# Adizes Four Management Styles SEE ALSO: [[Motivation Opportunity Ability (MOA)]] RELATED FUNCTIONS: [[Governance]], [[People Operations]] <div class=iframe-container> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VnvoT1S8BjA" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div> ## Producing, Administrating, Entrepreneuring, Integrating (PAEI) ==The following text is excerpted from "Ichak Adizes Prototypical Management Styles" - http://paei.wikidot.com/adizes-methodology== Management consultant Ichak Adizes describes four "concern structures" that capture dominant energies and actions for different styles of management. All four are essential to a thriving enterprise. But each of the four is in tension with the other three. The framework suggests that each of us has one dominant style, often with a lesser emphasis on a second style that we've learned over time. The lesson of this framework is that no individual can hold all four styles at once, but diverse teams can (and should) understand and make room for all four. Adizes also suggests that the necessary combination of styles changes over the lifecycle of an enterprise. ## Tension One: Effectiveness and efficiency Two competing values of an enterprise: *effectiveness* and *efficiency*. These two values are different, and not entirely compatible, in that both cannot be maximized simultaneously. - effectiveness = “obtaining results which somebody needs” - efficiency = “conducting activities with minimal waste” Finding the appropriate trade-off between mobilization (effectiveness) and conservation (efficiency) of energy is necessary for every decision. Striking a workable balance between effectiveness and efficiency in the attainment of our goals is important for reaching a quality decision. ## Tension Two: Short-Term and Long-Term Decisions can be effective and efficient in the short run, but disastrous over a long run. Expediency can resolve short-term issues, but can also leave the enterprise vulnerable to long-arc requirements of health. Example: Two staff members in conflict? Fire them. Problem solved. ![[1-Adizes-Competing_Values_PAEI.gif|400]] ## Four Management Styles (Concern Structures) - *Producing* is the activity of attaining short term or immediate results - *Administrating* is the activity of minimizing waste in ongoing activities - *Entrepreneuring* is the activity of seeking out and recognizing new opportunities or new orientations to the environment - *Integrating* is the activity of coordinating shared attention and identification Each concern requires decision-makers to adopt certain preoccupations, motivations, values, instincts and priorities. But due to personal preferences, some concerns appeal to us more than others. We each have biases towards or away from different styles of concern. Furthermore, we are very unlikely to be equally skilled at solving problems in all four styles of concern, because talent in one biases against talent in others (e.g. a talent for quick, snap decisions and a talent for long, careful meticulous decisions are hard to maximize within the same person). ### Producers Producers are high energy, active people. They like to be busy all the time, and their interests are overwhelmingly concrete. They love to attain tangible results, and to attain them often. They feel highly rewarded every time they can declare a task complete. Producers dislike fussy details, ambiguous situations or abstract considerations. They have little patience with future-oriented tasks and wild brainstorming. They are much more interested in getting a task done than they are in ensuring that their colleagues are happy with the way it got done. They will denigrate these kinds of interpersonal concerns, feeling that the rapid attainment of concrete results justifies the suspension of other concerns. This can make them unpleasant to be around at times, but they are responsible for driving many organizational achievements. Producers help us stop talking about solutions and start implementing on them. ### Administrators Administrators are quiet, cautious people who are less concerned with what we should do than how we should do it. They need to know what process or procedure we are planning to use before they can join in on the action. They are extremely uncomfortable with ambiguity or uncertainty, and they are made uneasy by unstructured environments and by group reliance on spontaneity and improvisation. Unplanned activities feel distressingly chaotic to them. Administrators prefer to construct a system of routines and conventions for ongoing activities, so they can be conducted in the smoothest and least disruptive manner possible. In organizational contexts, they bring stability and order to collective activities. They are slow and careful in decision-making because they track each detail to make certain it is handled properly. They also weigh the impact of any proposed changes on the entire stabilizing network of rules that they maintain. They may say “no” to new proposals as a reflex, in order to slow things down so they can think through the proposal and deliver a revised opinion once they have worked through their concerns. Administrators may see Producers as sloppy loose canons wreaking havoc upon organizational operations. Producers may see Administrators as fussy obstructionists. ### Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurs are easily typecast as dreamers. They are not interested in the results we are attaining today, and would rather focus on bigger potential achievements in the future. Entrepreneurs feel