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      • 🧠The Ideal Executive: Why You Cannot Be One and What To Do About It
        • Introduction
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        • 1. Barking Up The Wrong Tree
          • A Corporate Fairy Tale (The Outdated Paradigm)
          • What is "Management"?
          • The Fallacy
        • 2. The Functionalist View
          • The Tasks of Management
          • The (PAEI) Code
          • The (P)roducer – (Paei) style
          • The (A)dministrator - (pAei) style
          • The (E)ntrepreneur – (PaEi) style
          • The Integrator – (paeI) style
          • Summing up the Functionalist View
        • 3. What Causes Mismanagement?
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          • (PAEI) Incompatibilities
          • The impossible dream
        • 4. Mismanagement Styles
          • Confronting the Inevitable
          • The Lone Ranger (P---)
          • The Bureaucrat (-A--)
          • The Arsonist (--E-)
          • The SuperFollower (---I)
          • The Common Denominator
        • 5. Working Together
          • A complementary team
          • The Bad News
        • 6. Can We Talk?
          • A Window on Managerial Styles
          • The Inevitability of Miscommunication
          • Translator Needed
        • 7. Constructive Conflict
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          • Honoring Diversity
          • Back to the Paradigm
        • 8. Structuring Responsibilities Right
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          • A template for Good Structure
        • 9. Matching Style to Task
          • Diagnosing a Type
          • Coding Jobs: A Basic Template
          • The Complementary Team Jigsaw Puzzle
        • 10. The Right Process: the Dialogue
          • The Managerial Tower of Babel
          • Dealing with a (P) – A (P)roducer or Lone Ranger
          • Dealing With an (A) – An (A)dministrator or Bureaucrat
          • Dealing With an (E) – An (E)ntrepreneur or Arsonist
          • Dealing With an (I) - an (I)ntegrator or Superfollower
          • Keeping Your Styles Straight: A Cautionary Tale
        • 11. Converting Management by Committee into Teamwork
          • The Communication Blues
          • Questions, Doubts, and Disagreements
        • 12. The Right People and Shared Vision and Values
          • The Role of Leadership
          • Sharing Vision and Values
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        • 13. Nurturing the Wrong Tree?
          • The Wrong Tree
          • Traditional management Squashes Potential
          • The Management Training Gap
        • 14. The Mission of Management and Leadership Education
          • Decision-Making Programmability
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          • Delegation and Decentralization
          • What Organizations Can Do Themselves
          • The Dark Side of Formal Education
      • 📈Mastering Change: Introduction to Organizational Therapy
        • Acknowledgments
        • Introduction to the new edition
        • Management, Executives, Leadership…
        • Conversation 1: Change and Its Repercussions
        • Conversation 2: On Parenting, Management, or Leadership
        • Conversation 3: Predicting the Quality of Decisions
        • Conversation 4: Efficiency and Effectiveness
        • Conversation 5: The Incompatibility of Roles
        • Conversation 6: Management, Leadership, and Mismanagement Styles
        • Conversation 7: What to Do About Change
        • Conversation 8: Responsibility, Authority, Power, and Influence
        • Conversation 9: Predicting the Efficiency of Implementing Decisions
        • Conversation 10: What Makes the Wheels Turn
        • Conversation 11: How to Communicate with People
        • Conversation 12: Perceiving Reality
        • Conversation 13: Quality of People
        • Conversation 14: How to Convert Committee Work into Teamwork
        • Conversation 15: The Adizes Program for Organizational Transformation
      • 🔄Managing Corporate Lifecycles
        • Introduction
        • Chapter 1. Change and Its Repercussions
        • Chapter 2. Courtship
        • Chapter 3. Infancy
        • Chapter 4. The Wild Years: Go-Go
        • Chapter 5. The Second Birth and the Coming of Age: Adolescence
        • Chapter 6: PRIME
        • Chapter 7: The Signs of Aging n
        • Chapter 8: The Aging Organizations: Aristocracy
        • Chapter 9: The Final Decay: Salem City, Bureaucracy, And Death
        • Chapter 10: Tools For Analysis
        • Chapter 11: Predicting The Lifecycle: A Metaphorical Dance
        • Chapter 12: PAEI And The Lifecycle: Stage By Stage
        • Chapter 13: Predicting The Capability To Solve Problems
        • Chapter 14: The Causes Of Organizational Aging
        • Chapter 15: Structural Causes Of Aging
        • Chapter 16: Organizational Therapy
        • Chapter 17: Treating Organizations On The Typical Path: A Contingency Approach
        • Chapter 18: The Optimal Path
    • Other Books
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  1. Library
  2. Books by Dr. Ichak Adizes
  3. The Ideal Executive: Why You Cannot Be One and What To Do About It
  4. 10. The Right Process: the Dialogue

Keeping Your Styles Straight: A Cautionary Tale

PreviousDealing With an (I) - an (I)ntegrator or SuperfollowerNext11. Converting Management by Committee into Teamwork

Last updated 2 years ago

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Each of these strategies can easily backfire if you misread the style of the person you’re talking to.

Imagine that you are an (I)ntegrator with an (E)ntrepreneur boss. All your life you’ve tried to resolve conflicts, so when a problem comes up, what do you do? You go and talk to all the relevant people, you resolve all the conflicts, and then you go to your (E) boss and say, “Boss, we had a problem, we all met, we all agreed what the problem is and we all agreed what the solution should be. Now we want you to approve it.”

How is the (E) boss feeling? He’s probably sweating. He’s thinking, “My god, this guy is building a revolution behind my back. He’s trying to execute a coup d’etat against me. My staff never told me about the problem, they just went into a back room and discussed it without my input; they came up with a solution, and now they’re trying to force me to approve it!”

An (E) will never forgive you, and he will never forget. At the first opportunity, he will fire you. This is a frequent problem for (I) types: They try to build a consensus, they encourage participatory management – and they end up getting fired by (E) bosses who feel threatened by that style of management.

If you don’t know someone very well and are not familiar with his typical working style, what should you do? Ask what job he performs. Look at the organizational chart; that can tell you a lot. If this person is in marketing, you can expect him to be (E)ntrepreneurial. If he is in sales, he should be (P)-oriented, a (P)roducer. An accountant will very likely have an (A) orientation.

You can also find telling clues by looking at his office, his desk, how he dresses, his posture, his energy level. In other words, be sensitive to and observant of the other person; watch his reactions to your comments; and adapt your style to his so that you can communicate to him clearly.

Summing Up

Knowing whom you are talking to and how to talk to them is essential for success in management and, I believe, life in general.

A good manager, who is by definition a well-rounded person, should be able to communicate with anyone, of any style. It is like knowing several languages. You can’t insist on speaking English in Rome and then complain when people don’t understand you. In Rome, you’ll behave as the Romans do if you want to influence people and be respected.

But now we come to another problem: If adopting the “language” of the person we’re talking to is the only way to communicate effectively, then how should we behave when we’re dealing with several different styles simultaneously, how do we manage meetings?

Let’s talk about that in the next chapter.

Are you curious about your managerial strengths and how they align with your personality? Explore the for a comprehensive assessment of your skills and traits.

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