Whether you enjoyed the game –or just made fun of those who did– you may know of the famous role-playing game (RPG) Dungeons & Dragons®.
In this game, you created a character who you would role-play (many think it was ‘roll’-play because of the use of dice) a character in a fantasy world filled with, orcs, kobolds, gelatinous cubes, hobbits and the odd dragon. In the process of creating your character, you roll dice to determine your character’s attributes, including:
- Strength
- Intelligence
- Wisdom
- Dexterity
- Constitution
- Charisma
Based on the scores in each of these characteristics, and race modifiers (yes, D&D was racist, but in a Dwarves vs. Elves sort of way) these traits would determine what kind of role your character would be most adept at.
A character with lots of strength and a strong constitution may make a great warrior, those with intelligence make the best wizards, wisdom is the trait of clerics, dexterity of thieves, and charisma was the currency of the ever-popular character: the dungeon-to-dungeon salesman.
One of the greatest challenges managers face, is how to evaluate the skills and preferences of their team members, and align them to the things that need to get done. Great managers often do this using instinct, others find this part of the job to be the most challenging. Luckily, it can be taught!
An attempts to create a structured approach to this skill was developed by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. The popular account is that their intent was to align women entering the WWII work force, to roles where they would be the ‘most comfortable and effective’. A less popular account involves a brainstorm triggered by a rather heated D&D session, where Cooks-Briggs’s level 6 cleric (an ESTJ) was bested by an introverted hobgoblin sorcerer (an INTP, it turns out) to much jovial ribbing by Briggs Myers. To which Cooks Briggs said, “never again!”
The test created was called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (or MBTI). If you haven’t taken one of these tests, you likely haven’t been employed in a large organization in the last 30 years!
Ironically, while many of the new WWII jobs called for strength and dexterity (or BOOM!), these weren’t included in the MBTI, which uses only 4 dimensions (dichotomies) to type individuals. As a result, this assessment provides 16 potential categories to classify everyone using a questionnaire. Note: it does NOT ask if “you love the smell of napalm in the morning“, which would have been useful in many WWII factory settings .
These MBTI assessments, and their large quantity of supporting material, are very valuable and a great learning resource for managers and employees. However, because there were only 16 possible outcomes, any given team can be comprised of several members that all have the same MBTI type, making it hard to differentiate how each of those team members could be leveraged. Because these types were based on preference, it actually increased the chances of people with the same MBTI type being on the same team, since their preferences drew them to a particular function.
In the D&D ‘skill indicator’ (or DDSI for our purposes) it actually indicated what a character’s strengths were, but not their preferences. This lead to some very capable, but unfulfilled, warriors, clerics, thieves and mages. As a result, many hybrid classes were created to satisfy these lost souls: the warrior-cleric (Paladin), the mage-cleric (Druid) and the warrior-thief (Ranger), with limited success.
So is there a method that leverages the preference aspect of the MBTI and the skill aspects of the DDSI to help managers maximize their teams? The best one that we have come across is the ‘Strengthsfinder’ assessment associated with both Marcus Buckingham and the Gallup Organization. To the best of our knowledge, neither of them were D&D fans (perhaps, closet D&D fans?).
This tool is based on 34 unique themes that indicate how an individual is predisposed to relate to people, strive for their goals, impact others and perceive the world. While a team might have one or two of these themes common amongst members, we have never seen two people with the same top 5 (100k’s of combinations). This psychometric questionnaire can be used not only to understand individuals preferences and skills, but how to develop their talents or the talents of an entire team.
More importantly: managers that don’t have the natural gift of aligning the right people to the right roles/tasks, can use them as a tool to learn how fully engage their teams of road warriors, IT wizards, cleric-al staff, and even your salespeople!
If your organization would like help understanding how these psychometric questionnaires and other methods can be leveraged to increase engagement in your organization, we would love to hear from you.
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