

  • In addition to getting the job done, recognize that people need a reason to put forth their best efforts. Review the “best leader” and “worst leader” lists in the “Understanding Leadership” section in the Introduction to Myers-Briggs® Type and Leadership booklet. From the best leader list, pick one characteristic to emulate, then try it and see what happens.
  • Limiting options may help your team complete projects quickly, but not all decisions are clear-cut. People will value your assessment of alternatives more when they know that your final answer incorporates many facets of the situation.
  • While rapid-fire problem solving may be as natural for you as breathing, you must also be able to slow down, step back, and plan efforts with longer time lines. Processes may seem tedious to you, but others may rely on them to facilitate implementation.

Developing Additional Skills

  • Coaching. Learn how to coach others for development. This means guiding their discovery of how to solve a problem, not telling them how to do their job. Caution: They may do it a different way than you would.
  • Self-reflection. Develop the ability to reflect on your values and goals and then see if your behavior is congruent with them. You don’t want your actions to be saying “arrogant, impatient, and competitive” when you mean them to say “confident, action oriented, and successful.”

Broadening Your Style

  • Others may see your productive, efficient style as demanding. Practice patience. When tempted to take over a task to save time, stop and think about the person to whom you assigned it. Instead of demanding the finished project, ask how the task is going and what help you can offer. A leader’s role includes developing others.
  • Rather than racing through your day, take time to connect with others so that they can get to know you. This more personal approach will help you develop empathy, improve relationships, and build trust—qualities that will help you be more influential.
  • Balance your tendency to challenge others with showing them support. Direct criticism, while valuable, is hard to hear. People will pay more attention to your input if you also tell them in a genuine way what you see them doing well. Consider using humor in such situations, but be careful not to undermine your best efforts with ill-timed teasing.

Changing How You Relate to Your Context

  • Challenge your tendency to act rather than reflect. Sometimes it is better to stop and consider more choices first.
  • Look for the value in a rule instead of assuming it is there to be broken. Make sure your moral compass is properly aligned so that expedience doesn’t drive you to take actions you wouldn’t want to read about on the Internet.

10 Percent Stretch for ESFP Leaders

Expanding Your Leadership Mind-Set

  • In addition to placing a high priority on meeting people’s needs, you must recognize when an authoritative approach best serves the organization’s purpose and set a clear direction.
  • Supplement your view that leadership needs to be fun with a willingness to be accountable for outcomes. Accountability can help you put more thought into choices instead of acting on impulse.
  • Take time to think more long-term and strategically about your organization. Consider its needs and its environment as if it were a person. Talk your ideas through with a trusted colleague or adviser, until you’re clear on your picture of the organization’s future direction.

Developing Additional Skills

  • Strategic decision making. Discover how to focus less on the present in your decision making and instead look more overtly at the long-term, logical consequences of the options.
  • Clarification of values. Take time to reflect deeply on your values and goals. Knowing what matters most to you and slowing down momentarily to ask yourself about the pros and cons of a choice will help improve the decisions you make under stress.

Broadening Your Style

  • You come across as energetic, initiating, resourceful, changeable, and willing to take risks. Invest your energy in what is most important to accomplish. Being busy is not the same thing as doing what is important.
  • Being cool under pressure can lead to a perception that you are glib in your responses to challenges. Though you can usually make decisions quickly, it may help you to pause—visibly—before sharing your conclusion.
  • Imagine fulfilling your role as leader as if you were stepping into a character role onstage. This may help you be tougher and more direct with people when you need to, despite the discomfort you feel.

Changing How You Relate to Your Context

  • Though you believe rules are for the most part meant to be changed, consider the potential cost of ignoring your organization’s norms. Know when it is best to follow the rules, and if you conclude that the current rules don’t work, collaborate with others to purposefully change the norms.
  • Make sure your friendly interactions with others don’t undermine your effectiveness. For example, keep “talkers” from eating up your whole day so that you can fully meet your commitments without relying on a last-minute rush.

10 Percent Stretch for ENFP Leaders

Expanding Your Leadership Mind-Set

  • In addition to being open to ideas and promoting collaboration, recognize the importance of delivering results and rewarding achievement.
  • Consider how a leader should make decisions in various circumstances. For example, in a very new organization, or when complete buy-in is important, a joint or consensus process is appropriate. But when an organization is in a turnaround situation, or when there’s an emergency or strict time limits, a more directive approach fits the situation better. Don’t overuse the consensus approach to decision making.
  • Embrace your own authority as leader. Stay true to your beliefs about including others’ views but also find at least one way to stand your ground when your authority is challenged. Power offers you an opportunity to achieve your ideals.

Developing Additional Skills

  • Logical persuasion. Learn how to present your views in a logical, businesslike manner to gain influence. Cite historical data to frame the problem, describe your proposed solution, and include specific measures of success.
  • Planning. Consider developing your project management skills, especially creating detailed time lines and cost estimates. While you are comfortable with evolving processes, others may look to you to provide structure.

