MBTI® Users Conference—From Diversity to Inclusion to Engagement


There was a short break in between the keynote and the first breakout session of the day. I planned my day out the night before and knew I wanted to attend Dr. Pete Hammett’s session. Dr. Hammett is the director of HR at Oklahoma Gas & Energy. In his session he asked us to consider how personality type can influence a culture of inclusion.

Hammett made the point that culture is a matter of life and death at the organizations he has been a part of (including NASA and many others). He has found that the more diverse the organization, the higher the productivity is. As he stated, “Homogeneous groups start out of the gate well, but over time their productivity flattens out.” Hammett likes assessments like the MBTI and FIRO® tools because he feels people need a clear, unclouded mirror. He mentioned the Dunning-Kruger Effect, where the unskilled suffer from an illusory feeling of superiority, while the highly skilled tend to underestimate themselves. Assessments can give us a more realistic view.

A big part of Hammett’s message was a call to repurpose the MBTI and FIRO tools to develop an inclusion diversity quotient. He believes this would contribute to the idea of creating an even better mirror. He said, “This would then allow us to create communities in which the uniqueness of each individual is recognized and valued.” In closing, Dr. Hammett said that the most important thing to take away from this session was to “know something about ourselves that we can do something with.”

Want to read more about the Users Conference? Check out my previous blogs in this series: