ESTJ. The Manager

If you are an ESTJ, you are naturally inclined to organize the world around you, including the people. This makes you a born manager. You have an excellent acuity for managing tasks in a timely way. You get things done efficiently and sufficiently. You value time and don't want to waste it.

You tend to be oriented toward tradition. You usually see what's been done in the past as a workable template for the future. That is, someone has probably figured out what it is you need to do. It's usually just a matter of finding the right manual and following the directions to make your world a better place.

Too much improvisation tends to make you uneasy so you plan and make back up plans. This way, life is less stressful as you usually have an idea of how to manage anything that might come your way. You can be tremendously creative in your planning.

You like objectivity: everything that is demonstrable within the range of the five senses. You can touch it, taste it, see it, smell it, and hear it and therefore you can trust it's existence. Data is your friend. You need empirical evidence for your decisions. Without evidence, there's nothing to consider.

The way you make decisions tends to be logical, decisive and geared toward efficiency. You're quick on your feet. You value competence in those around you and may be impatient with those who can't do what is needed. One of the reasons you want competent people around you is that you need to be challenged, just as you need to challenge others. You need to push and get pushed back because that's how growth takes place.

The work environment may be a natural energizer for you because of the many challenges and opportunities to manage tasks and people that present themselves there. You are a “take charge” people who does not like to sit still.

For the most part you welcome routine and detailed work, but you also need it to be challenging. You're not one to do routine for its own sake, but can do it well for the sake of keeping everything in order.

You want to stay in control of the environment around you as much as possible. Organization and structure is important.

Because order and achievement is so important to you, you do your best to keep yourself under control and deal with task as efficiently as possible. When those needs are thwarted you may first become overly critical of others around you. In these cases, other people might view you as harsh and uncompromising, even undermining. This overly critical behavior can then come full circle as you come under your own fire, beating yourself up for being too hard on others, and then incriminating yourself as a 'horrible' person. At this point, the feeling of it can become overwhelming and everything is taken personally. Your natural logical approach collapses.

The way to avoid such cycles is twofold:

1. Make sure the projects you take on are coherent with your own values.
2. Find ways to caretake the morale of the people around you even as you work efficiently toward your objectives. After all, no one works efficiently when they feel alienated.

Other people will appreciate your uncanny ability to manage the details of almost any task that comes your way. This is your specialty and it is very needed. Other personality types simply aren't geared toward this as well as you are.