Broadening Your Style

  • Your energetic, appreciative, understanding style may give others a false impression that you give great latitude in what you consider acceptable behavior. Make sure you provide clear boundaries, stating the operating values you want people in your organization to demonstrate.
  • As part of a larger effort to place value on task accomplishment, recognize members of your team who regularly finish tasks on time. Process is important, especially to spur action that leads to results.
  • Examine the breadth of your decision-making approaches. Do you make the decisions you need to in a timely manner, or is a bias for consensus slowing you down? Can you benefit from using a consultative approach more often, gathering views and then making the decision yourself?

Changing How You Relate to Your Context

  • Appreciate your ability to find many ways to any destination and look for ways you can help your colleagues see these options, too. If you help them see some alternatives, perhaps you’ll get less resistance when you want to experiment.
  • On the other hand, recognize when there are firm constraints you should not challenge because of the longer-term goals you are working to achieve.

10 Percent Stretch for ENTP Leaders

Expanding Your Leadership Mind-Set

  • In addition to deploying experts and encouraging competition, recognize the importance of building relationships and executing well in your drive to tangible results.
  • The value you place on merit may lead you to ignore job titles and hierarchy, giving others the impression that you don’t respect authority. Hierarchy is inescapable in executive ranks. Accept this tactical reality to preserve your influence and leadership impact.
  • Look for opportunities to collaborate. A team-generated answer is often superior to one generated solo. Leverage the power of group brainstorming to improve on or innovate beyond an existing solution.

Developing Additional Skills

  • Inquiry over advocacy. Learn to ask about and explore others’ ideas rather than demonstrating the value of your position or your own abilities. This skill will help offset your tendency to argue your points until others give in or give up.
  • Patience. Learn patience and suspend judgments about others, especially when those others don’t grasp what you are saying. Take a breath and wait. Give people time to process concepts in their own way before proceeding.

Broadening Your Style

  • Your zeal to initiate and your optimistic nature help your team strive for formidable goals. Supplement this approach with attention to accomplishment. What specific steps does the team need to take to execute the plan and achieve results?
  • Recognize when systems and procedures are worthwhile. They can be used to satisfy recurring operating needs. Then you can focus your time and energy on the most important and challenging aspects of your organization’s work.
  • Adapt your communication style to your audience. This may mean finding different ways to communicate your vision, speaking more slowly, and even repeating your key messages.

Changing How You Relate to Your Context

  • Notice when your instinct to always see change as a good thing might be suboptimal for the situation. Develop your political savvy to better assess the risk/reward trade-off.
  • Try influencing others based on what they find most important and using the methods that appeal to them. Resist your tendency toward rapid-fire argumentation. It breeds resistance.

10 Percent Stretch for ESTJ Leaders

Expanding Your Leadership Mind-Set

  • In addition to directing and managing others, look for opportunities to promote collaboration in decision making. Engage the whole team to decide an issue when, for example, buy-in is important, information and/or skills are distributed across the team, the team is capable of making a good choice, and members’ goals are aligned.
  • Using methods that have succeeded in the past may make sense to you, but others may prefer variety and trying something new. Allow them room to experiment. Team members whose ideas are welcome are more likely to contribute their best efforts, going above and beyond what is required of them.
  • Particularly as you rise in an organization, your success will depend increasingly on your ability to influence people over whom you have no positional authority. How can you start developing this skill now?

Developing Additional Skills

  • Strategic thinking. Learn to ask how the task at hand relates to other tasks, other parts of the organization, and even other industries. When you read the news, think about how current events might affect your organization down the road.
  • Communication. Find out how to soften your usually forceful ways of communicating. Ask more questions—and then wait for the answers—to see what you can learn from others.

Broadening Your Style

  • Your outgoing nature and focus on accomplishing tasks can be used to coach or mentor others. Restrain yourself from giving them the answers. People gain skills by finding the answers themselves; as a coach, you act as a resource and support.
  • While an organization chart conveys roles and official relationships between them, every organization has an unofficial chart, too. Cultivate your ability to see both the official and unofficial lines of influence. Use what you learn to build a stronger base of support for your group or team.
  • Develop a habit of asking others what you can do to be a more effective leader for them. This may take people by surprise at first, but you will get some good information if you are open to what you hear, and you will learn a lot about what motivates others.

Changing How You Relate to Your Context

  • Explore with advocates of change what does and doesn’t work about the current approach. If an improvement can be made, help quantify the value of that improvement and spread the news.
  • Find ways to show your appreciation to the people who help get the work done in your organization. Yes, they are just doing their job, but you can still make it clear to them that you notice and are grateful.

10 Percent Stretch for ESFJ Leaders

Expanding Your Leadership Mind-Set

  • In addition to encouraging an upbeat, harmonious work environment, recognize that sometimes disagreements within the group are beneficial. The debate can expose a broader range of actions to consider.
  • Your view that leaders should have a personal connection with others and be helpful can be balanced by focusing on the fiduciary responsibility a leader has for the survival of the organization. After all, no one will have a job if the organization fails.
  • Practice leaving people with some discomfort, unresolved problems, and ambiguity. This may lead to their most powerful learning.