stifled by the demands of ongoing activities. The here-and-now is a trap. Entrepreneurs are energized by novel challenges, exciting opportunities, new possibilities and future achievements. They are talkative and charismatic. Their excitement is highly infectious, and they love being at the center of attention. They are flamboyant, expressive and very easily bored. They can come up with several very different grand future schemes every few minutes, when inspired. Entrepreneurs scan the environment constantly for changes, in their drive for novelty. They love aligning themselves with new developments, and fomenting more change in those new directions. They track activities at a very high level of abstraction, looking for trends and anomalies. Producers are highly skeptical of this abstract exploration of mere possibilities, where there is a clear to-do list for the here and now. Administrators see Entrepreneurs as either irrelevant or dangerous. Entrepreneurs want to dramatically change the whole game an organization is playing, with no detailed sense of what the new rules will be. This cannot be squared easily with Administrator concerns about how to best do what we are currently doing. Entrepreneurs are the only managers who seek out and stimulate major changes. They are easily dismissed, but it is fatal for organizations to shut them out. Change is inevitable, and the structure of Entrepreneurial agency allows them to help the whole team anticipate and adapt to change in a timely, proactive manner. ### Integrators Integrators are team-builders with the organization. They manage the interpersonal, interdepartmental, supplier and client relationships that allow the organization to function together as one organic whole. They attend to peoples’ needs, views, motivators, complaints and conflicts to foster a constructive working environment. Integrators help people focus on shared goals. They are less concerned about formal roles and titles, and more concerned that people pull together, each and all doing whatever it takes to achieve their collective mission. The measure of an Integrator’s success is his or her ability to take a vacation. He or she can step away from the organization for periods of time because it is well Integrated and functions as an organic whole. In meetings where Producers are pushing for a quick decision about what to do, Administrators are slowing things down to make sure we carefully consider how best to proceed, and Entrepreneurs are questioning why we are even doing any of that now, when a new long-term plan is more attractive, Integrators are thinking about who we are, who is in the room and who our other stakeholders are. Integrators are trying to align concerns and interests, turning us into a combined and unified (organically integrated) force, in touch (integrated) with our social surroundings. Producers do not have adequate patience for integration work. Their impatience is important for rapid task execution, but they typically tolerate damage to team integration in order to get things done. Administrators are more abstract in their focus than Integrators. In administrative mode, persons are defined according to roles specified in policies and procedures. No procedure defines the unique elements of interpersonal or group interaction that Integrators are so attentive to and aware of. Entrepreneurs are also less concrete than Integrators. They can get lost in hypothetical futures. They prefer to be at the center of attention rather than sharing the spotlight, let alone stepping into the wings to observe and support others. None of these other three management styles focus on people in the way that Integrators do. They all focus in one way or another on tasks. Integration is the only function focused on the organization itself as a group of people pulling together to exert more power as a team than any of them could do individually. ## Extremes The complete loss of even one style results in mismanagement and predictable patterns of failure, but the clearest and most visible forms of mismanagement arise when full reliance is placed on one and only one management style. All other styles and priorities are denigrated and disrespected. These mismanagement styles help to highlight the competing values within the model. ### The Lone Ranger (Producer Gone Wild) The Lone Ranger is a perpetually busy manager who only cares about results. Lone Rangers are perfectly willing to trample over peoples’ feelings, to violate proper procedure, and to cut short discussions about possibilities just so that known tasks can be executed quickly. Quality of execution matters much less than task completion. Lone Rangers prefer to do all tasks themselves, because for any one task it is easier and quicker for them to do it themselves rather than training someone else to do it. This has the ironic outcome that Lone Rangers – who are interested in rapid execution to the exclusion of all else – end up becoming bottlenecks in the organization where work sometimes grinds to a near halt. Lone Rangers do not build effective work teams around them. Their employees tend to become simple errand-runners for the Lone Ranger as he or she manages tasks by crisis. Lone Rangers leave work late and arrive early the next day in order to get things done. Their employees leave early and arrive late, because there is essentially nothing for them to do. Lone Rangers make poor managers because they try to manage tasks directly, rather than managing the team that does the tasks. Their strong preference for concrete, tangible results and