Let’s Get Personal

This course is a part of Re-Imagining Leadership, a 6-course Professional Certificate series from edX.

Please note: the UMD Power Lab is an optional lab, highly recommended, and costs an additional fee. Please read the important statement at the bottom of the description.

Great leaders are just ordinary people with the right skills at the right time. To become a great leader, however, you have to know yourself well. What are your core personality attributes? How do you make decisions? What’s your decision-making style? How do you know?

This certificate offers an extraordinary opportunity to spend some quality time with yourself to assess your current level of soft skills, clearly define your core self, and build soft skills which are essential to professional, not to mention life, success.

In this course, you will learn about the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, MBTI for short. It is the most frequently used assessment of personality type in the world. Nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 companies use MBTI for recruitment, promotions, job-fit decisions, and building more effective teams.

Within this course, you will find the following topics:

What is personality type

Why personality type matters personally and professionally

How type preferences influence behavior

Your personality type

Strengths and pitfalls of your personality type

How to use personality type to

Have constructive conflict

Increase your energy

Build better teams

Communicate more effectively

Learn more effectively

Contribute more at work

Better manage stress

Core personality traits are much more difficult to change than any single Power Skill. So, it’s very important to understand your type, its strengths & weaknesses, and how to use your understanding of your type to be happier and happier at work. Personality type describes how you prefer to get data, make decisions, generate energy and are oriented to the outside world. These are preferences which are your personality's default setting. Your behavior may differ, may have to differ sometimes from your preferences, but that takes extra energy to do.

Your take-aways from this course will include:

understanding of type

difference between preferences and behavior

characteristics typical of each preference pair

Generate energy: extroversion/introversion

Gather data: sensing, intuitive

Make decisions: thinking, feeling

Orientation to Outside World: judging, perceiving

how to

optimize your type at work

solve problems using type dynamics

communicate more effectively

better manage stress

learn in alignment with your type

do constructive conflict with type

use type for career choice

building teams with group type

understand type and

energy management

project management

understand type watching

Verified learners can access the Power Lab to take the MBTI, Step 1 for Organizations which helps you to identify and confirm your type and understand how your type shows up in the workplace. You will develop understanding of how you prefer to communicate, your likely behaviors at work, and your work style. You will receive your own individual MBTI report.

Verified learners will have these additional take-aways:

confirmed type

detailed report of your type at work

your workplace contributions

your ideal workplace

how you like to learn

how you communicate

your work style

your preferences at work

potential pitfalls of your type

suggestions for optimizing your type at work

The UMD Power Lab includes a curated set of self-assessments offered at a discounted price paid separately from the edX content and certificate. These self-assessments are rigorously developed and cannot be supplemented with free versions that would mislead learners with poor-quality alternatives. The UMD Power Lab is optional but highly recommended for any verified learner in the course. It costs $89 per year and only needs to be purchased once per year for the entire suite of courses in the Re-Imagining Leadership Professional Certificate.

We've done everything we can to reduce these costs for you, and have built a free SMART Goals Mobile App to help you achieve your goals. Used together this forms a revolutionary design to coach learners at scale in leadership and power skills as a premium but low-cost experience above and beyond learning the course content and earning the edX certificate.

What you'll learn

• what is personality type
• why does it matter at work
• structure of personality type
• limitations of personality type
• demographics of personality type: age, gender, careers, professions, etc.
• how to apply personality type
• problem-solving
• communications & conflict
• stress management
• learning
• energy management
• building teams
• group type
• career choice
• mental model for type diversity in the workplace