Developing Additional Skills

  • Encouraging input. Discover how to encourage meeting attendees to contribute many ideas in an effort to find an entirely new solution to a long-standing challenge.
  • Feedback. Practice with a colleague before presenting feedback to someone on their work or ideas. Get feedback on how clearly you deliver your message.

Broadening Your Style

  • Your energetic and highly resourceful approach combined with your drive to complete tasks may have a downside: You may be trying to do all the work yourself. Instead, delegate important jobs to others and learn to coach them for growth.
  • A tendency to judge others for what seems to you like bad behavior can reduce your impact as a leader. Rather than bluntly criticizing, ask what the person hoped to achieve with his or her choice. Use a dialogue to help coach that person to develop new approaches.
  • Slow down your decision making. What happens differently if you are the last to offer your solution rather than the first? What new and relevant perspectives are brought to the table when the discussion is left open a little longer?

Changing How You Relate to Your Context

  • Soften your attitude about how consistently the rules have to apply to each person. Remember that each person’s situation is a bit different and adapting rules to the situation doesn’t mean the rules aren’t important.
  • Changing company culture is not necessarily disloyal to the original vision. See if you can imagine how the organization’s needs have changed and how the culture needs to change to better support new goals.

10 Percent Stretch for ENFJ Leaders

Expanding Your Leadership Mind-Set

  • When bringing out the best in others, remember that not all people are committed to developing themselves in the same way. Avoid seeing others’ development as a personal project unless they agree to the plan.
  • Your belief that a warm and friendly approach is usually most effective can be supplemented with a willingness to use direct, blunt communication when needed. At times, team members miss the point and problems persist. In those cases, a strong and clear approach is best.
  • Consider other views of leadership and the value they offer. For example, find the value in creating some standard operating procedures. Following established procedures can be easier than starting from scratch with each new situation.

Developing Additional Skills

  • Analysis. Learn to think about and list the pros and cons of a situation or solution. If you can’t think of potential negatives, find someone who can help you do this.
  • Delegation. When delegating work to help people develop, specify the results you want without also telling them how to do the work. When people are tackling stretch goals, they will learn more if you let them risk stumbling.

Broadening Your Style

  • Your collaborative, friendly style can be relied on to help groups reach consensus in the face of conflict. Reserve extra time in meetings to debate options. Resist avoiding the discomfort you feel and fight the urge to close off discussion when differing views emerge.
  • Practice less comfortable leadership styles, such as giving more direction and making decisions on your own. Try these when you’re short on time, people’s goals are not aligned, or you are not certain whom you can trust.
  • Rather than worrying about a conflict overnight, try raising your concern the same day, without necessarily having an immediate solution in mind.

Changing How You Relate to Your Context

  • Choose your battles wisely so that you invest social capital (i.e., influence) to change the system but don’t lose capital by always being the lone crusader or being generally critical of the top leaders.
  • When you find yourself impatient for a decision or action, assess the cost of waiting a day. Try backing off a bit and listening more intently to others’ concerns or issues. What do they need in order to be ready to decide or act? You may gain new insights.

10 Percent Stretch for ENTJ Leaders

Expanding Your Leadership Mind-Set

  • In addition to demanding top performance and challenging others to work toward a clear vision, recognize that not everyone is motivated by competition. Discover what ignites individual team members’ drive to succeed.
  • As a stretch exercise, use a collective or consensus approach to make a critical decision in your group—especially when everyone’s full commitment is needed. Explore each person’s concerns and then ask the group to brainstorm solutions to those concerns.
  • Consider the servant leadership model: a leader’s true purpose is to support others. Ask your direct reports what you can do to better lead them. Listen to and act on their responses.

Developing Additional Skills

  • Root cause analysis. Learn to identify the root question, or core issue, before you start generating the solution to a problem. Include others in the analysis. Only when the core issue is clear should you move on to solving the problem.
  • Engaging others. While you see yourself as having excellent interpersonal skills, others can feel browbeaten by your impatience. You can’t make people feel engaged, so consider slowing down to find out what motivates them. You will make better progress with them if you understand what they value. Try to provide it for them.

Broadening Your Style

  • Your hard-charging style can be perceived by others as overly ambitious and driven by self-interest. Try making your thought processes and true motivations more transparent, but do this in a relaxed way, when you are not under stress.
  • Rather than giving the answers, stating the solutions, or pushing your view, explore what it is like to facilitate a conversation during which your single aim is to find out what others think might work (without correcting them).
  • Behaving authentically often means acting in accord with one’s values. Many ENTJs don’t make time for identifying values until they reach midlife, however. List what is important to you. Knowing what drives you, what you value, increases wisdom.

Changing How You Relate to Your Context

  • Tread carefully if you view context as something you orchestrate. While you can influence outcomes, this could be problematic when ethical issues are involved. Be clear where you stand and hold firm to your values.
  • Rather than fostering overt competition among members of your group, which can split them to the group’s detriment, how can you foster competition between your team and an outside group? How would that help you create more motivation, perhaps at a lower cost?