Category Archives: Team Building Workshops

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Don’t Attend Any MBTI Team Building Workshops Till You Have Read This

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MBTI Team Building Singapore workshop

Or Don’t Think MBTI Team Development Workshops can solve all your work problems.

Before I facilitate any team building workshops using MBTI, I always check with my clients on whether there are any team issues which they wish to address. Whilst MBTI can address a number of teamwork and team communication issues, it cannot resolve every organisation problem. Sometimes, I find the reasons that my clients want to have the workshop are not necessarily what MBTI can help them address. Here are some examples of possible ‘wrong’ reasons for attending or organising a MBTI Team Building session.

MBTI Team Building Workshops Do Not Change A Company’s Culture which is normally set at the top

Recently a client told me that the staff do not speak up during team meetings, and there’s a lack of creative input into team discussions.  They wanted a MBTI team development workshop to address this.  From an MBTI perspective, there are Extraverted/Introverted personalities, as well as Sensing/Intuition as well as Judging/Perceiving types that can affect a person’s natural tendency to want to speak up and to be spontaneous with creative input.  So I gladly took up the challenge to facilitate and prepared a number of exercises to help them. (In fact I used a few exercises from my Presentations Skills Training courses for them to practise.)

MBTI does not solve every problem in the workplace culture

As we progressed during the Team Development workshop, it was revealed that their company culture has little tolerance for errors, causing staff to clamp up and not speak up.  The senior management wasn’t in the training session, and MBTI team building workshops are not the solution to addressing culture issues such as this.  We did everything we could to encourage participants to speak up, but the fear created by the top management was not something MBTI can address.


Don’t Use MBTI For Recruitment

One of the most common common questions I face as an MBTI Trainer is whether MBTI is suitable for recruitment use.  My answer is “No, MBTI cannot tell you who you should hire”.

MBTI Assessments not for recruitment

Is MBTI good for recruitment?

The MBTI assessment provides insights about people, but using it for the hiring process is inappropriate. In fact, the publisher of the assessment, the Myers-Briggs Company, stipulates that the assessment should not be used for hiring or selection, conditions that users of the questionnaire agree to. And to my participants who ask me: “What is the perfect MBTI style for the workplace?” – the answer is “no, there isn’t a perfect MBTI type. Every type has its strengths and development areas.”

However I have my own perspectives on how MBTI insights can contribute to the hiring process. Let me share here.

In recruitment, you hire potential suitable candidates based on skills and fit.  MBTI Tests or Assessments do not measure skills or competencies.  They measure innate preferred behaviours which do not necessarily lead to competent performance.  Eg, a person may be extraverted, and you might prefer, as a hiring manager, to hire such a type for a Sales role.  But that does not mean an Extraverted person will be a good sales person.

However,  as a line manager (previously), I do consider the personalities and skill sets of my existing teams and try to hire people who can complement.  One of my previous project teams was very competent in execution but highly introverted, and would not want to present during clients’ meetings.  I arranged for them to attend presentation skills training, but innately, if they have a chance, they would rather not speak publicly.   That is why I decided to challenge status quo, by bringing in new blood who are eloquent and could present the right image for the company we worked for.   The mix of the ‘new’ and ‘old’ blood in my team turned out to be a wise decision.   So in my opinion, recruitment should not just consider skills, but fit.  Every opportunity I have, I hire new people who can fit into the organisation (it has to be both ways).  The fit can be in culture, personalities, aspirations or needs that you have.  So in this sense, whilst I do not use MBTI for recruitment in terms of skills/competencies, I consider it for ‘fit’.

MBTI Does Not Predict Performance

Another favourite MBTI discussion question is whether MBTI Tests can predict performance.  MBTI Assessments are very useful to reveal behavioural preferences (eg what types of info you need, how you make decisions, how you interact with the world etc) but MBTI does not look into the crystal ball to predict the future nor performance. 

