Let’s Get Personal: Working with Personality Type

Please note: the UMD Power Lab is an optional lab, highly recommended, and costs an additional fee. Please read the important statement at the bottom of the description.

Great leaders are just ordinary people with the right skills at the right time. To become a great leader, however, you have to know yourself well. What are your core personality attributes? How do you make decisions? What’s your decision-making style? How do you know?

This certificate offers an extraordinary opportunity to spend some quality time with yourself to assess your current level of soft skills, clearly define your core self, and build soft skills which are essential to professional, not to mention life, success.

In this course, you will learn about the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, MBTI for short. It is the most frequently used assessment of personality type in the world. Nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 companies use MBTI for recruitment, promotions, job-fit decisions, and building more effective teams.

Within this course, you will find the following topics:

• What is personality type
• Why personality type matters personally and professionally
• How type preferences influence behavior
• Your personality type
• Strengths and pitfalls of your personality type
• How to use personality type to
  • Have constructive conflict
  • Increase your energy
  • Build better teams
  • Communicate more effectively
  • Learn more effectively
  • Contribute more at work
  • Better manage stress

Core personality traits are much more difficult to change than any single Power Skill. So, it’s very important to understand your type, its strengths & weaknesses, and how to use your understanding of your type to be happier and happier at work. Personality type describes how you prefer to get data, make decisions, generate energy and are oriented to the outside world. These are preferences which are your personality's default setting. Your behavior may differ, may have to differ sometimes from your preferences, but that takes extra energy to do.

Your take-aways from this course will include:

• understanding of type
• difference between preferences and behavior
• characteristics typical of each preference pair
  • Generate energy: extroversion/introversion
  • Gather data: sensing, intuitive
  • Make decisions: thinking, feeling
  • Orientation to Outside World: judging, perceiving
• how to
  • optimize your type at work
  • solve problems using type dynamics
  • communicate more effectively
  • better manage stress
  • learn in alignment with your type
  • do constructive conflict with type
  • use type for career choice
  • building teams with group type
  • understand type and
  • energy management
  • project management
  • understand type watching

Verified learners can access the Power Lab to take the MBTI, Step 1 for Organizations which helps you to identify and confirm your type and understand how your type shows up in the workplace. You will develop understanding of how you prefer to communicate, your likely behaviors at work, and your work style. You will receive your own individual MBTI report.

Verified learners will have these additional take-aways:

• confirmed type
• detailed report of your type at work
• your workplace contributions
• your ideal workplace
• how you like to learn
• how you communicate
• your work style
• your preferences at work
• potential pitfalls of your type
• suggestions for optimizing your type at work

The UMD Power Lab includes a curated set of self-assessments offered at a discounted price paid separately from the edX content and certificate. These self-assessments are rigorously developed and cannot be supplemented with free versions that would mislead learners with poor-quality alternatives. The UMD Power Lab is optional but highly recommended for any verified learner in the course. It costs $89 per year and only needs to be purchased once per year for the entire suite of courses in the Re-Imagining Leadership Professional Certificate.

We've done everything we can to reduce these costs for you, and have built a free SMART Goals Mobile App to help you achieve your goals. Used together this forms a revolutionary design to coach learners at scale in leadership and power skills as a premium but low-cost experience above and beyond learning the course content and earning the edX certificate.

Week 1: Introduction & What is Personality Type?

• Introduction to Personality Type
• What is Personality Type
• Structure of MBTI – The Functions
• Structure of MBTI – The Attitudes
• A Few More Interesting Details
• The Big Ideas of What is Personality Type

Week 2: You and Your Personality

• Introduction
• Exploring Your Personality Type, Part I
• Exploring Your Personality Type, Part II
• Optimizing You
• Type Watching
• The Big Ideas of You and Your Personality

Week 3: Personality Applied, Part I

• Introduction
• Model for Problem-solving with Type
• Communicating with Type
• Triggers, Stress and the Grip
• Type Contribution to the Workplace
• The Big Ideas of Personality Applied, Part I

Week 4: Personality Applied, Part II

• Introduction
• Personality Type and Projects
• Energy Management by Type
• Conflict and Type
• Building Teams with Type
• The Big Ideas of Personality Applied, Part II