What is your management style?

In the world where we live today, at any level of any organization, every one of us is expected to manage – managing him- or her-self, managing time, managing others, managing indirectly people interacting with us, professionally and personally. In a democratic world, being able to manage expectations, time, relationships… is the only way to survive and fully exist. In one day, every one of us probably plays ten to twelve different roles: being a time manager to ensure your children get to school on time, being an advisor with your husband or wife asking for help, being a negotiator with your boss or employees when conflicts arise…

So, all in all, how do you end up your day, caught in between so many roles and functions? There must be some form of a manager in you…

Well, in my opinion, despite the large number of roles you may play in a day, you end up rotating around three management styles. And you will juggle across the three, depending on the situation and most importantly, depending on your own personality and preferences: process management, project management, and people management.

Process Management

This management style applies to those of us who look for organization and customer value. Indeed, a process is the transformation of inputs into outputs, in an organized manner. In other words, a process is meant to create value in the inputs, so that the outputs consistently meet or exceed the customers’ expectations: the customers choose to pay the price of the transformation since it has brought the sought value, rather than buying the input components one by one and performing on their own the process to transform these inputs into the wanted outputs.

So, process managers organize their tasks to avoid wasting time and effort, and keep a constant focus on why they do what they do: the outcomes of what they do are driven by their own customers, i.e. the people who receive and use what comes out of their processes and tasks. The people management component is inherent to the fact that the manager should aim at aligning the team to deliver the process outputs rather than let a bunch of individuals doing their own tasks in a disconnected manner; and the project management component is inherent to the fact that process outputs, in order to create the value expected by the customers, must be delivered on time and money within ranges acceptable by the customers.

As such, if your leadership style is process management, you will whole-heartedly spend time with your teammates and colleagues to create bonds, sometimes at the expense of the individual personalities. And you will prefer delivering stunning results for your stakeholders, even if it sometimes means to let your roadmap slip, and use more budget than what you were expected to at the beginning of a project. The tendency can sometimes be to over-commit, as you will prefer to please your customers rather than realistically tell them you cannot deliver their demands.

Project management

If you are a project manager in your heart, you tend to focus on executing tasks, on time, and within budget. You can always be trusted to due diligently complete the tasks assigned to you on time; you are usually disciplined, you love to have a very detailed excel spreadsheet listing down the progress of each task, the percentage of completion, the status of each task from where they will derive, via complex arithmetical formulas, the overall status of the project. This results in building the confidence in your stakeholders that you know what you are doing, that the overall projects are in control. Once you promise something, people trust it will get done, or you would not have committed in the first place. As such, you seldom take risks and seldom deliver outstanding results – staying within the norms is your primary goal.

With regards to the process management component, project managers sometimes tend to forget why they are doing these tasks, which might result in the inability to adapt to their customers’ needs when they slightly change in the course of a project. Also, they struggle to keep the end in mind: they start building tasks list before defining the outcomes of the project for example. What guarantees then that all the tasks do deliver value to the stakeholders then?… With regards to the people management component, project managers often manage very well up, but seldom very well down. They manage up to ensure the company managers will give them the support they need while they perform their tasks, but this is not a management style meant to understand the nature of the people and adapt to their style. This is a rather selfish people management style since the people in this category manage people to promote themselves rather than to build strong human relationships over time. People who primarily belong to the project management category rather than the process management or people management categories are usually well valued by their managers, even if this can sometimes be a short-term appreciation. But they are hard to build strong relationships with their peers, which makes them difficult business partners, in spite of the fact that they are very reliable once they commit.

People management

Refusing conflicts and “violence”, refusing imposing constraints, refusing telling people what to do, but rather putting you at the service of others to develop their skills and help them grow through the tasks they do themselves, on their own: this is the foundation of servant leadership, the primary driver of people who primarily belong to the people management category. It requires being authentic in your management style. As a result, people who naturally possess this management style tend to be truly respected by their peers and subordinates, and they build their image in the eyes of the management through the word being spread by others rather than by telling themselves to their managers how good they are, or by promising to their stakeholders what they cannot deliver with the means given to them.

Authenticity being the primary feature of people managers, the second aspect that characterize them is their ability to motivate others: motivating others to collaborate in any type of teamwork, motivating others in being creating and innovative, motivating others in becoming over-achievers, motivating others in getting things done over time, motivating others in bringing their ideas for being challenged by the group in order to leverage a team to develop better ideas than what any individual may have. And the third aspect of people who are natural people managers lies in their ability to balance telling others what to do and letting people find out on their own – and sometimes fail – when it is appropriate.

However, people managers sometimes tend to forget that the deliverables can be as important as building the relationships with their colleagues. Thus, the process management component – in the sense of creating value in the eyes of the customers – can sometimes be left aside, and quickly destroy the human partnership that took so long to build. Also, they tend to let roadmaps slip as they may prefer to let people take the time to learn rather than delivering on time by telling them what to do. As a result, they do not systematically deliver what is expected from them on time, and they might not be trusted for the most critical projects that cannot afford to slip in time or budget.

A mix of the three styles

These three categories – or more accurately a combination of them – are, in my view, describing any management style. Every one of us uses a mix of the three, but has natural preferences in one of them, two for the lucky ones. What matters then is to know which one is your primary driver, and why you are weaker in the other two. And then work on adapting to what works best in every specific situation !

What is your preferred style? How do you find out when you have to use one more than the other? Share your own stories and help readers to improve their own management skills…