Partnering With Other Types

Every day each of us does simple things like ordering a product and complex things like doing our job. All these activities involve partnering with others. Partnering is necessary and comes naturally for most of us. These partnerships satisfy not only functional needs but social and personal needs. However, partnering can have its difficulties.

Psychologists have studied the difficulties in partnering that healthy, normal people encounter. They found that how we perceive the world, how we make decisions, and how we interact with others are preeminent pieces of the puzzle. Concepts of psychological type and psychological temperament emerged from this work. We can use psychological type in our own personal growth to know, accept, and specialize in who we are. Additionally, psychological type can help with partnering by facilitating communications, acceptance and understanding, and providing insight about the diversity and differences we encounter.

Psychological type comprises two attitudes and two functions. Using these four variables, there are sixteen unique psychological types into which we all fall. When partnering one-on-one, if you combine 16 possible types with 16 other psychological types, then you come up with 256 unique psychological type partnerships possible. It is now clear why there is so much diversity present when people interact. Two hundred and fifty-six unique partnerships is a great deal to understand and master. It would be helpful to have a comprehensive reference manual that summarizes all of these combinations.

This book provides this material, along with hints on how to deal with the most common type-based behaviors and the use of temperament specific language to improve communication. This book then proposes how to use psychological type, psychological temperament, and team skills to improve our most important interactions. Last, this manual proposes a general-purpose problem solving process and provides an objective means of measuring how the interaction is going.

Satisfying interactions are possible even with those whom we previously had great difficulty enjoying. Much of our difficulty is created by the diversity we encounter and our naive approach in handling this diversity. This book lifts the shroud of our ignorance on these subjects. It is now up to us to care about our relationships sufficiently to take the time and effort to tend them.

Ken Boggs retired from the IBM Corporation after nearly thirty-eight years in a range of management and professional assignments.  His career spanned the creation fo ubiquitous large system computing, international information systems networks, the Internet, and the accreditation of project management.

Ken is a certified project manager and a qualified Myers-Briggs consultant.  He has worked with small teams and some very large ones while managing projects up to $5M in value.  He is currently a project management mentor, and provide selective consulting and Myers-Briggs counseling.

Ken is married to Mary Lucas, physical therapist, yoga teacher, photographer, and quilter.  They live in rural Chatham County North Carolina.  When Ken is not working with clients and teams, he is an avid putterer – building projects on our ten acres of pine and hard woods, gardening, operating an amateur radio station KB4RV, exercising, playing backgammon, singing fold songs and playing guitar, and enjoying a growing entourage of grandchildren.