🎉 Celebrating 2 Years of Leadership by 16Personalities
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Read enough leadership advice and you start to feel a little confused. Some expert tells you the best leaders take charge and fill the room. Flip to the next book and you’ll hear the opposite, that real authority is quiet and you should mostly be listening.
Somewhere along the way you’re also meant to be feared, while also being beloved, probably both before lunch.
So we stopped listening to the experts, and instead turned to real, everyday people like you and me.
We surveyed more than 17,000 people across all 16 personality types in our Leadership survey to learn how they lead, what they want from the people above them, and what they think leadership really requires.
And… a lot of people disagreed on a lot of things based on their personality type. Whether a leader needs formal authority, whether you should fuss over being liked, whether the boss deserves a fatter bonus – different personality types varied in their opinions here.
But, interestingly, some things held steady across the board – and today, we’re going to look at what almost all leaders, regardless of personality type, agree on when it comes to leadership.
Let’s dive in!
1. Nearly everyone wants a leader who is willing to change their mind
We asked whether open-mindedness belongs near the top of the list of desirable leadership qualities, and the level of agreement was striking. ESFPs (Entertainers) showed the strongest agreement, at 99%. ISFPs (Adventurers) and ENFPs (Campaigners) followed closely, both at 98%. Results this high suggest that, for most people, open-mindedness is not a marginal preference but a core expectation.
Even the least enthusiastic group still showed strong support. ISTJs (Logisticians) were the most reserved personality type on this measure, yet 86% still agreed. Across all 16 types, no group fell below that threshold. No other leadership quality in the survey showed such consistently high agreement.
The pattern also reflects some familiar personality differences. Types that tend to value structure, consistency, and proven methods were somewhat less emphatic about open-mindedness, while Prospecting and Feeling types – who are often more receptive to new perspectives – showed the highest levels of agreement. But the gap was small. The broader conclusion is clear: across personality types, people strongly prefer leaders who are genuinely willing to reconsider their views.
2. Fairness is the one thing few people are willing to compromise on
Fairness was another near-universal priority, and it stood out for how little variation there was between personality types. INFJs (Advocates) showed the strongest agreement, at 98%, while ISFJs (Defenders) and ENFJs (Protagonists) followed closely at 97%. Among Feeling types, agreement rarely fell below 95%.
Even the lowest-scoring group still showed substantial support. ENTJs (Commanders) were the least likely to rate fairness as highly, but 86% still agreed. That leaves only a 12-point gap between the highest and lowest personality types. In a survey where many qualities produced differences of 30 or 40 percentage points, this level of consistency is notable. Whatever distinctions separate Thinking types from Feeling types, or Introverts from Extraverts, they had relatively little effect here.
For leaders, this offers a rare point of stability. Team members may differ widely in how much warmth, guidance, flexibility, or independence they want from a manager. But fairness appears to be a broadly shared expectation. When it is difficult to read what different people need, fairness is one of the safest and most reliable principles to lead from.
The Bottom Line
Across all 16 personality types, two expectations stood out with unusual consistency: people want leaders who are willing to reconsider their views, and they want leaders who treat others fairly.
Effective leadership may depend less on projecting authority in a particular way and more on maintaining trust.
Open-mindedness and fairness are not the only leadership qualities that matter, of course, but clearly they are among the most widely valued. And for anyone new to leading a team, or managing multiple personality types, they offer a practical place to begin.