their inability to assess other kinds of outcomes leads to this untenable situation. Lone Rangers place a severe limitation on the capacity of a team to grow. The team never gains the capacity to do more work than the Lone Ranger him or herself is capable of doing. ### The Bureaucrat (Administrator Gone Wild) Unlike Lone Rangers, Bureaucrats do not care about concrete or tangible results in the slightest. However, they are extremely concerned with how things are done, with procedures, rules and practices. They spend their time scrutinizing behavior on their teams to make sure that prescribed methods are being followed. If an employee was to circumvent a rule or two to accomplish some important task, this would be a disaster. The Bureaucrat would devote all energies to punishing the wrongdoer for side-stepping a rule, completely ignoring the important results that this side-stepping made possible. No results in the world would justify “taking shortcuts”. Just because taking shortcuts worked this time does not mean it will work next time. Rather, total chaos and an unspeakable cascade of complications might occur, violating rule after rule after rule. Better to follow the rules – that’s the point. The rules say we should follow the rules, and so those are the rules we should follow. It’s the only way. Bureaucrats hate improvisation and uncertainty in work behavior. They develop and release policies and procedures for everything, firmly believing that any policy is better than no policy around a task. Subordinates are expected to demonstrate that they followed proper procedure in everything they do, and innovation or improvisation is either discouraged or positively punished. The rules are seen as the guarantee that the team will not get into trouble. Bureaucrats end up managing the rules, with no attention paid to the experiences of stakeholders outside of the rules. The organization may become insolvent and go under, but it will do so on time and according to regulations. Everyone in bureaucratic organizations leaves work on time and arrives on time the next day. In the interim, they manage to look busy and keep things neat and well-organized, whether or not they are doing work that actually delivers any real value to internal or external stakeholders. The irony of bureaucracy is that the desire for order leads to such a massive proliferation of rules and policies that people become disoriented. The drive for order produces chaos, and the destruction that rules were put in place to prevent ends up sweeping away the whole work unit, which has stopped delivering value to stakeholders. ### The Arsonist (Entrepreneur Gone Wild) In their own minds, Arsonist are visionaries, about to revolutionize the world and garner the attention of all due to their genius and originality. Their favorite event is the announcement: the announcement of a new grand plan, great vision, new direction, innovative campaign, etc. They love these announcements and the commotion that they cause. They love to see their employees cheer and scramble to reorganize themselves in order to enact a new vision. The problem is, after a short period of time, once all the excitement dies down and the hard work of implementing the plans begins in earnest, Arsonists begin to get bored. In their boredom, they begin to dream up new grand schemes and new directions. This all builds up to a new announcement and a new great vision for employees to follow. The old projects they had been giving their attention to are now seen as irrelevant. Since this happens with great regularity, employees are constantly forced to change directions. Their manager only appears among them to start new fires, watching everyone scramble to cope with them. Employees are eventually forced to ignore their manager – to applaud enthusiastically to newly announced ideas, but to ignore the substance of those new announcements and to continue working on some project or another to the point of completion. The irony of the Arsonist is that someone who craves being at the center of everyone’s attention and esteem ends up being irrelevant, marginalized and ignored by all around them. ### The Super Follower (Integrator Gone Wild) Super Followers are consummate political animals. They often have no sense of any of the issues that are at stake, but they have an extremely strong awareness of the conditions for political survival surrounding those issues. Super Followers thus do not stand for or represent anything in particular. They simply echo or parrot back the mood and language of the powerful or the dominant clique. Super Followers are sometimes so good at following that they do so before anyone has a chance to lead. They will gauge the mood, tone and emerging consensus of a meeting, and then stand up and articulate that consensus as if it was their own contribution. They will only do this when they feel certain of the consensus, however. Super Followers are conflict averse, so if they are confronted with some residual conflict while they try to articulate the consensus, they may shift their articulated position on a dime, so as always to seem to be in agreement with whoever they are interacting with. This kind of face-to-face agreement characterizes all of their interactions with important or powerful people. The issues don’t matter. Being on the right side is the only thing they care about. Super Followers like one particular type of subordinate; one who listens in on conversations, who has friends throughout the organization, and who feeds this information to the Super Follower to help him