Myers Briggs ENTJ MBTI® Personality Types’ Leadership Style

Being aware of your Myers-Briggs® personality type can help you motivate others, and give you a framework for your leadership preferences so that you may work on becoming a more efficient leader. In many ways, your personality type mirrors your leadership qualities and challenges, so knowing it can help you optimize your performance. This week, we will learn about how The Extraverted-Intuitive-Thinking-Judging (Myers-Briggs ENTJ) type can best utilize their leadership style to motivate and organize their teams.

As a leader, knowing your colleagues’ MBTI® personality types can provide you with valuable insights into their strengths, areas for growth, and valuable potential contributions they may give to a team or particular project. Richards (2008) emphasizes that the best leaders can energize and motivate their teams without being intimidating or overwhelming. In other words, they have to balance achieving company goals, cultivating their employees’ potential, while contributing through actions, helping their teams’ see them as being a supportive leader. Myers-Briggs test ENTJ’s work quickly and efficiently, and they tend to lead decisively. They easily spot logical contradictions, and excel at designing and implementing comprehensive solutions to broad problems. However, they do tend to be strong-minded and idealistic, sometimes conveying their ideas in a way that seems to devalue the input of other team members. As a result, Myers-Briggs test ENTJ’s risk being perceived as overly ambitious or power-oriented. While being ambitious is, of course, not inherently negative, if it is not channeled appropriately, it can divide teams rather than cultivate them. For this reason, ENTJ’s should make a careful effort to consider and appreciate the contributions of each of their team members.

ENTJ’s also tend to overlook bureaucratic and pragmatic constraints to their progress. Richmond (2008) summarizes their approach as “to ask permission is to seek denial.” Of course, this attitude can be seen as undermining authority, which has its own sets of problems. Nonetheless, ENTJ’s can couple this idealism with their charisma and knack for maximizing efficiency in order to streamline bureaucratic processes and restructure otherwise clunky systems.

Richmond (2008) identifies a few strategies ENTJ’s can use to continue to develop their leadership skills and increase their effectiveness. First, she emphasizes that they should try to think of themselves more as facilitators and less as leaders, taking a step back to create opportunities for others’ contributions. This will help the team coalesce, and will help others feel valued. Similarly, while their initial tendency may be to foster competition among team members, they should instead consider fostering competition between their own team and an outside group.

As an ENTJ, you may also need to work to understand your decisions within a larger context. This will ultimately help you contribute to your company more effectively, helping you make yourself an even more important part of a team. It may help to discuss such possible implications with a board or advisory committee in order to help you make more informed decisions.

In future weeks, we will be taking a similar look at other Myers Briggs personality types. Stay tuned for more great strategies for you and your team to optimize your performance and work together even more effectively!

               

References

Introduction to Type and Leadership (Richmond, S. CPP. 2008)

Learn More About the MBTI ENTJ Personality Type

• Explore our MBTI ENTJ Personality Type Page

ENTJ Careers

Click on one of these corresponding popular ENTJ Careers for detailed information including Career Stats, Income Stats, Daily Tasks and Required Education: Aerospace Engineers, Architect, Architectural and Engineering Manager, Chef,Computer and Information Systems Managers , Electrical Engineer, Emergency Management Director, Epidemiologist,Market Research Analyst, and Pharmacists.

Explore additional information that delves deeper into the ENTJ Personality Type by examining various personality and career based subjects:

• How the MBTI ENTJ Type relates to Innovation
• How the MBTI ENTJ Type relates to Project Management
• How the MBTI ENTJ Type relates to Emotional Intelligence
• How the MBTI ENTJ relates to Communication 

Click On Your Personality Type Below & Read About Your Leadership Style:

ISTJ	ISFJ	ESTP	ESFP
ISTP	ISFP	ESTJ	ESFJ
INFJ	INTJ	ENFP	ENTP
INFP	INTP	ENFJ	ENTJ

Click on a link below to read more about different MBTI Personality Types

ISTJ	ISFJ	INFJ	INTJ	ESTP	ESFP	ENFP	ENTP
ISTP	ISFP	INFP	INTP	ESTJ	ESFJ	ENFJ	ENTJ