ENFJ Careers: What You Need To Know When Changing Careers
Are you an ENFJ contemplating your next career move? Wondering what ENFJ careers are best suited to your personality?
ENFJs have a rare and valuable skill set, so whether you're an ENFJ, work with one, or love one, check this out.
What Is an ENFJ Personality Type?
ENFJ stands for Extroverted, INtuitive, Feeling, Judging. Read the full ENFJ profile.
I conducted a poll of my community, and this was the most common personality type.
This is super interesting because ENFJs make up only about 2% of the general population.
I’m so glad this happened because ENFJs are super-interesting and super-needed:
They’re altruistic, idealistic, charismatic, and social.
What they love most: helping other people.
They’re known for their leadership abilities and are skilled influencers.
They’re driven and creative.
They are great communicators, using data and facts as well as connecting with feelings. A rare-yet-valuable combo.
Here’s a quote from 16 personalities.com:
“[ENFJs] easily see people's motivations and seemingly disconnected events, and are able to bring these ideas together and communicate them as a common goal with an eloquence that is nothing short of mesmerizing.”
How cool is that?!
I want to be an ENFJ now.
Screw being an INTJ super-villain. 😂
3 Things ENFJs Should Consider When Making Career Decisions
Before we dive in, these considerations for ENFJ careers are simply a starting point.
Use them as a springboard to understand how they show up in your current day-to-day…and how you want to apply them to your career going forward.
Or ignore them and focus on what jumps out to you.
1. ENFJs Actively Seek Out Different Opinions To Form a Cohesive Whole
ENFJs take genuine pleasure in getting to know other people, and have no trouble talking with people of all types and modes of thought.
They’re interested in uncovering different modes of thinking and diverse points of view.
A lot of us know intellectually that we're supposed to get diverse opinions but don’t do it well in practice.
ENFJs really thrive in this space. They see the intrinsic value of each and every opinion. They seek them out, validate them, and then take all of these opinions and form a cohesive whole, solution, and way forward.
How important is that?!
Obviously there are a ton of applications for this…creating opportunities where everyone can feel comfortable expressing their opinions and suggestions, working together to develop win-win situations that get the job done.
The mind reels with all the different ways that you could apply this, so I invite you to get curious for yourself.
Here are a couple of ideas that jump out at me.
Focus Group-like Settings or Interdepartmental Communication
I immediately think of focus group-like settings, where you have people from all walks of life or different groups or even disparate departments.
ENFJs seek to understand not just the status quo but especially the outlier points of view, which is extremely important in coming up with better solutions—and bringing people along for the ride.
ENFJs are not just interested in the ideas but the motivation behind the ideas: why people are thinking the way they're thinking.
“[ENFJs] have an uncanny ability to pick up on people’s underlying motivations and beliefs. At times, they may not even understand how they come to grasp another person’s mind and heart so quickly.”
—16personalities.com
And because they’re motivated by the search for common ground, they are especially skilled at pulling disparate ideas together to determine the way forward.
Driving and Communicating Major Change
ENFJs are called to serve a greater purpose in life, and they’re focused on doing the right thing—even when it’s not easy.
Which made me think of the potential for Change Management careers.
I think back to all the Change Management initiatives I worked on, where leadership-on-high decided the direction, and then we were tasked with going out and convincing people that this was the right solution for them, trying to get them to buy in after the fact.
I imagine an ENFJ’s role in leading an initiative like this, and how beautiful it would be for them to gather the impacted people around, really understand the benefits as it relates to the individuals and the greater group as a whole—whether it's internal stakeholders or customers—and then come up with a solution that has the biggest, longest-lasting benefit.
To me, that’s true Change Management.
We need more ENFJs to lead this work.
Again, there are multiple applications for just this one strength.
I’m just sharing with you to get the juices flowing.
Which brings us to the next consideration: organizational culture.
2. ENFJ Careers: Consider Your Ideal Environment
What becomes really important here—aside from your role—is the culture of the organization or the industry you're in.
If you're in an environment that's about meetings and spreadsheets and statistics, you can see how that's gonna start to grate.
From 16 personalities:
"Work that is repetitive, isolated, or otherwise constrained can be frustrating for them. [ENFJs] want to see the impact they’re having, not to plug away at tasks all on their own."
As an altruist and idealist in search of deeper issues, you’re likely going to want to stay away from something that’s going to be cold assessment of the facts. Or careers where you’re potentially making decisions that hurt people – like a corporate raider.
From 16 personalities:
“[ENFJs] will feel haunted, knowing that their decision cost someone their job, or that their product cost someone their life.”
So you might consider environments that share that altruistic mindset, value pushing ideas further, and are more community-minded.
I’d also invite you to think about your day-to-day structure.
ENFJs want to focus on long-term solutions and interact with people.
If you’re in back-to-back meetings in a very reactive environment, again, that’s probably not conducive to your big picture, social, people-focused nature.
Anecdotally, the ENFJs I’ve worked with tend to want to be away from their desk, in-person, out among the people.
3. “Boundaries. Boundaries. Boundaries.”
That’s a note I made to myself as I was thinking about ENFJ careers.
Because ENFJs are sensitive to others’ feelings and success, they run the risk of absorbing colleagues’ energy…and their physical and emotional work.
From 16 personalities:
“[ENFJ’s] role as a social nexus means that problems inevitably find their way to their doorsteps, where colleagues will find a willing, if overburdened, associate.”
Beware colleagues who take advantage of this.
And be intentional about your interactions so that when they leave your office, you’re not left wondering how your To-do list just grew by 10 things or how their problems always seem to become yours.
There’s Limitless Potential For ENTJ careers
I’ll leave you with a few caveats about using personality assessments to make career decisions.
I love personality assessments. They’re fun. They’re helpful data as a starting point.
Take all personality assessments and even this post with a giant grain of salt.
I kind of look at personality assessments like astrology—they’re interesting, but I’m cautious about using them to make major career decisions or trusting them over my gut and experience.
The ENFJ personality type description is NOT a blueprint. It doesn’t give you all the answers.
It’s really down to you to take the elements that resonate with you and go the next level down to really understand how this stuff shows up for you in your day-to-day.
And then connect the dots to what you want in your career.
I also wouldn’t restrict yourself to the career paths that 16personalities.com and other assessments mention. If those paths appeal, great. But often they don’t. And they represent some really obvious options.
What’s most helpful about these types is that they start to explain WHO YOU ARE AT YOUR BEST and HOW YOU BEST OPERATE. They’re not really meant to tell you WHAT TO DO FOR A LIVING—because the possibilities are truly limitless.
Personality assessments are just one piece of the career puzzle.
Career change is about understanding your strengths and complexities, then developing the internal mindset and external strategy to take action in the direction of you want.
If you need help getting started, download my 4-step career roadmap. It’s a proven framework that also gives you the flexibility and space to make your own discoveries.
If you’re interested in my favorite assessments to help you create a career you love and thrive once you get there, check out How To Use Personality Assessments In the Workplace.
If you’d like to talk more about ENFJ careers and what’s truly getting in the way of what you want, apply for a free strategy session.
Author Bio:
Before becoming a coach, Caroline had a successful career in management consulting and financial services. She's made it her mission to help people grow, contribute, and get wherever they want to go in their careers.
Caroline wants you to recognize how much power you have to define your career. Take the first step by downloading your free 4-step career roadmap.
