HERE HERE! Ozy. I am writing this in a sleep-deprived stupor, but I needed to hear this today. You see I was on my way UP in the medical corporate world. I had been let into the inner sanctum of organizational hierarchy. I was a Chief Medical Officer (CMO) with supervisory powers over the Chief Financial Officer. I was literally next in line to the CEO! I started off, out of the gates with this job, that was thrust upon me by the way, in true ENFP form. I, as the CEO put it, "personally turned this company around in a moment of dire need" (paraphrased of course, who can remember the exact words?). Once the crisis was over and fixed, I not only began to lose interest, but also began to sabotage my position in the organization. I was bored, stressed, clueless, stressed, overwhelmed and stressed. Who knows how to do this stuff ALL THE TIME!!! In short bursts it is great, but this was never ending and always the same stuff. I created an assistant position and ...... oh you guessed it?!?! Yes, As of today, that person is now the new CMO. The truth is, she is way better at this stuff than me. I am actually relieved, because once the excitement of the total chaos was gone, I was left with actually trying to keep up with "I and T personalities",as you put it, on their turf in their world. I could not fool them at all. There was no way for me to charm them with the droll details of daily business.

Oh well. I think I am better for it. I have only been out of the position for 12 hours now, but I feel like I am missing something already. It will be bitter sweet, bitter because I will miss being a part of the solution, sweet because I can have a life outside of work and let a personality more suited to the position cover those details.

I want that CEO position someday too, not sure if or when I'll get there now. I could have really used some other personality traits over the past several months. If you do find that "plastic surgeon", let me know. I need a brain lift here.

Hello,

I surfed in here a while ago when I was browsing the web for ENFP stuff, but I just registered today. Being ENFP is not a curse in my opinion, but it's a blessing. Following through, focusing deeply on one single thing for a prolongued period of time and staying on topic? They're ENFP weaknesses which you have to learn to live with. If you challenge those weaknesses enough you will find yourself improving on those points, but it will always be frustrating and painful. My advice would be to make use of tools or techniques to keep your focus.


First a little bit about me. I've worked for the same company for 6 years now, which is respectable for an ENFP I guess. It's a government agency providing meaningful education and jobs for unemployed people. The organisation counts about 5000 people, and it has an IT department of roughly 150 people, where I've been working over the past 6 years.

How did I manage to do the same job for 6 years? Actually I didn't. The first 2 years I was still studying and did some web tier development (ASP) and administrative tasks. About half a year before I graduated I started working as a Java developer. A year and a half later I started as an Oracle PL/SQL developer, after taking some courses. I became technical project leader half a year later, and continued to do this until the end of May 2006. Meanwhile I had been following management courses in my spare time, and had some experience with people working for me. Since June last year I've been working as software release manager.

This learns me I have an attention span of about 1,5 or 2 years in a certain profession. If the organization is large enough, I'm convinced ENFP's can carry on growing or climbing up (atleast till they reach a certain point). The advantage of a large organisation is that, even when you change to a different job, the people you know with in the company (your network) still remain partially the same. Being who we are, we create lots and lots of goodwill in the people we work with and work for. In situations where for instance certain painful problems need to be resolved, it helps knowing a lot of people personally, in order to reach an acceptible compromise sooner. ENFP's are master diplomats :)

For me a large company is the solution for the job hopping issue. It only works if you believe in the company and it's goals, and if you can identify yourself with it, atleast as far as I'm concerned. I couldn't have done the same in a cold anonymous banking or finance environment...


What about focus? If there's nothing but chaos, a problem that appears to be too complex to solve, or a work environment full of emotional minefields and people working in clans rather than together... I gain access to an undepletable energy source, and can accomplish amazing things. ENFP's are excellent change managers in my opinion. Unfortunately when details, procedures and day in day out issues become the menu of the day, things quickly become boring.

Additionally, while I believe I have done quite a good job improving the existing release management procedures, my time management sucks badly, and there are days when I neglect some of my core tasks, and waste time chasing unimportant details. I've faced this problem before I was a release manager, but not that many people depended on the things I did back then.

How can you solve this problem? I think you can't, or actually not really in my opinion. It's the way my mind works... Todo lists are useful until the next brilliant idea makes me forget about the todo list and run off in a different direction. There are a few tools or techniques I use to reduce the effect of my 'randomness'.

- Schedule team or status meetings on a regular basis. Doing so will reduce the length of the action points / todo lists for everyone, and work will be more manageable in the end, in terms of follow up.

