The Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS-II) has been used by over 30 million people worldwide to improve their understanding of their Temperament – the in-born, pre-destined style of behavior & thinking.

Dr David Keirsey spent his life exploring and developing ideas around the four basic types of people as identified down the ages by writers such as Plato (c340BC), Aristotle (c325) to Myers (1958) in order to figure out what people can do well under varying circumstances.

By paying attention to how people use language (Concrete – facts or Abstract – ideas) and how they use tools or act (Co-operatively  – doing what’s expected or in a Utilitarian fashion – doing what works) he identified 4 basic Temperaments: The Artisans (who talk about what is and do what works), Guardians (talk about what is, and do what’s expected), Idealists (talk about ideas, do what’s expected) and Rationals (talk about ideas and do what works).

The diagram below shows some information for each Temperament type.

While you can use this to ascertain your own type, a more comprehensive analysis can be done using the free KTS-II on-line survey, which will tell you what your temperament type is. On completion of the free survey you will be offered a report – for a small fee. Our experience is that this report is biased towards the implications for your relationships, and while interesting, is not as valuable as the full report. As certified administrators of the KTS-II, we can provide this report, together with a telephone or face-to-face coaching session to maximise the value to you.

While the KTS-II provides great value to individuals in self-understanding, the real value of the KTS-II tool is when it is used to profile a whole team, including the leader/manager. Using a Temperament map ™ and understanding your teams mission we can do a gap analysis between the relative strengths that you have and you require. Often we find that a team is missing a core strength that can be provided by drawing on the team members skills in a particular way, or sourcing it from elsewhere in your organisation.

Team-building workshops using the KTS-II.

The first part of a KTS-II-based team building event is usually spent explaining the tool, looking at examples from films and books (For example, the 4 main characters in ‘The wizard of Oz’ and ‘Harry Potter’ and even ‘Sex and the City’ cover the four temperaments!) and getting a really good understanding of the temperaments before self-evaluating and then comparing that with the actual survey results.

While no psychometric test such as KTS-II (and MBTI etc) can be 100% accurate, in our experience, peoples survey results are remarkably accurate to their self-analysis.

With a good foundation on the temperaments, we then spend time exploring how the team profile both supports and challenges the mission of the team. These are very useful discussions that often surface deep concerns as well as ‘ah-ha’ moments that improve the way the team works for the future.

A team profile can also be extremely valuable to identify causes of friction within the team or with other teams, and we would usually couple together some of our other tools to help you move forward.

Such team-building events are usually 1 day duration, and we have the flexibility to divide this into two separate half-day sessions so that ‘day’ jobs are not impacted any more than necessary. You can read a case-study on such an event here.

Benefits as a Manager

You can imagine, as a manager/leader, the benefits of having a simple and quick way to understand (a) what makes your team members tick and (b) how to get the best out of them by playing to their strengths. As a leadership development tool, we can give you a really solid grounding in the tool so that you can quickly and accurately assess a team-members type and then give them the most appropriate tasks (e.g. Strategic thinking to Rationals and Tactical to Artisans) as well as, perhaps crucially, providing opportunities that will maximise their self-image, which in turn will maximise the results that they get.

Contact us today to discuss how KTS-II can help you with your team challenges.