Are you the “architect type”?
Posted : February 2, 2011 by Kaye, Category: Architects
And is that a bad thing?
A recent study by Robert Gaarder, a leadership coach and consultant on organization development, thinks architects might come with certain personality traits.
ARCHITECH Magazine featured his findings this week, and there’s been quite the buzz on the Internet.
His findings?
“…the most frequent type among the architects was ENTJ—extraversion, intuition, thinking, and judging. ENTJs accounted for a whopping 31 percent of the architects that Gaarder tested, despite the very low frequency of the type (estimated at 1.8 percent) within the general population.”
But it’s not all bad.
In Gaarder’s less stilted words, “The good news is, the ENTJ has a lot of leadership qualities. They can envision the future. They are these grand-scale organizers; they think in terms of systems.” It makes sense, then, that the architecture-firm principals in Gaarder’s group overwhelmingly scored as ENTJ (16 of them) as opposed to other types (three ISTJs, for example).
How accurate is his study? Well, with just a sample of 100 architects, mainly at the senior level and based in Washington, DC, probably not wholly representative of the entire U.S. architect population. But it’s fun to see the results, nonetheless. If you’re an architect, where do you think you fall? Engineers, do you think the architects you work with fit this mold? We’d love to hear your thoughts!
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