Lipman - The Type B Manager

Whether youre a supervisor on the shop floor or an executive in the C-suite, you have an enormous amount of power over the employees who report to you. Think about it: Youre often the person, other than perhaps a significant other or parent, who has the biggest impact on your employees minute-to-minute, day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month existence. If youre not working remotely (which only a small minority of the workforce is), your employees will probably see you often: in meetings, around the office or job site, at the watercooler or in the cafeteria, or simply whenever youre discussing whatever it is theyre working on. You likely control their compensation and the way others in management perceive their job performancein short, their livelihood.

A good relationship with a manager makes a bad job bearable, but a bad relationship with a manager can make a good job a misery.

So what makes a good manager? Are some personality types better suited for it than others? Given that management, at its core, involves accomplishing work through other people, the relationship between employee and manager is of central importance. People have to want to do work for others; even compensation and recognition have their limits. So what exactly are the personality traits that make others want to do their best for you? What are the qualities that make you successful as a manager?

Its a deceptively simple question because one thing we do know is that management isnt a simple job. Research has made it clear that theres currently an epidemic of employee disengagement. Numerous studies, as well see in more detail, indicate that between 60 and 70 percent of employees are disengagedmanagement code for not emotionally connected to their organizations and therefore in all likelihood not working at full productive capacity. If being a manager were easy, wed never see such numbers.

As a young manager being considered for executive ranks at a Fortune 500 company many years ago, I had the same odd conversation, with only minor changes in phrasing, with several executives on different occasions. When discussing my future, the dialogue went like this:

Senior executive: I just dont know about you. I cant quite put my finger on it, but you dont seem like a manager. You just dont seem like executive material.

To which Id normally respond: Whywhat exactly is it that makes you say that?

The answer would be: I dont know... you seem too quiet, too soft-spoken, too calmnot authoritative enough.

By then I was managing complex projects like the companys annual report, working with a variety of people at all organizational levelsfrom CEOs and CFOs to product experts, accountants, designers, and printers. So Id ask, But doesnt it make more sense not to judge my personality, but to judge results? Do people generally like working for me? Do I get things done? Am I able to deliver large projects on time and on budget?

And the concluding answer would be: Yes, thats true, but I still just dont know....

Over time my own managers came to accept, for the most part, my personal style, my quietness, my soft-spokenness, my lack of excitabilityin short, the absence of what are often called classic Type A personality characteristics. I ended up spending twenty-four years in management, becoming a vice president, and routinely overseeing advertising, marketing, and communications programs with annual budgets over $20 million. But the point here isnt about me. Like most people who spend decades in management I had successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses, good days and bad. I made so many mistakes over the years I used to say I could no longer remember the first couple hundred. It was only about a quarter century later that I began to think more about those earlier conversations, the puzzlement over my personal style, and what it meant about the common perceptions of managers and executives that weve so often come to expect.

Excellent managers come in all shapes and sizes. Like snowflakes, no two are exactly alike. Two of the most widely respected of the past half century, for example, have revealingly unique personalities. Phil Jackson, Lord of the Rings (a reference to the eleven NBA championship rings hes won as coach of the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers), is known for using an unorthodox blend of basketball wisdom, Zen Buddhism, and Lakota Sioux philosophy to bring his teams to peak performance. Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, legendary investor with a net worth of over $60 billion, still lives in his first home, purchased for $31,500 in 1957. Though Jackson has been fortunate to coach some of the greatest basketball players in history (Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Shaquille ONeal, and Kobe Bryant), it was only when these supremely gifted individuals bought into Jacksons highly personal vision of team harmony that talent was translated into rings. Similarly, Buffett, who possesses one of the most incisive business minds ever, is known for his insistence on surrounding himself with the absolute best and brightest people he can and then backing off and giving them wide latitude to follow their own instincts. So much so that hes been called the Delegator in Chief.