LogoLogo
  • What is Adizes?
    • Adizes Institute
    • Adizes Organizational Therapy
    • Dr. Ichak Adizes
  • 🅰️Dictionary of Terms
    • PAEI
    • capi
    • Organizational Lifecycle
    • Formula Of Success
    • Change Map
    • Decision Making Process
    • Adizes Organizational Transformation
    • 🤝Symbergy
  • 🔠Wiki
    • 8-step Decision-Making Process
    • a
    • Abnormal Problems
    • Accept (a decision)
    • Accommodate
    • Accumulate
    • Accountability (Managerial)
    • Administrator
    • Adolescence; Adolescent Organization
    • AED (Adizes Executive Dashboard)
    • Affair
    • Allocated Expenses
    • Aristocracy; Aristocratic Organization
    • Arrest
    • Arsonist
    • Attribution Analysis Spreadsheet
    • Authorized Power (ap)
    • Backup Behavior
    • Behavioral Curve
    • Benevolent Prince
    • Best in Class
    • Black Book
    • Blue Book
    • Blue Internal Profit Center
    • Brackets
    • Bureaucracy; Bureaucratic Organization
    • Bureaucrat
    • Caminando y Hablando
    • Cascade
    • Cascaded Syndag
    • Chain of Causality
    • Charges to/from
    • Charismatic Guru
    • Christmas Tree
    • Client
    • Client Interface
    • Colleague
    • Column 0
    • Column 1
    • Column 2
    • Column 3
    • Column 4/5
    • Column 6
    • Committee
    • Complementary Team
    • Conceptual Foundations
    • Conduit
    • Constraint Goal
    • Constructive Conflict
    • Consultant
    • Contribution to/from
    • Cost to/from
    • Courtship
    • Creative Contributor
    • Deadwood
    • Death
    • Decentralization
    • Defreeze
    • Dog and Pony Show
    • Delegation
    • Deliberate
    • Demagogue
    • Democraship
    • Destructive Conflict
    • Deterministic Goal
    • Developmental POC
    • Dialectic Convergence
    • Dotted Line
    • Dotted-Line Reporting
    • Dramatic Reading
    • Driven Force
    • Driving Force
    • Early Bureaucracy
    • Entrepreneur
    • Executive Committee
    • Imperatives of a Decision
    • Implementor
    • Make (a decision)
    • Participative Organizational Council (POC)
    • Participative Organizational Council POC), Developmental
    • Phase 0
    • Phase I
    • Phase II
    • Phase III
    • Phase IV
    • Phase V
    • Phase VI
    • Phase VII
    • Phase VIII
    • Phase IX
    • Phase X
    • Phase XI
    • Page
    • Recrimination
    • Responsibility
    • Roles of Management
    • Synerteam
    • Take (a decision)
    • Yellow Internal Service Center
    • Witch-Hunt
  • 📖Library
    • Books by Dr. Ichak Adizes
      • 🧠The Ideal Executive: Why You Cannot Be One and What To Do About It
        • Introduction
          • Organization of the book
        • 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?
          • The Myth Of The Perfect Manager
          • (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
          • Good Conflict, Bad Conflict
          • Honoring Diversity
          • Back to the Paradigm
        • 8. Structuring Responsibilities Right
          • Organizational Ecology
          • Why Structure Matters
          • Structuring for Accountability
          • Back to the Functionalist View
          • 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
          • The Visioning Process
        • 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
          • The Effectiveness of Training
          • 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
  • 🔗Adizes Resources
Powered by GitBook
LogoLogo

Social Media

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • YouTube

Contact Us

  • Website
  • Submit a form
  • Get certified
On this page
  • Style Differences
  • Natural Adversaries

Was this helpful?

  1. Library
  2. Books by Dr. Ichak Adizes
  3. The Ideal Executive: Why You Cannot Be One and What To Do About It
  4. 6. Can We Talk?

A Window on Managerial Styles

Previous6. Can We Talk?NextThe Inevitability of Miscommunication

Last updated 2 years ago

Was this helpful?

Since a manager’s style determines so many of his decisions, let’s try to look at the four styles systematically and see if we can predict where conflict will probably occur.

Look at the Figure below. Think of it as a French window – one big window with four smaller windows in it. The four sides of the window give you the four variables in the style of any individual’s decision-making: Priorities, speed, process and focus. For each of those variables, there is a continuum.

On the horizontal line at the top, which measures priorities, the continuum goes from being exclusively task- or result-oriented, to being exclusively process-oriented: Does this manager attach more importance to the task (what we’re doing and why) or to the process (who does it and how)?

Across the bottom of the window, we are measuring the speed at which people make decisions: From slow, on the left, to rapid, on the right. Some people are slow and methodical in their decision-making; a joke about Bureaucrats, for example, is that you should never tell a Bureaucrat a joke on Friday because he might burst out laughing – on Sunday in church!