MBTI Cannot Tell Who Will Be A Great Leader

Whilst MBTI tells us which MBTI type tends to be what type of leaders based on behavioural preferences, it cannot predict nor tell who will be a great or capable leader.  For eg, ESTJ are known for preferring to exhibit decisive and commanding leadership, and this can come in very appropriate in crisis situations where timing are decisions is important. But not every ESTJ will necessarily become a superb leader.

MBTI Does Not Tell You Which Job You Will Excel In.

Another popular question during the MBTI Team Building sessions that I facilitated before is whether MBTI Tests give a good prediction of which job you will excel in.  There are lots of online info that provide jobs that certain personalities may be suited for.  Again, being suited based on preferences does not mean excellence in the job (although there may be a strong correlation).

Do not use MBTI Assessments to tell you which job you will excel in

MBTI Tests are NOT for telling you which jobs you will excel in

So by all means, check out what jobs might be suited for your MBTI type after you have taken the MBTI Assessment, but don’t use this as the sole yardstick.  Your career choices are more than just based on your personality!


So don’t attend any MBTI Team Building workshops if you plan any of the above as your MBTI discussion questions.  But if you intend to help your teams understand themselves better, get to know each other’s working styles better, deepen communication quality, improve buy-in techniques, foster strong relationships – then yes, my teambonding workshops can help you meet these needs. 

How is MBTI used in team building?

How does Myers-Briggs help teams? Knowing your team’s MBTI personality type can tell you more about their working style. For example, intuitives (N) tend to look for new solutions to problems. On the other end of the spectrum, sensors (S) rely on their existing knowledge while solving problems.

We have trained companies, government related bodies, schools and educational institutions, in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China and have refined our training over the years to meet your unique needs.  We have specially designed MBTI (Free) Team Development Activities MBTI activities to help you improve your (MBTI) team dynamics.

Contact 36 HR Training & Consultancy for a free consultation on how our Corporate Team Building and Team Development workshops can help you!

Personality Profiling Workshops (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam)

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Why Personality Behavioural Profiling is important and increasingly gaining recognition in the corporate world?

About 80 million people complete a personality test each year.  Are you benefitting from it?

Approximately 80% of Fortune 500 companies use Personality Profiling assessments to help them build stronger, more effective teams and more balanced teams. 
Is your company doing this?

Human beings are the driving force behind any enterprise, and an increasing number of businesses are awakening to the fact that enhancing the efficiency with which their teams operate can yield enormous gains. This can be achieved in a variety of ways, such as by encouraging open lines of communication and fostering a positive, productive atmosphere.

Personality Profiling Workshops in SIngapore using MBTI, DiSC, Colored Brain and FIRO-B
Personality Profiling Workshops Singapore

 Businesses can engage with their employees as individuals and recognize their unique needs by using Personality Profiling Assessment and training.  This enables them to elicit the best performance from each member of the team. If you know how to explain your ideas to anyone in the organization and how they prefer to hear them, you will be able to create cohesive groups, encourage more communication and cooperation among workers, and boost output.

Generally Personality Profiling Training, such as MBTI, DiSC, FIRO-B, Colored Brain, can yield the following benefits:

  • Deeper understanding of yourself, your strengths, your blind points and how to make them work for you, leading to greater personal effectiveness. 
  • Gain awareness of other people personalities with the result of being better able to understand their behaviours,  and avoid conflicts.  When we conduct our Personality Profiling sessions, we often have insightful and fun learning activities that showcase sources of conflicts due to personality differences, and consider strategies to avoid or work through conflicts.
  • Improve quality of communication:  Knowing each other personality types through Personality Profiling Tests or Profiling Assessments, you learn how to speak the same language of your counterpart leading to better connection and communication.
  • Better teamwork: Our fun team building sessions and games help to draw out the strengths and weakness of every employee and how diversity of a team may contribute to higher quality decisions, or more creative or productive performance.
  • Improve leadership:  Leaders and Managers with ability to understand their team members have better empathy.   A Personality Profiling Training workshop can help leaders and managers to better understand their team members and discover what motivates them, how they make decisions and communicate, and how to engage them.
  • Better Recruitment:  Whilst we stress during our Personality Profiling workshops that many of such Personality Assessment tools are not for use in recruitment, some tools give insights on diversity or the lack of, which managers can tap on such insights for their recruitment.

