The personality traits that serve many IT workers well as they rise through the ranks in an IT department, can actually trip them up once they become a chief information officer. That’s because once they’re in the C-suite, many CIOs begin to work closely with CEOs or CMOs with different personality traits.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a psychometric questionnaire that’s been used since the 1940s to match personality preferences with jobs. The major difference between the typical CIO and the most common personality type of a CEO or CMO tends to be in how they perceive the world, said Sherrie Haynie, an organizational development consultant with CPP, Inc., the exclusive publisher of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
Most CIOs perceive the world through information gained through the five senses, which means they prefer to focus on concrete facts, numbers and data that happen in the present, according to the research of Joe Peppard, a professor at the European School of Management and Technology. Broadly speaking, CEOs and CMOs tend to focus on intuition, or information acquired as patterns or hunches, said Ms. Haynie. “So they might be pushing more toward the big picture, looking long range at the vision,” she said.
Click here to read the full article on Wall Street Journal!