How Thinking and Feeling Personalities Can Lead Better in Uncertain Times
Uncover your strengths and blind spots to become the leader your team needs.
What’s Coming Up
Why Thinking leaders might keep defending decisions even when they’re not working
What happens when you mistake “I can explain my reasoning” for “this is the right call”
How Feeling leaders’ ability to read the room can keep them from making necessary calls
The uncomfortable truth about when protecting people from discomfort matters more than giving them direction
How to recognize when your decision-making style is protecting you instead of navigating the uncertainty
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Thinking and Feeling personalities are pretty much in agreement when it comes to what part of life causes them to feel overwhelmed most often – work/career. The distinction lies in how they become overwhelmed.
According to our research, more than half of Thinking types say they become mentally overwhelmed.
Less than half of Feeling types reported the same – they were more likely than their Thinking counterparts to say they become emotionally overwhelmed.
Needing to make decisions at work without having all the answers can feel overwhelming – and Thinking and Feeling personalities tend to trust different factors in this position.
Thinking leaders tend to look for objective criteria and defensible logic. Feeling leaders tend to focus on relationships and human impact.
Understanding your default thinking pattern helps you notice when you might actually be using it to avoid something uncomfortable rather than to navigate the unknown.
Let’s dig into that, shall we?
P.S. For more information on how to lead your team (rather than yourself) through stress and uncertainty based on their personality traits, check out our past Managing Stress series.
How Thinking Leaders React When Uncertainty Hits
If you have the Thinking personality trait, uncertainty probably pushes you to build even stronger cases for your decisions. When there’s no clear right answer, you gather evidence, test options, build arguments you could defend if someone challenges you. These actions feel responsible to you because it feels like you’re bringing order to chaos.
But sometimes that need for a solid rationale is less about finding the right answer and more about protecting yourself from criticism.
You might catch yourself defending a decision even after circumstances have shifted and it’s not working, because it was logically sound when you made it. If you can explain why it made sense, somehow that’s supposed to matter more than the fact that the situation has changed and you need a different approach.
And you might recognize feeling most stuck when uncertainty means there’s no objectively right answer – when it’s a judgment call with incomplete information and competing values. This is exactly when your team needs you to decide anyway, but without clear criteria to lean on, you’re pushed into the kind of subjective decision-making that feels uncomfortable.
How to Stretch
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