Where is time lost when work passes between people?
Consider a founder whose eight-person team is productive individually, but frequently waits for decisions, explanations or review. The founder suspects the team needs to understand how colleagues prefer to communicate.
Ask how people prefer to work.
A voluntary personality-preferences exercise, including an appropriately administered Myers-Briggs assessment, can prompt discussion of communication styles and working preferences. Follow it with direct questions about decision owners, written versus verbal updates, and how colleagues want to receive feedback.
A necessary limit: Myers-Briggs is designed for development and self-understanding. Its publisher advises against using it to predict job performance, select employees, or assign roles. We would not use a type label to decide who can do a job.
Find what is causing the delay.
Updates arrive in a format colleagues don't act on.
Nobody knows who can approve the next move.
The right person is already fully occupied.
Briefs omit facts the next person needs.
Each explanation leads to a different intervention. Ask the team and inspect recent examples before choosing one.
What would recovering some of that time be worth?
For illustration, one hour of participation per person would cost about $400 in staff time at the same hourly rate. A hypothetical first-year value after that participation cost would be about $2,667, assuming the saved time has productive use. These figures omit assessment fees, facilitation and implementation costs.
Business value is not automatically cash savings. The founder may recover capacity without reducing payroll. Better service, faster decisions or avoided overtime would need separate evidence.
Use observations that could change the decision.
Log handoff delays for two weeks. Record owner, task, minutes waited and reason.
Hold a voluntary discussion. Agree on one owner and one minimum handoff note for each recurring task.
Run the same log for two weeks. Compare median delay and total hours with similar work volume.
What would make the hypothesis wrong? Delays remain unchanged, or the logs show that capacity and unclear authority explain more lost time than preferences do. If so, change the work process before investing in more assessment sessions.
The Myers-Briggs Company's guidance describes development uses and explicitly rules out hiring and performance selection. A review of Big Five personality and performance research examines a different family of personality measures; neither source supports treating this scenario's savings as measured outcomes of a Myers-Briggs session.