Do you defer to others in certain situations? More specifically - do you recognise when a situation might call for your least favourite function (or function combo) and how do you go about dealing with that situation?
If there is already at least one other person dealing with the situation, I usually defer
too often, due to a lack of confidence in my abilities, shyness, and laziness, in varying proportions. I do genuinely suck at a lot of things (as far as functions, anything requiring well-developed Ti, Te, and to a lesser extent Fe), and standing back and letting others handle situations that involve competence at those skills has been for the best, but I'm sure there were other situations involving other skills where I underestimated how much I could have contributed. It's this pesky e9/e6-disintegration thing where there's a part of me that feels like my voice and actions are somehow less 'valid' than those of others -- even when I'm feeling mostly confident and like I know exactly what actions to take, it's still there, muffled but still audibly undermining my conviction. (Rational self-questioning is important to avoiding overconfidence and making better decisions, but this inner criticism I'm talking about is irrational and sometimes keeps me from doing what I need to.) It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of incompetence. Also, I sometimes avoid taking initiative simply because things can always go wrong and I don't want the blame and the feeling of responsibility to be on
my shoulders - if it's
other people's decisions that lead to the unwanted outcome, I can slide by with less severe consequences while convincing myself it wasn't my fault because I wasn't the active decision-maker. Of course,
this is selfish and irresponsible; if things go wrong because I didn't help or speak up I'm responsible too.
Oddly, if I am currently the only one dealing with a situation (especially tasks that were specifically given to me), I tend to be reluctant to ask for help (and sometimes even to let anyone help me). I don't have to deal with the obstacle of shyness, and it feels like my chance to prove to myself that I have competence at some things and make that constant inner voice of self-doubt shut the hell up. However, if the situation requires skills I know I lack and the outcome is important, I'll usually swallow my pride and ask for the help of a person whose strengths are my weaknesses. If the situation requires skills I lack but the outcome isn't that important and I can afford to risk screwing up, I'll take it as an opportunity to strengthen some of my weaker skills and continue trying to work through it on my own.
I just realized that what I've written so far is probably a lot less typology-focused than what the OP is looking for, so I'll add that some of my weaknesses that come from underdeveloped Thinking functions involve detailed planning and organizing, leadership, logistics, and understanding the workings of a complex system in a very detailed way. I'm occasionally sensitive about those weaknesses, but I don't have delusions that I'm good at those things and can hand them over to others with only a little sting to my ego (rather than a big blow). I don't think I'm able to defer to anyone when it comes to Fi alone, but when it comes to Ne-in-service-of-Fi skills (empathizing with other individuals, understanding another's perspective and what led them there, reading deeper meanings or multiple possibilities of meaning of a situation or, in an academic setting, a text) I expect myself to have an above-average but not exceptional level of perceptiveness and creativity. When a level of insight and creativity (of an NF variety) above that level is needed, I have no problem deferring to others and even enjoy learning from them and seeing new ideas and solutions that I wouldn't have thought of myself. When it comes to anything that's at or below what I consider "my level", I really want to use my own ideas to deal with the situation, though I acknowledge when someone else's ideas are better than mine and reluctantly defer; it's also common for me to defer anyway out of passivity and underlying self-doubt, as I mentioned in the first paragraph. (For this reason, if I feel I can do an academic project well on my own, I prefer to work alone instead of in a group. I don't want my voice to be drowned out and I want the ideas to be MINE, damn it!) When I feel like I
should be able to grasp something with Fi+Ne but struggle to, I get very hard on myself and defensive about my competence at the things I expected myself to be good at. I have trouble deferring to others in these situations, and don't even like others to notice I'm struggling.
tl;dr version: I rightly defer to others in important situations that require skills I lack, and I sometimes wrongly defer out of passivity to more domineering people even when I could have competently dealt with something. I try to practice my weaker skills in situations where I can afford to screw up, and I prefer to work alone in situations where I have a good grasp of things.