It’s no wonder that the Personality Testing industry reached $2.3 billion in 2019.  According to Dr. Howard B. Esbin, the CEO of All Star Teams, Personality Profiling Assessments will increase to $6.5 billion by 2027.

OUR PERSONALITY PROFILING WORKSHOPS

MBTI ASSESSMENT IN SINGAPORE, MALAYSIA, THAILAND, INDONESIA

The Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator is a self-assessment test, also known as a self report inventory, designed to identify a person’s personality type, strengths, and preferences. The questionnaire was developed by Isabel Myers and her mother Katherine Briggs based on their work with Carl Jung’s theory of personality types. Today, the MBTI inventory is one of the world’s most widely used psychological instruments.

16 MBTI Types by Myers Briggs

The MBTI® assessment is a psychometric tool that gives you insight into what makes you unique, based on 16 Personality Types. 

It gives you a framework to develop a clearer sense of self-awareness and awareness of others, and as a result you’re able to better frame decisions, reduce miscommunication, and understand personal needs more effectively. It gives you insights on where you get your energy (Extravert-Introvert), what types of information you need to make decisions (Sensing-Intuition), how you make decisions (Thinking-Feeling), and how you deal with the world (Juding-Perceiving).

With the help of our professional certified MBTI Coach and Facilitator, the participants will be able to discover their own and other people behaviour preferences and use their skills to improve relationship and communication among each other and other people they interact with.

The MBTI training is also a powerful tool for teambuilding and leadership development and coaching.   In fact, MBTI Team Building workshops (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia) is one of the most sought after programmes by 36 HR Training & Consultancy.

Click here for more info on our MBTI Assessment Workshops

THE FIRO-B® TEST

The Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation-BehaviorTM, or FIRO-B® Test, was developed in response to the need to understand and predict how high-performance military teams would collaborate during World War II. William Shutz’s theory’s basic premise was simple: “people need people,” and people’s interpersonal needs motivate their behaviors.

Schutz’s research led him to the conclusion that an individual’s interpersonal needs could be summed up into the three foundational areas of the FIRO-B test:

FIRO-B Team Building Singapore

Affection, Inclusion, and Control and the added dimensions of Expressed vs Wanted.

During our FIRO-B® Team Building workshops, we demonstrate the value of value FIRO-B Personality Profiling as follows:

  • It reveals how interpersonal needs drive people’s behaviour.
  • It shapes people’s ability to build trust, influence others, and create productive relationships.
  • It facilitates the formation and reengagement of teams.
  • It highlights perceptual gaps that may inadvertently derail relationships.

Read here to find out more about our FIRO-B Team Building Workshops

DiSC PROFILING TEST

The DiSC® model provides a common language people can use to better understand themselves and those they interact with—and then use this knowledge to reduce conflict and improve working relationships.

DiSC Personality Test

DiSC is an acronym that stands for the four main personality profiles described in the DiSC model: (D)ominance,
(i)nfluence,
(S)teadiness and (C)onscientiousness.

People with D personalities tend to be confident and place an emphasis on accomplishing bottom-line results.

People with i personalities tend to be more open and place an emphasis on relationships and influencing or persuading others.

People with S personalities tend to be dependable and place the emphasis on cooperation and sincerity.

People with C personalities tend to place the emphasis on quality, accuracy, expertise, and competency.

Everything DiSC also measures priorities (the words around the circle), providing more nuanced and memorable feedback in profiles.

During our DiSC Team Building Workshops, we show you how individuals and organizations can benefit from DiSC profiles in the following ways:

  • Enhance your self-awareness and comprehension of your communication preferences.
  • How you handle conflict
  • What keeps you going?
  • What stresses you out?
  • What method you use to solve problems
  • Learn how you make decisions.
  • Learn how to use the People-Reading process to identify DiSC styles.
  • Put in place actionable strategies to encourage team interactions.
  • Increase your leadership influence by learning new skills.
  • Improve your sales skills by recognizing and responding to customer communication styles.
  • Understanding what motivates and stresses employees and team members allows managers to manage more effectively.

