Company X had a marketing and finance department who needed to work together to achieve stretching business objectives. Finances’ job was to interpret data, inform and advise marketing on product direction and new business. However both teams were experiencing a common type clash. The finance department were predominantly sensing in their preference, meaning they were interested in the detail, in real information that was tangible and proven. Marketing on the other hand were poles apart, in that their dominant preference was for intuition, meaning they were interested in the bigger picture and could spot future possibilities. The effect was that marketing felt that their visionary enthusiasm was constantly being dampened by finances boring practicality. Whilst finance felt that all their hard work and effort at interpreting complex data was wasted on their fluffy colleagues in marketing.

Clearly these differences were hampering progress on mayor projects and company X could see the value of getting these two teams working together smoothly.

Enter Gecko (armed with heavy MBTI artillery)

Initially we held an introductory session in which we explained what the MBTI is, how it works and how they could benefit from it.
All participants took the MBTI questionnaires and each had their own one to one feedback session in which; they explored the preferences, their own best fit type, and began to understand their impact on others.

We then built an understanding in each department of their strengths and how their strengths, when overplayed, could be perceived by the opposite preferences at the 1 day Introduction to Type workshop.

Finally, it was time to get the two teams communicating now that they had a common and effective language in which to do so.
Gecko arranged to take both teams away to neutral ground and spend quality time:

• Seeing each other in a new light.
• Team building.
• Making decisions about how to best deliver business needs without the pain.
• Planning how to keep their renewed relationship strong and productive in the face of future challenges.

As a result, marketing and finance became each other’s strongest allies. Finance guided creativity rather than stifling it, and marketing rubbed off on finance too, by adding emotional appeal to their logical figures.