or her in political intrigue – a gossip. Super Followers do occasionally become leaders of organizations, and when they do, they still seek out a powerful reference group to please. There will be a set of stakeholders, constituents or commentators that the Super Follower will try to impress and appease. They “govern by opinion poll”, taking no particular stand on any issues until it is clear what the reference group wants to hear. It does not matter to the Super Follower if the organization drifts away from its actual mandate as a result of all of this impression management. It only matters if powerful onlookers criticize the Super Follower for allowing this drift to happen. They way things are is of no concern to the Super Follower. All that matters is the way things look. The irony of course is that a sole focus on form over function leads to scandalous failures of function that can expose a Super Follower for what he or she is, a confused mismanager with narrow priorities interested primarily in their own position, rather than the good of the whole organization. By worrying exclusively about looking good, they end up looking pathetically bad. ## Transcript What if I told you there were four types of managers and that you were probably dominantly one of them? Hi, I'm Andrew Taylor. I'm on the faculty of Arts Management at American University in Washington,  DC And this is ArtsManaged, a series of resources about Arts Management: what it is, how it works, how you can get better at it. In this video, we're exploring the management framework of management consultant and scholar Ichak Adizes. He also calls it a "concern structure" because he tries to describe four dominant concern structures that each kind of manager might bring to their work. And the purpose here is not to suggest there's just four kinds of people in the world or the working world. The purpose is to suggest that each of us brings a dominant concern to the work; a dominant way of paying attention; and a dominant understanding of what it means to be productive in the workplace. Each of these four approaches is essential to a successful and thriving enterprise. But each of them also lives in tension to the three others. So it's quite unusual, in fact probably impossible, for one person to be fully dominant in all four structures. More likely, according to Adizes, you have one dominant structure, and then you have a second you might have learned to be capable in over time. So let's talk about each of them. And you can listen to see which sounds most resonant to you and the energy you bring to your work. Producing has a primary focus on getting things done. It's about immediate and tangible action. It's about checking off the things on your list and adding more things to that list to get done next. The producing energy isn't particularly comfortable with discussion or reflection or abstraction. The goal is to move and to move forward. And to get things into the world. Administrating has a focus not on doing things, but on doing things right. Administrating energy tends to be more quiet and cautious. It is uncomfortable in spaces that are unstructured or improvisational or spontaneous. The administrating energy is really about doing things efficiently, rather than doing things quickly. The Entrepreneuring energy is about looking into the distant future, imagining what might be next and how the world is changing, and how the work will change as well. Entrepreneuring doesn't tend to be interested in today's tasks, but rather tomorrow's possibilities. The Entrepeneuring energy tends to be charismatic and talkative. It draws people to it because it talks about a future that's exciting and new. And finally, Integrating is a focus primarily on people, on the team, the community, on listening to motivations and emotions and energies, on what pulls people together and makes them feel like they're part of a team. So that gives us four primary concern structures: P, A, E, and I. Producing, Administrating, Entrepreneuring, and Integrating. According to Adizes' extreme shorthand, "P's do, A's think, I's listen, E's talk." There's lots to learn and explore about these four ways of being and doing as a manager. And maybe one of them is already speaking to you as a primary concern for you. If not, it might be worth thinking: Where do you go when you're under stress? Where does your attention and energy go when things are going sideways? Do you double down and get the work done that's in front of you? Are you a producing energy? Do you pause and think about what's the better system to manage this process? Rather than getting it done now, let's get it done right? Making you an administrating energy? Do you focus on a distant future and say, Well, maybe what is in front of me now is really not the useful thing. Maybe there's something bold and new and different I should be thinking about? Or is your impulse to check in with others and your team and see how they're doing and what they're doing and how they're finding focus in their own energy in this moment? Another way to explore your own dominant energy is to think about the things in the workplace that really drive you nuts. What are the responses or approaches or people even that lead you to get really frustrated and want to walk out of the room? Often, that's going to be an energy that is contrary to your dominant focus. So it's difficult for you to understand, and it actually stands in the way of you doing the work the way you want to do it. The tensions at work in this framework, according to Adizes, are on one