Click here for more info on DiSC Teambuilding Workshops

COLORED BRAIN INVENTORY TEST

Understanding human thought and personal rapport can be a powerful tool for improving both work and personal relationships. Have you ever wondered why there is so much miscommunication and why some people misinterpret the message you’re attempting to convey? This is due to the fact that we all process information differently. “Colored brain processing” helps us understand the four genetic ways of processing information. In this course, ‘Colored Brain: Gateway to Improving Communication Skills at Work,’ we will teach you how to take your interpersonal communication skills to the next level.

Colored Brain Training

What does a Red, Blue, Green or Purple Colored Brain mean?

Participants will learn how to overcome common psychological barriers, identify their own colored brain, and discover how each ‘Colored Brain’ works during this one-day Colored Brain Team Building workshop. Participants will also learn how to master working relationships with people of all different colors.

Contact 36-HR Training and Consultancy for more information on different Personality Profiling Workshops to find out which suits your needs.

HOW TO LEAD A TEAM BUILDING SESSION ON MBTI (MYERS BRIGGS PERSONALITY TYPE)

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Planning to run your first MBTI Team Building Workshop or Offsite? Fret not. This article provides you with practical tips on how to facilitate and lead your MBTI team building session.

Do you want to improve teamwork and maximize productivity with the help of personality type insights? The MBTI, personality types developed by Isabel Briggs Myers helps improve communication and teamwork by creating self awareness and team awareness.  It also highlights commonalities among members of different backgrounds. Learn how to maximize the effectiveness how to lead your team development session by reading on.

1.      Define objectives and desired outcomes

It is very important not to assume every MBTI Team Building workshop is the same, even if you have similar experiences.  Hence an important starting point is the define your objectives and desired outcomes for your team/learners.

Perhaps you have a general idea of what motivated your interest in a personality type session, but now is the time to refine your objectives. Specifically, what do you hope people will learn from the workshop that they didn’t know before? How might you like to see your team evolve as a result?

Your workshop will provide a high-level overview of personality traits and how they affect employees’ approaches to the workplace. Participants will develop an openness to differences in types and behaviour, diversity, which can improve teamwork and output. In order to get even more specific with your workshop, you might want to define some objectives as:

  • Enable participants to understand their behaviour, strengths and blindspots
  • Help participants understand each other, and ways to engage each other despite differences in types.
  • Improve quality of conflict management through deeper understanding of each other.

Increase teamwork and conflict resolution by fostering an understanding of and respect for one another’s differences, as well as participants’ strengths and weaknesses.

Outlining your goals in advance will aid in communicating their importance to your team and in selecting the best means of achieving them.

2.      Assess your team

I normally consider the demographics of the team so that I can appropriately plan and carry out the right types of MBTI team building learning activities. For eg, if you have females who are pregnant, avoid strenous physical exercises. If the majority of your participants are young working adults, avoid ‘lecturing’, and instead facilitate.

MBTI Team Building Singapore - demographics

Consider your team’s demographics in the design of your objectives and team learning activities.

In most cases, it’s a good idea to have all employees who plan on attending the workshop take a personality assessment beforehand so that they can come to the workshop with knowledge about their own personality type already in hand. Educating your participants on the theory of personality types and how their teammates may be different from them will give them a deeper appreciation of the differences and  think about ways to engage each other.  Furthermore, it discusses that perennial favourites of human beings, ourselves, in order to introduce the ideas of personality type.

With technology advancements, personality assessments and tests can be administered online or use of paper test booklets.  For eg, MBTI assessments can be handled easily online where participants’ results can be obtained before the workshop.  For anyone new to the administration of the MBTI assessment – a word of caution:  do give at least 2 weeks to administer the MBTI test.  In Singapore, there is only 1 central MBTI Assessment body which is responsible for the administration – hence there can be ‘traffic’ congestion when many companies do their MBTI assessments at the same time especially during year end.

