Sometime in the 90's our department took a Myers-Briggs test. The presumption was that a little self reflection would help us get along. One conclusion I remember was that everyone was bossy except me. That explained a lot.
As soon as I arrived in the fall of 1985 I made a few suggestions for improving things. I was put in charge of Calculus III, after all, and there was a lot of missing content. There was nothing about cylindrical or spherical coordinates, little about multiple integration, and absolutely nothing about line integrals, surface integrals, flux, and the theorems of Green, Gauss and Stokes.
Every bit of this content is important in multiple areas of STEM. Without this content most students will steer clear of certain STEM fields, or at best, hang on white-knuckled. I mentioned each area in a department meeting and met uniform resistance. One colleague mentioned that, "Our students already have enough to learn." Another colleague, who taught remedial math, also piped in with, "We don't get good students here, so don't bother."
Both of the above points are myths. We get a surprising amount of talent at SUNY Niagara. And, if students are given something worthwhile to work on, they will work surprisingly hard.
My approach, from the beginning, was to figure out how to get students to master the most difficult content. The easy content would take care of itself. For almost 40 years I did so with very low attrition.
While the Myers-Briggs test did show who was bossy, there was no measure of stubbornness. If there was, my score would have exceeded the sum total of the rest of the department.
Last year I had the pleasure of receiving a phone call from a former student who is a pharmaco-kineticist. He develops mathematical models for drug diffusion and interactions for new drugs, before they come to market. I won't mention his name, for legal reasons.
My friend said he needed some help with a 2-compartment drug diffusion model. He thought one of the terms in the system of differential equations was incorrect, but was not sure, and wanted to be certain before a publication. This model has been used to build more complex models since 1940. Like a lot of these allied fields, there are few mathematicians, but many professionals that just use given equations without a whole lot of understanding.
It turns out my friend was correct. I rewrote the system of differential equations to make it more evident that he was indeed correct, and explained what every term meant. The funny thing was, this system was similar to something I taught in my differential equations class. All that content I added propelled my friend straight through his Ph.D. program in pharmaceutical chemistry.
After I left that initial meeting with the math department, I put together an well-attended independent study course, which eventually became a special topics course, and ultimately was incorporated into our Calculus sequence. It took a while, but I had the last word. I knew I would.
A few years before I retired, Mark Voisinet and I put together a list of successful STEM grads. The list was close to 400 in length and was hastily put together. It is an impressive list that I will talk about at a later date. I am sure there are many hundreds more that we forgot, or just don't know about. We were impressed. No one outside of C-Building was, with the exception of Deb Brewer in the Foundation.