Like many Introverts, INFJs often miss opportunities to accomplish more by participating in teams. They will gladly offer their assistance to others if asked, but otherwise may choose a more independent path.

INFJs are capable of some impressive achievements on their own, in both their personal and professional lives.  But like anyone else, they can become far more proficient, productive, and effective if they seek out opportunities to work in groups or teams.

Collective empowerment is best realized when everyone pulls together in the same direction, adding their unique skills and contributions to the group effort. INFJs who miss chances to collaborate in the workplace and in their personal lives will be artificially limiting their own accomplishments and hindering their process of self-development.

If you’re like most INFJs, your determination to maximize your potential is strong. To convert that determination into concrete action, you should embrace the teamwork concept wholeheartedly and without reservation. Your friends, family members, and co-workers have many gifts to share, and if you share yours with them you can make magical things happen together!

What INFJS Can Bring to the Team

The sparkling and transformative characteristics you’ll bring to any team include:

Empathy

INFJs are among the most empathetic of all personality types. In group situations, you can easily tell when companions or co-workers are feeling overlooked, underutilized, or disrespected.

Motivated by your empathic nature, you won’t be willing to observe these developments and remain uninvolved. Your first instinct as an INFJ will be to reach out to these individuals, in private moments, to let them know you want to help. You’ll listen to their frustrations, disappointments, and grievances, and do your best to reassure them with compliments and kind sentiments.

Moving forward, you’ll go out of your way to increase their level of participation in the group. You’ll openly seek their advice, praise them for their good ideas, and make sure they are acknowledged by everyone else. This compassionate approach will ultimately benefit everyone in the group, since it helps ensure that no voice goes unheard and that each person’s capacity to contribute to the team’s success is utilized to the fullest.

Constructive Perfectionism

As a perfectionist with great hopes and expectations, you believe that virtually anything is possible. Consequently, you maintain high expectations for yourself and others. You won’t settle for mediocrity, and you’re unwilling to let others do so, either.

If you were an unpleasant or demanding person, this could alienate your companions or co-workers. But you prize interpersonal harmony too much to take a hard line. Your preference is to inspire others with praise and encouragement, and this approach will help convince your companions to emulate your example and refuse to be satisfied with a subpar performance.

Awe-inspiring Vision

One of the major defining characteristics of INFJs is the impressive scope of their vision. You think big and you think about the long term. When you undertake a work or self-development project, you’re always looking for ways to expand or improve it.

This big-picture orientation—and the faith that underlies it—can have a significant impact on teammates. Your perception of the world as filled with infinite possibility can encourage others in your orbit to be more bold, ambitious, and creative. Even those who tend toward cynicism will ultimately be touched by your enthusiasm and sense of greater purpose, as it helps awaken the slumbering idealist that lays dormant inside.

Generosity

In addition to your empathy, you’ve also been blessed with a kind and generous nature. Like other INFJs, you aren’t threatened by the success of others. Instead, you are heartened by it, because it affirms your belief in people’s inherent capacity to aim high and hit their targets.

Your generosity won’t go unnoticed or unappreciated by others. Your happiness at the success of your friends, family members, and co-workers will reveal your unselfishness, which the people around you will appreciate and reciprocate. Your magnanimous example will be contagious, offering a fresh and attractive alternative to the hyper-competitiveness that too often contaminates the group dynamic.

Uniqueness

One vital element you’ll add to any group or team is a unique and singular perspective. The INFJ personality type is the least common of all, comprising just 1.5 percent of the population. Consequently, when you join or form a team there is an excellent chance you’ll be the only INFJ in the group.

Your uncommon presence, marked by your immense compassion, sensitivity, and vision, will add diversity to the room and dynamism to your team’s efforts.  Your impact could be especially notable and potent if you find yourself gravitating toward a leadership role, where your empathic nature guarantees you’ll be striving hard to make sure everyone is heard, acknowledged, and understood.

What the Team Can Bring to INFJs

While you have much to offer others, they have much to offer you as well. In teams, you can constructively engage with other personality types who possess some important characteristics you as an INFJ may lack, such as:

A Persistent Attention to Detail

Your focus on the bigger picture can help the teams or groups you join choose more worthy and transformative goals. But even the most marvelous achievements consist of a long and continuous series of small, carefully performed steps, which is something that INFJs often forget. INFJs have a habit of neglecting small details here or there, which can sabotage their most ambitious campaigns and leave their best laid plans unfulfilled.  

This doesn’t have to happen, if you’re smart enough to form cooperative relationships with other personality types who pay more attention to details. Work projects designed from your expansive vision and executed with the detail-oriented approach favored by INTPs, ESFPs, or INTJs can produce amazing results, impressing your bosses and putting you all on a fast track to long-term success.

On the personal side, detail-oriented companions can help you break your habit of abandoning ambitious personal development or home improvement projects before they truly get off the ground. The prods and reminders of your ESTJ or ISTJ friends will keep you on the straight and narrow, as they’ll make sure you remember that taking it one day at a time is the only way to get anything remarkable done.

Polished Communication Skills

INFJs who join collaborative projects should form close partnerships with Extravert teammates whenever you possibly can. You can learn a lot about how to communicate effectively by watching and listening to Extraverts, who love to connect with people and get quite good at it after practicing their whole lives. You’ll never be able to emulate their style completely, but you can still pick up some valuable insights by forming closer relationships with them and seeking out their advice and input in situations where communication is especially important.

And the benefits of such relationships will be mutual. Your extraverted co-workers and companions can also learn from your more thoughtful, introspective, and measured approach. You’ll complement each other well, making the team as a whole more productive in the process.

Working Together for the Winning Edge

The final verdict is inescapable - when INFJs work in teams, they can accomplish more and improve their lives more definitively and decisively.

Shared self-development or personal improvement projects are more energetic and sustainable than their solitary counterparts, thanks to the peer pressure and the boundless enthusiastic encouragement. When co-workers unite to improve the business and their career arcs simultaneously, workplace production skyrockets and raises and promotions are handed out to everyone.

Even after the project ends and the team breaks up, you’ll continue to reap the benefits of your collaborative efforts. The valuable lessons you learned from your non-INFJ co-workers and companions will stay with you and continue to shape your choices and behavior going forward. You’ll become a better-rounded and more consciously aware individual, applying everything you’ve discovered about human variety and potential to your future quests, adventures, and investigations, whether they’re solo or cooperative.

Nathan Falde
Nathan Falde has been working as a freelance writer for the past six years. His ghostwritten work and bylined articles have appeared in numerous online outlets, and in 2014-2015 he acted as co-creator for a series of eBooks on the personality types. An INFJ and a native of Wisconsin, Nathan currently lives in Bogota, Colombia with his wife Martha and their son Nicholas.