How knowledge of management styles can help you

Hey, my name is Eva and I have been leading the Strategic HR department for the last 4 years in Quadcode company.

Today, I want to share how the management styles by Adizes can be used from the perspective of HR and management (even if you don’t use anything else in his methodology).

Briefly, I’ll describe the four management types by Adizes:

Producer (P) — focused on results here and now. These are people for whom achieving results as quickly as possible is the most important thing in their work.

Administrator (A) — focused on processes. These are people who can create a completely clear system with a table for each process with a sense of purpose and organization.

Entrepreneur (E) — these are people with very far-reaching plans. They build plans and see the world around them as it is in their head.

Integrator (I) — these employees are primarily focused on people. Their focus is on communication and the connection of people to each other.

An analogy that may help to understand this:

When an Entrepreneur decides to build a house, he has a complete picture in his head of what the house should look like at the end. Administrators will organize the processes of purchasing materials and work schedules. Producers will work quickly and focus on the result — pouring the foundation, putting up walls, etc. And, Integrators who will build the right communication between all participants and help resolve conflicts.

According to Adizes, quality management cannot exist without any of these elements. The surprise is that no one person can contain all four types.

So, what do you do about this in practice?

Ok, the last piece of theory here. Because the most interesting thing is that all these types differ greatly. To make it easier to inderstand, I visualized it:

You can see that every type has its focus and it may be absolutely different. Let’s take, for example, the Producer and the Administrator and compare them:

- The Producer has a high speed of decision-making, while Integrators are slower and require more time.
- Producers are more focused on results, while Integrators are focused on the process.
- Also, the Producer’s approach is more structured, unlike Integrators.
- Only from a perspective, both focus on local things, like a specific process, task, or project.

What conclusion can we draw?

That these guys have a higher risk of difficulties in interacting at any stage of joint work. Whether it’s the Producer’s impatience due to speed or the Integrator’s irritation that they’re not following the process — it’s already a question of real interaction between two people.

If the conflict lies around these differences (which is not uncommon), it is necessary to pay attention to this and show that everyone is looking at it from their perspective. And it makes the team stronger, not weaker, allowing them to see more together than individually. The only thing that matters is finding a way to interact.

Let me give you an example: In one of the cases, we had employees who differed in speed (those Producer and Administrator). The Producer could not come to terms with the fact that the Administrator didn’t answer fast enough, thought too much, and never gave an immediate answer. As a result, when resolving the conflict, we discussed together how each of them makes decisions, how much time they need, and why, and found a solution — the Administrator explicitly says: “I think” when additional time is needed, and the Producer can calmly focus on his work while the Administrator thinks — checking the work chat, answering e-mails, etc. It turned out that such a simple action was enough to make the employees look at their communication differently.

We have encountered conflicts due to differences in these styles more than once. Both between managers and employees and between employees themselves. In the majority of cases, they can be resolved, even if not on the first try.

Good luck to you in resolving such conflicts and any others!