hand, effectiveness and efficiency, and on the other hand, short term and long term. Adizes defines effectiveness as "obtaining results that somebody needs." And he defines efficiency as "conducting activities with minimal waste." So you can imagine that both Producing and Entrepreneuring focus on effectiveness, on doing the right things, while Administrating and Integrating focus on efficiency: doing things right. On the other dimension, you can imagine a short-term and a long-term focus, as well, that would be in tension with each other. For the short term, Producing and Administrating both focus on short term outcomes: either doing the right things or doing things right. However, in the long term, you really need to focus on the distance and how that distance might be achieved over time. Here, the Entrepreneuring energy and the Integrating energy are really important. Entrepreneurs look to the distant future and imagine what might be true next. Integrators tend to think about the community and the people around them and how they might be more coherent, cohesive, and connected in the ways they work together. And these also suggest that each of these energies and, in fact, different combinations of these energies, are essential over the changing lifecycle of any organization or endeavor. And we'll talk about lifecycles in another video. And a final way of exploring these four concern structures or management styles is to think about the extremes. And Adizes describes four cartoonish, unrealistic extremes that really bring the message home. See if any of these resonate with you and your own work, or the people in your organization that drive you nuts. First, the extreme of the Producing energy is the Lone Wolf. This is an individual that moves forward despite others, despite process, despite the visions of the future. They just keep working, and they take all the work and keep it for themselves. The extreme of the Administrating energy is the Bureaucrat, the person who stops everything all the time to make sure everyone is following process and procedure and protocol. The extreme of the Entrepreneuring energy is the Arsonist. They basically set everything on fire all the time, because the current and present need is uninteresting to them. And what matters is bursting that apart and moving to what's next. And finally, the extreme of the Integrating energy is what Adizes called the Super Follower. This is somebody who will move in any in every direction, depending on which way the wind blows, which way the group's moving, which way that they need to move to fit in. So the point of this framework is not to suggest you should excel in every one of the four concern structures. The point is, in fact, to say you can't. You're going to have a dominant energy that you go to when you're stressed, that actually moves you forward and contributes to the work of the organization. And you may have a secondary area that's not quite as strong, but that you've learned over time. But you won't have three and you won't have four. And your purpose therefore is to find and join and find ways of working with a complex team of diverse energies and interests, where together you can get the work of the enterprise done in the short term and the long term, both effectively and efficiently. And you're going to annoy and obstruct each other all along the way. Because these energies conflict with each other. They can't quite live in partnership and harmony all the time. But that's the way the world works. And your goal as a team with different strengths is to make that world work for you and the purpose you have together. --- ## Sources - Adizes, I. (1979). *How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis*. Homewood, Illinois: Dow Jones-Irwin. - Adizes, I. (1991). *Mastering Change: The Power of Mutual Trust and Respect in Personal Life, Family Life, Business and Society*. Santa Monica, California: Adizes Institute Publications. - Adizes, I. (1999). *Managing Corporate Lifecycles: How and Why Corporations Grow and Die and What to Do About It (Revised Ed.)*. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. - Adizes, I. (2004a). *The Ideal Executive: Why You Cannot Be One and What to Do About It*. Santa Barbara, California: Adizes Institute Publishing. - Adizes, I. (2004b). *Leading the Leaders: How to Enrich Your Style of Management and Handle People Whose Style is Different from Yours*. Santa Barbara, California: Adizes Institute Publishing. - Adizes, I. (2004c). *Management/Mismanagement Styles: How to Identify a Style and What To Do About It*. Santa Barbara, California: Adizes Institute Publishing. - Aldrich, H. E. (1979). *Organizations and Environments*. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. - Andrews, K. R. (1971). *The Concept of Corporate Strategy*. Homewood, Illinois: Dow Jones-Irwin. - Chandler, A. D. (1962). *Strategy and structure: Chapters in the history of American industrial enterprise*. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. - Peters, T. J., & Waterman, R. H. (1982). *In search of excellence: Lessons from America's best-run companies*. New York: Harper & Row. - Szilagyi, A. D., & David M. Schweiger. (1984). “Matching Managers to Strategies: A Review and Suggested Framework”. *The Academy of Management Review*, 9(4), 626-637. - Tichy, N. M. (1982). “Managing change strategically: The technical, political, and cultural keys”. *Organizational Dynamics*, Autumn, 59-80. ## Tags (click to view related pages) #frameworks #functions/people_operations #functions/governance #video #sapling