On the opposite end of this continuum is the Arsonist, who probably won’t let you finish telling your joke; it reminds him of another joke, so he’ll interrupt your joke to tell his.

The right side of the window addresses focus, from a global orientation, at the top, to a local orientation, at the bottom. The diagram itself is a good illustration of focus: If the four styles of manager were looking out of that French window, each would focus on a different view. An (E)ntrepreneur would see the flowers, the mountains, and the horizon from the window; an (A)dministrator might only notice that the window frame was dirty. Every manager’s typical perspective can be mapped somewhere on this chart.

The left side of the window presents the last variable: The process by which people make decisions. Some managers attack a problem in an unstructured way; others are structured.

The unstructured type will start talking about A, which reminds him of Z. Z reminds him of Q, which he relates to B, then to C, and X. In his holistic view, everything is interrelated, thus, there is no particular predetermined sequence in which the whole must be understood.

Structured thinkers are linear. They don’t like to start talking about B until they fully understand A; they’ll put off talking about C until B is fully understood, and so on.

Style Differences

Looking at the diagram, we can see that the four (PAEI) styles – (P)roducer, (A)dministrator, (E)ntrepreneur, and (I)ntegrator, as well as their corresponding mismanagement archetypes – fit neatly into the four quadrants of the window.

The (E)ntrepreneur, or Arsonist, depending upon how extreme his style is, has the global, or big-picture, perspective; he thinks and acts quickly and without structure; and he is result-oriented in his decision-making.

(A)dministrators (or Bureaucrats) have a local perspective and a structured, slow-moving style focused on process and details. They pay attention to the how.

That tells you something immediately, doesn’t it? You are mixing water and oil when you put these two people together to work. Their priorities are different; their speed of decision-making is different; their focus is different; the way they organize facts and draw conclusions is different; the way they communicate is different.

When an (A) and an (E) get together, the (E) quickly becomes exasperated with the (A)’s incessant harping on details. Sometimes he’ll simply leave the room in the middle of a discussion. This causes the (A) to feel ignored, abused, and abandoned. He’s convinced no one cares about his problems. If he were the type of person (he isn’t) who understands and can communicate in metaphors, he might tell you he feels like he’s working with a sea gull: The (E) appears from above out of nowhere, lets out a shriek, drops a shot on the (A)’s boat, and disappears, only to reappear later on.

Natural Adversaries

The diagram also shows that each style will be in conflict mostly with the style diagonally across from him. Thus, (P)s and (I)s don’t get along any better or like each other better than (A)s and (E)s.

(P)s (or Lone Rangers) are fast, local, structured, and focused on tasks, details, and results. They are our railroad engineers. They are the ones who say, “Show me the tracks and get out of the way.” In meetings, they are the ones who interrupt the discussion to say: “Look, what do we need to do? Let’s just go and do it. Right now. We have a business to run. What we really need is to talk less and do more.”

(I)ntegrators (or Superfollowers) are process-oriented, slow, and unstructured – which is why they are so politically astute. They have a global view; they see the big picture, and they can easily change and adapt.

Seen from this perspective, the potential conflicts are obvious. The task-oriented, quick (P) is not generally very personable or sensitive. This upsets the (I)ntegrator, who wants to slow down and pay attention to how people feel. The (I) thinks the (P) is an insensitive and “macho” “hatchet man,” who steps all over people without regard for their feelings and needs.

The (P), on the other hand, thinks the (I) is insensitive to what the organization needs. He perceives the (I) as weak and slow – even effeminate. (Nevertheless, this is not a gender issue. A woman can be a (P) and a man can be an (I). In fact, I have observed a real flip-flop from traditional sexual stereotypes in the United States over the last twenty years.)

So between these two types also, there will often be hard feelings and a lack of mutual respect. They need each other but at the same time, they cannot work together without difficulty – like a marriage of two people who love each other because of their differences, but sometimes find those differences unbearable to live with.

What kinds of conflict do these different approaches create among managers, and are they inevitable?

One source of conflict is miscommunication, which occurs because we think and perceive reality differently: (A) is conservative and looks for ways to control, whereas (E) looks for ways to make changes. (P) requires short-term feedback, whereas (E) takes time to develop his ideas and looks to the long term for feedback. (E) prefers to talk, whereas (I) wants only to listen. (And in any case, very few people can both talk and listen effectively – that is, communicate well.)

The different styles also focus on different components of the decision-making process. And even if they use the same vocabulary, it is often meant to convey opposite meanings. In other words, the four styles simply speak different (PAEI) languages! Thus, naturally, they have difficulty understanding one another.

Prefer the convenience of a Kindle? Grab your digital book edition !

📖
🧠
here