Mis-management Styles

I recently read "Management and Mis-Management Styles" by Ichak Adizes. This is the second book in a trilogy of books that deal with roles and styles in the workplace. This one focuses on elaboration of the dysfunctional effects of mis-management. The five mis-management styles are:

• Lone Ranger


• Bureaucrat


• Arsonist


• SuperFollower


• Deadwood

Lone Ranger is a negative expression of a Producer personality. A Producer is someone who gets things done and does not like to waste time discussing alternatives and long range plans. When this personality is in a management position and has no other complementary skills of administration, entrepreneurial or integration the Lone Ranger pattern is manifested. The Lone Ranger will not take time for necessary meetings or giving appropriate instructions to subordinates. She does not have time for strategic discussions. He just wants to get things done since there is SO much to do. This can have the effect of inconsistent and inadequate communication and delegation throughout the organization.

The Bureaucrat loves systems and processes. Since, unlike the Administrator, the Bureaucrat has no complementary skills of Producing, Entrepreneurship or Integration, the result is an emphasis on form over function. As long as everything is accounted for and there is a rule for every situation the Bureaucrat believes things are running smoothly. Never mind that the organization's creativity has died a slow death and the rules and regulations are keeping people from making creative decisions required by new information or situations.

The Arsonist is an Entrepreneur gone wild. There are so many ideas and opportunities. We have to chase all of them. We need to be working on more things... FASTER!! Can we get "someone" to start on this great new idea I had this past weekend? Never mind that we are knee deep trying to get the current release finished. Wait, maybe we can add this into the current release. It should only take "a couple of weeks" to get it done. I already thought it through over the weekend. Depending on how distorted the Arsonist's time multiplier is, it could really take 2 months or longer to actually get the work done. So, the release, which was barely on schedule is now delayed indefinitely.

The SuperFollower is a negative expression of an Integrator. Typically an Integrator is the one component (in addition to at least one more) that is necessary for a leader to possess. But a SuperFollower has no other competency beyond the desire that "everyone just get along". He has no agenda of his own, no initiatives to drive and does not want to make decisions. He is always searching for consensus and wanting "everyone" to agree before a decision can be made.

Deadwood has zero competency in Production, Administration, Entrepreneurship or Integration. He is there until the lights are turned off. With no ability to push for completion, setup organizational systems, initiate creative ideas or integrate the enterprise, he is the obvious target for layoffs. However, in some organizations, Deadwood can survive for years.

Radical Management

I just finished the book "A Leader's Guide to Radical Management". This book argues for expanding and implementing iterative and transparent management techniques across the entire organization. So, it is one of any number of methodologies and philosophies that argue for proliferating the principles of contemporary software development techniques found in Agile Scrum to a broader application.

If you are familiar with Agile/Scrum, much of the "radical" techniques will be very familiar. This is especially true about the long list of practices that are suggested at the end of each chapter. Nothing really new here.

The main premise of the book is about identifying clients and focusing on pleasing them. Clients do not have to be external customers but are also internal groups or departments that consume the output of another group or team.

There is lots of good wisdom about team leadership, transparency and client-focused operational techniques that is communicated through anecdotal stories throughout.

Overall a decent read, more interesting if you are not at all familiar with the concepts.

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.

Creation

Overview
The realm of Divine Ideas is created by the Source. As individuals we become aware of Divine ideas. We increase this awareness through meditation or other activities that promote the Silence. As the Divine Ideas come into our consciousness, they are colored by race consciousness input from the subconscious mind. Ultimately they express through our individuality and within a specific medium of expression such as art, science, music, business or any number of other forms of expression and action.

The receptive clarity of Divine Ideas exists along a spectrum from very clear to unclear. The closer we are to the Source, the more consistent the individual expression of the Idea is to the Ideal. Lasting works of art or world-changing scientific theories are produced from an extremely accurate perception and reception of the Divine Idea from Mind. The less true the reception and transmission of the Divine Idea, the less true the manifestation of the Divine Idea within a medium will be. A good analogy is that of a copy machine making less clear copies from subsequent copies as compared to making high quality and clear copies from the original.