- Don't assign tasks to yourself that include a significant amount of detail, even when the idea or the concept behind it is very interesting on its own. Delegate!

- Attract a soundboard, and function as a soundboard yourself. No one is perfect, and everyone has certain skills and certain weaknesses. Realizing where you lack is an important step towards countering your them. In every job you will sooner or later be confronted with problems that attack your weaknesses. Having a colleague, or multiple, whom you can use as a soundboard, helps a lot in those circumstances. Bounce your ideas off of them, and use the feedback you're given. I'm not sure what the cause of this is, but many times something only becomes clear to me when I get it back from a second person perspective. Writing something down, and reading it anew the next day is another helpful technique, in that context. Somehow we ENFP's are unable to organize our thoughts internally, and need to use the outside world to bring structure into our thoughts. Well, in my experience anyway.

This has worked for me so far, and it keeps me in check most of the time. I'm not sure this still works when you have a CEO position though, because you need people you can trust, and rely on, and who know what you are talking about. Also, the people I use most as a soundboard are indeed thinkers or judgers (ESTP=pragmatism/realism, INTJ=strategy, ISTJ=procedures).

Anyway, I hope this gives some food for thought.
Cheers, voot

AMEN! I specifically came to this site looking for ENFP input for those of us with 'established careers' unable to just walk out of our job on a ENFP vision when you're just about ready to stab your eyes out with sharp pencils during the weekly division status meeting because you've exceeded the ENFP's shelf-life in one's workplace.

About me ... I'm a lead IT specialist and technical project manager with a rather large federal government agency and have worked in the same office for a little over three years, and over 12 years in the IT industry. I was recently promoted to what is the highest non-supervisory technical grade level for my job field last month. I pretty much manage technology projects that I am the lead technical engineer and may have a contract engineer or two that assist me with some of the project taskings; but am not required to supervise them in the HR sense but functionally lead a few staff members from the technology aspect ... meaning that I do most of my own work and within my self-set time schedules and deadlines.

Last year I temporarily filled a role as an 'acting' supervisor and site team leader in a busy operational environment ... and was doing well ... until I hit a brick wall plateau mid-year about the same time I was rotated out of the position, giving another peer employee a turn at 'acting' in the supervisory role for the sake of gaining experience. The timing was good - i rotated just days before completely exhausting myself, I then moved to a non-operational development role and took over a couple highly-visible technical projects, turned them around, and pumped out some good results like a kiddie in a Kathy Lee sweatshop ... but I'm absolutely miserable. It's to the point that it takes every ounce of energy I got just to get out of bed in the morning and make it into work still keeping fashionably late but geting worse arrival times ... and remaining somewhat unnoticed.

I feel like I'm dipping my toes into the edge of the abyss ... long-term-burnout and depression ... which is pretty much ENFP purgatory ... and have been feeling very disconnected, bitter, miserable, bored, life-hating, and lost. This time is different than the occasional episode of introversion/rechargin ... I'm finding it hard to even use my imagination to dream the "what do I want to be when I grow up" career scenarios or "if I won the lottery" etc., and this time I'm somewhat stuck at a point financially that I really cannot afford to take any extended time off or form of salary cut to explore new career opportunites or pick up a new job as I have a significant other, house, pets, etc., that I have to consider and that would be greatly affected.

Lo and behold ... I attended a mandatory training course this week on "Basic Leadership and Management Skills", the first in a series of three required of those at my grade level. We re-visited the MBTI test and spent a whole day on MB type analysis and classroom exercises/discussion. It enthralled me and really hit home. It had been years since my last test and it was totally what I needed to do some self-analysis and get my arms around the root of what has been going on with me and my career. Once again MB type analysis has shed light on the tools I can utilize to figure this one out - similar to the "ugly lights" that come on at the bar/club when it's closing time.

I'm just throwing this post out there to see what y'all think ... I'm ecstatic to find similar posts and a website of brothers and sisters of type. I guess it's a misery-loves-company thing ... and I am looking for the company before I get to the point of no return and completely implode mentally and emotionally and turn into a shadow of my ENFP self.

I've got enough of a good reputation at work that I can ride out a "slump" until it passes without drawing attention to myself from upper management ... but now I'm almost on borrowed time ... and I need to either have an epiphany or get off the preverbial porcelain pot.

I'm looking forward to reading reply posts ... and I appreciate everyone who has contributed to this website and have shared innermost thoughts and feelings that are so much a part of the ENFP type. I'm sooo happy that there are others out there.

-fred