Having an INTJ Female Personality at Work
What is the INTJ Female Personality Type?
People fall into 1 of 16 personality types according to the Meyer-Briggs test. If you’ve never taken the Meyer-Briggs personality test I suggest you should. This personality test is used by many businesses and corporations to help them assemble teams that function well together. Once you complete the Meyer-Briggs test, which asks many questions to determine your personality type, you will be assigned letters that go along with your personality type. Through work, I learned that I am have the INTJ personality type. I learned that this personality type is rare and even rarer among women. Which answered so many questions for me. Learning that I am an INTJ female personality type changed my life for the better.
Why is it odd to be an INTJ Female Personality Type?
The letters INTJ stand for Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Judging. Learning about my personality type helped me understand the way I think, solve problems, and how I work with people.
If you’re reading this I’m sure you just discovered that you’re an INTJ female and you may feel alone in your workplace. Luckily for you I’ve studied a lot about my personality type and hopefully I can give you some advice and peace of mind.
Understanding the INTJ Female Personality
First, let’s go over the individual parts of the INTJ personality type to understand how each part generally works.
- Introvert- being introverted has us prefer being around smaller groups of people and engage in meaningful and deeper conversations in a calm environment
- Intuitive- personally we enjoy, “What if?” scenarios. Thinking about the possibilities of things is way more fun than accepting things for as they are.
- Thinking- we lean on facts. We gather facts and use logic to reach a decision.
- Judging- this doesn’t mean we ‘judge’ people. We judge problems, scenarios, and work by our past experiences and look for patterns in the real life data in front of us to come to a decision.
Seeing these traits listed in this way had made me feel understood. The relief I got knowing other people were like me made me feel better. But when I received my results at work I also saw that my coworkers got their results as well. What I saw was interesting because they all had the same or similar personality types.
When I saw that, I felt alone and finally understood why I was so misunderstood at work.
What it’s like to be a female INTJ at work? A misunderstood genius.
Female INTJ personality types make 1% of the population. If you didn’t already feel odd, just know that you are uniquely rare. The INTJ woman is confident, successful, and sarcastic. And at work it’s a struggle to connect with other peers if they’re not INTJ themselves.
I found myself being misunderstood by leaders who made decisions with their employees with their feelings. I couldn’t stand seeing obvious patterns on operations come up and watching leaders make poor decisions without using prior data or experience to make a sound move to solve problems in front of our team.
The amount of heads I butt into due to disagreements over team development, business operations, and financial management were so many. I felt like I foresaw problems that my coworkers and superiors did not see and that no matter the amount of warnings and solutions I gave them they would not listen to me and would ignore me. Eventually my predictions came true and I was the ever so hated INTJ female personality at work.
At one of the companies I worked for I had so many issues with others (in the moment I didn’t thin I had) that my Area Director gave my a ‘resignation gift’ that was a book titled, “Why No One Listens to You”. Petty? I think so. But it was truly how I felt. If I was heard, I’d still be working there.
So how do I, an INTJ female, get my message across more easily at work?
How to navigate your personality at work as an INTJ Female
The struggles I had were very clear to me. I couldn’t communicate my ideas and persuade the upper management that my ideas were good and were backed up by data. I lacked emotional intelligence.
And like the typical INTJ, I went off and started researching how to become a better communicator. I read the “HBR Guide to Emotional Intelligence” to start and learned a lot. These are the few tips I got from this book that helped me better myself professionally:
- Managing my emotions- understand that you too also have emotions and that it is okay to have them and use them as an indicator that something is up. Face your emotions, don’t ignore them and understand why you’re having them.
- Communicating via email, at meetings, negotiations- practice emulating how others communicate with you. The INTJ female at work can come off dry and straight to the point. Smile from time to time and listen more. Also, as horrible as it is, use an exclamation point in your emails to reciprocate excitement over a project.
- Dealing with difficult people- Sometimes our straightforward approach adds to the fire inside an upset employee. I found that listening to them and having them calm down, rather than kick them out of the environment for now managing their feelings built more trust with the employee. Letting them work through their feelings and being patient with them, rather than dismissing their feelings, helped my repour with frustrated team members and higher ups.
- Empathy- The INTJ Female is a loner. We find no one like us and can endure almost anything. But 99% of the population isn’t like us. We need to empathize with others to connect with them.
- Do not endure, recharge- Like I said, we are enduring machines. We will work until there is no more work left. But that’s not healthy. If we’re exhausted and anxious we become very unpleasant to be around.
- Managing the emotional culture- As I learned to manage myself and my emotions, I had to hold others accountable to the same standard. But only after I taught them. This helped my work culture at my current company because I focused on developing emotionally intelligent leaders. My teams became teams that became great communicators, listeners, and operators of their business due to being able to effectively collaborate more better.
The outnumbered INTJ Females Personality can lead
I promise you that being this personality type is challenging. It can be lonely understanding the world and watching no one step up and fix the issues at hand. The INTJ female will place herself in a leadership role if she finds that she can fulfill the role better than the current leader.
With that being said, we are rare and beautiful leaders that could take a my way or the highway approach. Or we can lean into others and learn how to work with other leaders and people. It’s tough being an INTJ, let alone being a female INTJ. But I challenge you ladies, to work on your emotional intelligence to make work easier for you. Don’t be afraid to take the lead at your workplace. But also don’t forget, great leaders lead. they don’t destroy.
For more stories like this one check out:
Immigrating from the Philippines to America to Become a Flight Attendant
Help! I’m Becoming an Author Instead of What My Parents Want me to Be
How to Become Stronger Without Parents
Yessenia is a compelling and innovative program and operations manager who uses her 5+ years of experience in operations management and graphic design to determine small business needs in the areas of inventory costs, labor expenses, P&L, COGs, marketing, and graphic design to create and manage profitable plans for small businesses and individual projects. She is the Owner and Founder of Tru.Works.