I have experienced many examples of the Creation process during my lifetime. For the purposes of this paper I will pick 3: music, software design and management.

Music
Music has always been a serious hobby of mine. I studied formally through the age of about 26 and took a couple of degrees, one in classical piano and one in jazz piano. After I left graduate school I never pursued it as a career, but have always maintained some connection throughout my life, performing in church or in local clubs every now and then.

A watershed era for me was when I learned the basic theory and chord structures for jazz piano after having played classical piano most of my college career. I was fascinated by the idea that I could know the basic chord progression and melody of a jazz standard and get together with other musicians and create arrangements on the spot. Once I worked on this area for a year or so, I moved away from reading music and began to play more and more by ear.

Learning to play jazz piano was a very transformative experience for me. Before that time, playing piano had been about accurately playing the notes on the page and adding a very small amount of interpretation to what was written. Once I discovered improvisation, this expanded a thousand-fold and my experience of spontaneous creativity was born.

On many occasions, when playing with a group, the experience might be somewhat mechanical, just trying to lay down what needs to be laid down at the right time. Sometimes I am thinking very intellectually, consciously aware of the chords and melodies that should be outlined to sound “correct” for a particular style or song.

But every now and then, when it is least expected, possibly during a solo, inspiration will strike and it seems as if I am not actually playing the music myself. The music seems to create itself and I am being led along for the ride, completely in the flow and the moment. At these times there is no conscious intellectual thought. The experience is more holistic and pervasive throughout my body, soul and mind. As Miles Davis once said, “you have to let the music get up in your body” (paraphrased). I can only imagine that if my skill level was higher that I’d have these holistic experiences more often.

Software Design
For most of my career I have been involved in the design of software systems in one role or another. In the early days when I was a junior programmer there was so much to learn that I did not think of it as a truly creative activity, especially compared to music. It was just a job that made money so that I could play music when I wanted.

I remember that I worked closed with a guy who seemed to be a very creative problem solver. He’d encounter extremely challenging problems and would seem to come up with algorithms very quickly. When I worked with him, I always felt that I could not really crack the solution and that I had to depend on him to formulate the algorithm which I could then code into being.

However, one day we were trying to design a data structure together and he was stumped. Somehow, an idea came into my mind that seemed obvious to me. When I told him he was ecstatic and told me that was very good. We went on to refine a design based on my insight. From this point on I had the confidence and continued to hone my ability to open my mind to solutions to problems rather than try to brute force a solution or feel like I had no ideas.

I began to relish the idea of thinking through a complex software system and come up with abstract concepts, data structures, communication pathways and user experience scenarios that had a good look and feel and satisfied customer needs. Sometimes the mental state needed was one resembling meditation. I needed silence and the ability to put my mind into a neutral state while thinking about the system passively, allowing ideas to flow without judgment so that I could try out different designs mentally and on paper.

Management
Once I became older and experienced in the software industry, I had both the desire and the opportunity to begin to manage and lead teams of gradually increasing size. I began to lose interest in the technical and creative challenges of software design and became fascinated with the challenges of leadership and management of technical products and development.

This leadership and management realm is where I currently spend most of my time. The experiences and techniques I learned earlier in my life have carried forward to help me progress in leadership roles. However, there are many more facets and dimensions that come into play.
In particular I have noticed a progression in myself from a mechanical style to a much more relaxed style that depends much more on my intuition than technical skill that I relied on in the early days of my management career. I get ideas of inspiration that are related to timing, personalities, team cohesion, management methodologies and other aspects of my daily work that seem to have a connection to the whole and the ideal, filtered to the culture or situation at hand.

I have found meditative practices to be especially useful in improving my process of creation in the various skills and qualities required for leadership and management.