PS&L Blog

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A long time ago, in another life before I was in higher education marketing, I was taking photographs of an expert in relationship management (their words) at a corporate event.  He had a great pitch to start his presentation, “Opposites attract  -  for the first two marriages.”

What’s that got to do with walking backwards during a campus tour?

We all agree, connecting with your audience is an important part of the campus tour, so we certainly don’t want to position ourselves as one of those opposites.  That expert of long ago then talked about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a tool to help people understand themselves and their audiences so they could interact better with customers, colleagues and even spouses.

Myers and Briggs designed a test, based on the work of Carl Jung, to determine which of eight personality dichotomies were prevalent in a persons approach to life. I remember that I am an ENTP, an Extraverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceptor.

The eight dichotomies are:

Extraversion  -  Introversion

Sensing  -  Intuition

Thinking -  Feeling

Judgement  -  Perception

Their theory is that if you understand your personality type and the general theory you can tailor your communication to your audience, which might mean toning down your natural enthusiasms to match your more reserved audience or vice-versa.

The Index of Learning Styles developed by Richard Felder and Linda Silverman in the late 1980s is another tool.  Felder and Silverman also have eight dichotomies:

Sensory – Intuitive

Visual – Verbal

Active – Reflective

Sequential – Global

The web site, Mind Tools has this to say about how to use the Index of Learning Styles, “Whenever you are training or communicating with others, you have information and ideas that you want them to understand and learn effectively and efficiently. Your audience is likely to demonstrate a wide range of learning preferences, and your challenge is to provide variety that helps them learn quickly and well.

Your preferred teaching and communication methods may in fact be influenced by your own learning preferences. For example, if you prefer visual rather than verbal learning, you may in turn tend to provide a visual learning experience for your audience.

Be aware of your preferences and the range of preference of your audiences.”

So while our tour leader has taken connecting with her audience to the extreme by internalizing walking backwards we all can remember that your personality type and your role as leader is just part of a continuum of behavior.  As with any role; we should be able to step into it and out of it.

While we don’t specifically use either Myers-Briggs or The Index of Learning Styles during our SMART seminars we do coach recruiters how to be much more natural so they can maximize their effectiveness in their role as a college enrollment consultant.