The Managerial Tower of Babel

Once we have learned to recognize and diagnose other people’s predominant management styles, and have also made sure that the organization’s structure will support and nourish all four of them, the next step is learning to communicate with each style effectively.

We all know how easy it is to get off on the wrong foot when we’re explaining something, and how another person can seem to hear something entirely different from what we thought we said. Miscommunication is a major source of organizational conflict. The best way to avoid it is simply to match your style to the style of the person you’re talking to.

Too often, we expect others to adapt to us. But if you genuinely want to be understood, you’ll be the one who adapts. You’ll remember that (E)ntrepreneurs are global in their views; result-oriented; fastmoving; and unstructured. (P)roducers are also result-oriented and fast, but they are local, or task-oriented, in their views; structured; and detailed. (A)dministrators share the (P)roducers’ interest in detail and immediate results, but in contrast to (P) types, they tend to be organized; slow; and process-oriented. Finally, (I)ntegrators, like (E)ntrepreneurs, take a global view of things and are unstructured. But like (A)s, they are process-oriented and slow. They wait for others to blaze the trails.

Again, I’m not teaching you anything new. If you were trying to get a loan from a bank, for example – even if you were a very highflying, esoteric, (E)ntrepreneur type – you would not dress in jeans and a T-shirt for your meeting with the bank officer, would you? You’d probably dress conservatively, walk slowly, sit quietly, and speak to the banker in calm, precise and polite language. Why? Because you’re attempting to be responsive to his or her style. You are trying to act like a banker.

In order to manage well, you must convince others to cooperate. In essence, management means selling your ideas. If you can’t sell ideas, you can’t manage. Thus, if you can’t communicate and convince, you cannot manage.

Now, in order to sell your ideas/manage effectively, you need to know to whom you are selling. Every salesman will tell you that in order to be successful, you have to know your clients. If you don’t know what they need and what they want, how will you be able to convince them to buy your idea? Before you talk to people, it is important to ask yourself, “Who am I talking to?” When people talk to you, you have to ask yourself, “Who is talking to me?” Then you can correctly interpret what they are saying.

And equally important, you must be conscious of your own style; you must be able to answer the question: Who am I?

Why? Because you also need to pay attention to what impression you are giving to others. If you know you are an (E) type, for instance, then you know that your style of communicating is apt to be problematic for the other styles. Being aware of your own style means being able to compensate for it. What is the first prescription for an (E) type dealing with an (A), for example? Slow down.

Book 3 of this series, Leading the Leaders - How to Enrich Your Style of Management and Handle People Whose Style is Different from Yours is dedicated entirely to prescriptions for each style: Quick, easily remembered ways to compensate for the weaknesses implicit in each style.

For now, it is important to understand that you can’t interpret “yes” and “no” according to your own dictionary. You have to look at who is saying it.

Let me explain what I mean by that. All religions – Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Muslim – have a principle that is known in the West as the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Its corollary is: “Don’t do to others what you’d hate to be done to you.”

It’s a good rule in most situations, but in organizations, communicating with others the way you wish they would communicate with you is definitely a mistake: If you are an (E) type, and you speak to others as if they are also (E)s, unless they actually are (E)s they are going to misunderstand you; worse, they are probably going to resent and dislike you. And that’s not very effective managing.

Who’s the Boss? Whoever You Try to Sell Your Idea To!

To communicate well, you must be conscious at all times, no matter whom you’re dealing with of who is the person you are talking to. The truth is that it’s irrelevant whether that person is a manager above you or a subordinate beneath you in the organizational hierarchy. Whether he is your boss, your peer, or your subordinate, you still have to sell him your idea. They are all associates and that is how you should treat them. Forget the hierarchy.

I love the story about Vince Lombardi the famous American football coach. The story form his biography is that before a game he will explain it to the team and than turn to the thickest headed player on the team, I mean not the brightest, and ask him what he thinks. Finally the other players got upset: Why the dumbest. Why not ask the smartest of us, they wondered.

Because if he understands, all of you understand the game. If he does not understand the game, he is going to run in the wrong direction, so what is the use.

Many books are written about how to lead your subordinates. What I’m talking about here is how to lead your organization, which you can only do by becoming a leader to all the people in your organization. How can you sell your ideas to each person whose cooperation you will need? Communicating to them in a style they can readily comprehend is far more important, in the long run, than knowing the limits of your authority in relation to each person in the hierarchy.

Try to think about each person in your organization as if he were your boss, whether he is or not. In other words, instead of falling back on your authority and power, try to use your influence. This is providing leadership – being a true thumb. (For more detail on leadership, see Chapter 12.)

Surprisingly, it is hardest to communicate effectively with subordinates. Why? Because we take our subordinates for granted. With a subordinate, we feel we don’t have to try so hard, so we are often careless of how we communicate. We forget what their style is and just talk to them as if we were talking to ourselves. As a result, we often miscommunicate.

Below, I analyze some scenarios that occur frequently between managers of different styles, and offer suggestions for dealing with them.

Let’s go in a sequence: First how to deal with a (P)roducer, then how to deal with an (A)dministrator, then how to deal with an (E)ntrepreneur, and finally how to deal with an (I)ntegrator. (I repeat. This is a summary. The material in more detail is in book 3 in this series. )