Michael Scott personality type: ENFP

Michael Scott blows his own money on a video iPod for a Secret Santa with a twenty dollar limit. Phyllis gives him a homemade oven mitt, and he is so hurt that he turns the whole exchange into a Yankee swap on the spot. If you want one scene that explains Michael, that is the one. He gives too much, too loudly, and he needs you to love him for it.

On the enneagram he is a 2 with a 3 wing. Twos earn love by giving, and they quietly keep score. Scott’s Tots is the most painful example. Ten years earlier he promised a class of kids he would pay their college tuition, and when the day comes he shows up with laptop batteries. In that moment he wanted to be their hero, so he made the biggest promise he could imagine. The 3 wing adds the performer: the Dundies, the improv class, the constant hunt for an audience.

I type him as an ENFP. Extraverted intuition makes him a nonstop idea machine. A sales meeting becomes an improv sketch. He spends years writing Threat Level Midnight, an action movie starring his alter ego Agent Michael Scarn, and he casts half the office in it. Underneath, introverted feeling gives him a soft, private moral center. On Halloween he has to fire someone, and he stalls the entire day, because being the bad guy feels unbearable to him.

And yet Michael can sell. At Chili’s with Jan and a big county client, he ignores her careful pitch, tells jokes for hours, and closes the deal anyway. His growth comes through Holly Flax. She laughs at his bits instead of tolerating them, and with her he finally stops performing. When he leaves for Colorado, he says goodbye to everyone one at a time without telling them it is goodbye. Plenty of fans type Michael as ESFP, since he lives for the moment and loves physical comedy. It is a strong case. Still, his worst decisions grow out of imagined futures, and his comedy runs on characters and concepts like Prison Mike. Some call him a 7, too. I keep the 2, because his panic is always about being unloved, never about being bored.