The Ideal Executive

Recently I read this book by Adizes. It was so relevant to me that I devoured it in a few hours on my Kindle. I found out about the book by visiting the Adizes Institute web site while I was pursuing information about Life Cycles of Organizations. There was a wealth of material there about organizational theory and wisdom about many topics in the blog. Adizes is an internationally known leadership and management consultant and his insight, clarity and spiritual strength shine thought in all his writings.

The title of the book, The Ideal Executive, is a teaser, since the point of the book is that there is no such thing. Everyone tends to have strengths in different areas and weaknesses in others and no matter how much training and rounding, we all have styles that revolve around 1 or 2 basic types. Adizes system is PAEI (Producer, Administrator, Entrepreneur, Integrator).

The premise is that all types of personality expression within an organization can be boiled down to those 4 types. Most people are strong in at least one of those types. For example, a strong worker bee who has no interest in management or leadership roles would be coded Paei. Or even more uni-dimensional coding of P---, where dashes represent close to zero ability in the dashed areas. Just as this kind of narrow human being is more fantasy than reality, the opposite coding of PAEI where someone is strong in all 4 areas is equally mythical. Therefore, the Ideal Executive does not exist.

Leadership requires excellence in at least 2 areas and adequate competence in the others. For example, a coding for a very strong leader is paEI. This means excellent Entrepreneurial skills and Integration skills, competent in producing (execution) and administration. Someone with a dash in any of the four areas is lacking significant skills that will produce a leader/manager. A leader cannot be completely missing any of the 4 without the organization suffering in some way.

For each of these positive types, there are opposite dysfunctional expressions. For each type these are:

• Producer - Lone Wolf (does not communicate or get buy-in from superiors, peers and direct reports - acts unilaterally)
• Administrator - Bureaucrat (too mega-focused on how things are done rather than what gets done)
• Entrepreneur - Arsonist (Starts too many projects - keeps team spread too thin and de-focused)
• Integrator - Super Follower (Cannot make decisions without consulting and getting consensus to a fault)

I found this personality framework very easy to remember and identify within the organization. A careful reading and study of the material in this book significantly helps you understand sources of conflict and ways to communicate with personality combinations that may create conflict with each other.