The Keirsey Temperament Sorter

Help Your Boss Help You — by Ken Kousen (43 / 74)

👈 The Four Scales | TOC | Putting It All Together: Communication Strateg ies 👉

The Keirsey Temperament Sorter is a self-assessed personality questionnaire introduced by psychologist David M. Keirsey in his book, Please Understand Me [KB84]. It’s not formally associated with the MBTI and differs from it in significant ways. Still, knowing something about the MBTI makes it easy to learn the categories of the KTS.

The KTS defines four “temperaments”: Guardians, Rationals, Idealists, and Artisans. These types have their own definitions, discussed as follows, but they are easy to understand using the MBTI letters already covered. Each will be discussed in turn, but to summarize, Guardians combine strong sensing and judging preferences (SJ), Rationals are strong intuitives with a thinking preference (NT), Idealists test highly on the intuitive and feeling scales (NF), and Artisans are associated with sensing and perceiving preferences (SP). The definitions are shown in the following table.

The KTS Wikipedia page[22] breaks down these high levels into more fine-grained subtypes that involve all four scales from the MBTI. For our purposes, however, we don’t need that level of detail. If you can assess your manager as a Guardian, a…