its foundation and history
THIS CHAPTER WILL appeal primarily to Blues and Golds. Greens, read this material because it will help you when you are talking to Blues and Golds. Reds, skip this chapter altogether—go read your own Chapter 10 before you get too restless.
Even without formal study it’s easy to categorize people into certain personality “types” like adventurous, artistic, practical, and intellectual. Although “personality typing” may be its trendy new name, the activity of grouping people into defined behavior patterns can be documented back to 400 B.C. At that time, intellects such as Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen identified four “humors”—sanguine (cheerful, confident), melancholic (pensive, gloomy), phlegmatic (hard to rouse to action, calm, cool), and choleric (quick-tempered).
The theme of four types continued into modern times. In the 1920s the pioneering psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, who had been a favorite student of Sigmund Freud’s,1 split away to develop his own theories. In his 1921 work Psychological Types, Jung theorized four “functions” by which humans engaged with reality—thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition.
Jung’s abstract work remained relatively unknown until 1942, when Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers began their work to develop an instrument for knowing one’s Jungian personality type. Through quantified observations and scientific validation, the two American women created one of the most extensively tested personality typing systems ever developed, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Nearly two million people take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality inventory (MBTI assessment) each year.
In the 1950s, David Keirsey did work that overlaid the Greek humors onto the Jungian/Myers-Briggs types. In his 1978 book Please Understand Me, he outlined four temperament groups, which serve as the basis of the Color Q model in this book—the Blue, Gold, Green, and Red personality types.
The MBTI assessment has been in use for over fifty years. Today the work is continued by the next generation—Peter and Katharine D. Myers, co-owners of the MBTI copyrights. Katharine D. Myers, whose work with the instrument began in 1942, became the first president of APTi, the Association for Psychological Type International, the leading membership organization for the “type” community. Peter Myers—the former chairman of the Myers-Briggs Foundation—continues his mother Isabel Myers’s work by promoting worldwide research. He believes “successful human endeavor results from the development of effective perception and decision making.” The key is working with, instead of against, one’s natural preferences.
“I view life through the Jungian framework—the same lens as Katharine Cook Briggs, Isabel’s mother and the original theoretician of the indicator,” says Katharine D. Myers. “I believe that Carl Jung, better than anyone else, explains human behavior, development, and the wholeness of wrestling with the conscious and the unconscious.”
Typical of Greens, Katharine D. Myers has naturally fostered the growth of others, beginning her career as a counselor and school psychologist. “My passion for what I do is so great that I’m still working at [age] 86, which I never planned to do,” she says. (Katharine D. Myers is profiled in Chapter 9, “Green/Backup Red Introverts.”)
The advent of modern brain scanning has moved the MBTI out of the realm of theory into proven science. The behavioral impact of chemicals and stimulations to different parts of the brain have validated many of MBTI’s theories, demonstrating that Jung was, indeed, correct. While each person is unique, it has been shown there is a core of preferences that remains solid and steady.
I developed Color Q as a quick introduction to personality “typing.” For those who wish to investigate further, I would suggest taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality inventory and reading the works of Carl Jung and David Keirsey and other MBTI-related materials listed in the bibliography.
When running team-building and leadership seminars for corporate clients (the U.S. Treasury, Chemical Bank, Deloitte, Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation, Merrill Lynch, Nokia, Prudential, the Government of Pennsylvania Leadership Institute, UBS, USAID, and schools in Saudi Arabia, among others), I have seen firsthand how conflicts can instantly transform into productivity. I teach “style shifting,” which involves recognizing and communicating with other personality types in ways that bring about the best response. With the cost of workplace conflict at $300 billion2 annually and rising, addressing personality clashes is now paramount.