Fieldmarshal (Role Variant)

The Fieldmarshal Rational is one of the 16 role variants of the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. David Keirsey originally described the Fieldmarshal role variant; however, the personality descriptions developed by Isabel Myers greatly contributed to its development. Fieldmarshals correlate with the Myers-Briggs ENTJ type. Fieldmarshals make up about 2% of the population.

Overview

Fieldmarshals are extraverted, pragmatic, direct, and expressive. They tend to be highly skilled in situational organizing, directing their own actions and those of others. Their talent for contingency planning is a close second to their ability to coordinate, decide, and execute a strategy. Born engineers, they want to break an idea or concept into its most fundamental parts, subject those parts to intense scrutiny, and reassemble the idea before giving it their final approval. Their desire to ensure that an assessment is valid extends to their own work, and they will often seek the opinion of another trusted individual such as an Architect or an Inventor to refine their view of an issue, regardless of how sure they are.

Fieldmarshals have a strong desire to give structure and direction to groups of people. Of all the role variants, Fieldmarshals are the most likely to see where an organization is headed, and they want to communicate that vision to others. Thus they are more directive in their social exchanges than they are informative. Fieldmarshals often rise to positions of responsibility in work because they tend to be devoted to their jobs and are excellent administrators. Fieldmarshals do not actively seek out leadership responsibilities, but will often volunteer themselves to take charge in situations where leadership is absent or has failed, or where a power vacuum suddenly exists—not due to selfishness, but due to their innate desire to see a given system (be it social, political, workplace, or otherwise) continue to function until a suitable leader can be identified, who, in the mind of the Fieldmarshal, is as good at leadership as at background administration.

Fieldmarshals search more for goals and policy than they do for procedures and regulations. They strive to make their organization more efficient by reducing red tape, task redundancy, and confusion in the workplace. Fieldmarshals base their decisions on well thought-out plans, impersonal data, and overall probability of success. They expect others to follow their vision, and they are willing to remove stumbling blocks that prevent a given system (human or otherwise) from being fully productive. For Fieldmarshals, there must be a goal-directed reason for executing any plan. People’s emotions are generally considered secondary to raw data in any decision-making process.

Fieldmarshals are impatient with ineffectiveness, inefficiency, and the repetition of error. If an established procedure can be demonstrated to be ineffective at accomplishing a certain goal, they will abandon the procedure. Fieldmarshals keep long-term and short-term objectives in mind while striving to turn their organizations into smooth-functioning, empirically stable systems.

Notable Fieldmarshals

For illustrative purposes, Keirsey and his son, David M. Keirsey, [cite web|url=http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_pwwi/is_200009/ai_mark01016857|title=FindArticles|accessdate=2008-08-03] have identified well-known individuals whose "behavior" is consistent with a specific type. Unless otherwise noted, the categorization of the individuals below, whether living or dead, as Fieldmarshals is a matter of expert opinion rather than the result of actual testing of the named individual.cite web|url=http://www.keirsey.com/handler.aspx?s=keirsey&f=fourtemps&tab=5&c=fieldmarshal|title=Keirsey Fieldmarshal|accessdate=2008-07-03]

* Bill Gates
* George C. Marshall
* George Bernard Shaw
* Margaret Thatcher
* Napoleon Bonaparte
* Carl Sagan
* Edward Teller
* Golda Meir

References