Read more on different Personality Profiling Workshops by 36 HR Training & Consultancy.

3.      Plan your venue and logistics

You have to decide whether the MBTI teambuilding workshop is in Singapore or overseas, eg Malaysia, Thailand or Indonesia.

Training Room for MBTI Team Building

Following that, you have to ensure you secure the venue in advance based on how much space you need, the no. of participants, the types of team building or team development activities you organise. 

Typically, for small groups, eg up to 15 persons, I prefer to seat the participants in a semi-circle to allow free-flow of ideas.  I also normally do away with tables so there is no psychological barrier between participants.   I also normally like to have the other half of the room to have empty space for activities and movements – but that depends on what types of team building activities you hold.  I usually will design learning activities that bring out the key learning insights, based on the team building objectives.

For large groups eg, 50 persons or more, then cluster seatings are recommended.  

There are lots of good teambuilding venues in Singapore.  Depending on your budget, you can get a decent room size (up to 15 persons) for between S$500-$1000 per day.  I will separately write an article to provide suitable corporate teambuilding venues.

Training Room Venue Singapore for MBTI Team Building

In Singapore, there are lots of interesting training venues for corporate team building events. This picture shows a training venue (if budget is not a huge concern for your clients) I had recently used which delighted my clients. I will be writing more on these venues in the coming days.

4.      Plan your resources/Logistics

Do consider:

  1.  What types of preparation you need in terms of content.  For MBTI Team Development workshops, the lead facilitator should be familiar with the MBTI concepts, and should be certified.  Contact 36 HR Training & Consultancy if you need help in facilitating your planned MBTI Team Development Workshop or any MBTI Offsite event. For more info on 16 MBTI types, read here.
  2. Consider whether you need any assistant facilitators, and whether any help for logistics.  When I facilitate any group larger than 15, I usually will get a logistics helper or trainer.  I will scale up the no. of assistants depending on the size of the learners.
  3. Team Building Activities and Games.  Make your learning insightful but make sure it’s fun too! The best way to learn is to incorporate fun into learning and let participants experience.  Check out some of our suggested MBTI Team Building Learning Activities.
  4. Facilitate using a combination of powerpoint, flip charts and papers, kahoot, games, plus course notes for participants to write their thoughts.
  5. Reflections – how do participants reflect and how do they bring these learnings back to the office?  Plan these!  I usually will create booklets or space in course notes for reflections.
  6. Music – consider using appropriate music for different learning activities.  Music can help create the right mood easily!  But make sure the venue has the means to project your music.  If not, get portable speakers.
  7. I normally will test my laptop connectivity with the venue ahead of the team building event – just to be very sure! 
  8. Feedback – consider how you would get feedback from the participants at the end of the team building event.  Design your feedback form accordingly!

 

5. Perform A Mock Run

Do consider practising your facilitation/presentation several times from beginning to end to ensure a smooth flow of ideas whether you use the free presentation script provided above or write your own. Make sure you have everything you need for your planned activities by doing a checklist of timings and logistics.

Normally I would rehearse with another MBTI trainer at least the first part (eg 15 min) and then walk through the team building games and learning activities.  I often get useful feedback and adjust accordingly.

 

Ready and Set! Prepare to facilitate and lead your team building workshop on mbti.

You’ve selected the materials you need to facilitate a workshop on personality type in the workplace, where you’ll help your team members better understand and appreciate one another’s unique qualities and contributions.

On the day of the workshop, be punctual – you don’t want to be sweating rushing in when participants are seated.  I usually get there early 1 hour before hand to set up the laptop and the space, place the course notes and arrange the flip charts.  And set up the area for the team building activities that have been planned.

If you would like to get help to facilitate for your company an MBTI Team Building session, or to have a MBTI lunchtime talk, please contact 36 HR Training & Consultancy.