Don’t make yourself an idol.

Incredibly useful and sometimes radical recommendations E(nterpreneur) for quickly establishing communication with yourself and your team.

With this material, we begin a small cycle in which we will try to briefly outline recommendations for establishing communication for each management style according to Adizes’ classification. We understand that not everyone will have the time and opportunity to read the works of Adizes, in which he fully reveals the features of each style and all the nuances of the interaction of the carriers of different styles with each other, so we will collect the most important things to pay attention to in this cycle. We hope that we will be able to interest you as little as possible and add motivation to immerse yourself in the theory and methodology of Adizes.

E(nterpreneur) will open this cycle as the most vivid and at the same time problematic style in communication.

Acquaintance

So you passed the Adizes test and found out that the most pronounced management style in you is E(nterpreneur). What does this mean for you? Let’s try together with Dr. Adizes to draw your likely portrait in several large strokes. Get ready to get to know yourself.

Perhaps this acquaintance will not be very pleasant, because now the emphasis will be precisely on what prevents you from understanding others, and usually we tend not to notice our flaws, and a look from the side can be quite a surprise. You may not even want to recognize yourself. And it is possible that you really do not look exactly like this portrait due to the presence of high manifestation of other styles. In any case, remember that every handicap has a flip side that looks like a talent. And vice versa – if you have talent, know that somewhere on its reverse side is hiding a flaw that you do not notice. Let’s try to look into this mirror and then decide how crooked it is.

In any case, trust and respect for others and colleagues begins with trust and respect for ourselves, with accepting ourselves as we are. And the first step to acceptance is knowing yourself. So we open our eyes and look.

Perspective

First, you look at everything in a very general way, without paying attention to the details. You are an eagle that flies very high and sees for many kilometers around. It helps you to look far ahead and have a very broad perspective. Thanks to this, you notice many things ahead that are not visible to others, and you can inspire and motivate people by painting their future perspectives. But you can’t get anywhere if you don’t look under your feet. It is not enough to imagine the desired future, one must still walk the path to it, which is usually not a highway, but a narrow mountain path with treacherous stones underfoot and cliffs at the edges. This path runs along the earth’s surface and is actually much longer than it seems to you from above.

Reality

Secondly, for you, what you imagined is already a reality, and you are very surprised that it is not yet the same as you dreamed this night. But it really isn’t like that, and for it to become like that, it will take a lot more work, which is not done instantly.

Time

Due to your distance from the surface, time passes much faster in your imagination than it does in reality. Events happen and plans are carried out immediately after you imagine that it happened. But on the surface, everything takes time. Remember that your hour is roughly equivalent to six hours on the surface. Therefore, if it seems to you that something can be done in an hour, in reality it will take from 6 hours, and if it seems that in a week – it will take more than 6 weeks.

Warning 

Since everything happens to you instantly, you switch very quickly to new ideas and projects. You always have much more of them than you can actually complete. But while you were captivated by a new idea, someone on earth continues to implement all your previous ideas and faces all possible difficulties and risks – stopping on stones and falling off cliffs that are not visible to you from above.

Consent

When you say “yes”, it actually means “maybe”, because in an hour you can already imagine a new reality in which the previous “yes” does not make sense, or is not beneficial. Worse, you forget (or rather, your brain erases it to preserve the integrity of your identity) that you agreed to anything before, and you can’t even imagine that you could have said such a thing. This is when you say: “This is delusional! I couldn’t say that. You made something up, or you misunderstood me.”

What’s around?

Thanks to your characteristics, you perceive those people who are different from you in a certain way. Let’s look at these stereotypes and learn to catch the moment when they are triggered, so that we can eventually get out of their influence.

(P)roducer

Pleasantly fast and to the point, but almost always does something it shouldn’t in a weird way.

At first he seems very clever to you and you like his speed, but over time you see that he doesn’t really understand your brilliant ideas. He runs to do the task immediately, and quickly returns with the result, but not as you expected.

What really?

All right. He’s actually really smart. And he does what you told him. It’s just that you change targets very quickly in flight, and he runs all the way on the ground.

In turn, you appear to him as a volatile, unreliable weirdo who often lies and is not responsible for his words.

His main question is “What (should we) do?”, while you are more interested in “Why?” and “When?”. His time is now, while yours is always in the future.

Appreciate it. He is the one who will turn your fantasies into reality if you take the time to clearly describe your goals and build a sustainable plan and find the strength to stick to that plan to the end.

(A)dministrator

Too careful and slow. It tells you why and where your ideas disrupt the existing system, and why they will not be possible to implement in the way you imagined. It really annoys you.

His main question is “How (are we going to do it)?”. It does not seem important to you at all, because the main thing for you is that the new reality is already present in your imagination, which means that it can be created. Are you more interested in why it still hasn’t been done and when it will be?

You are also annoyed by his manner of holding long meetings. What can be discussed for two hours, when everything is already clear?

What really?

His perceived slowness is due to the fact that he perfectly knows the complex system that you yourself once created and tries to preserve it. This is necessary because only a mature system is capable of creating something useful. A system that is being rebuilt does not produce anything, its energy is directed at rebuilding its own structure. If there were no administrators, you would rebuild the system endlessly as long as there were enough resources.

Appreciate it. Thanks to him, your ideas are not just implemented, but also exist for a long time, creating changes according to their purpose.

(I)integrator

Even slower and more confusing than the administrator. Most of the time it seems to you that he does nothing at all. This annoys you, because the company is already lacking active people, and you think that in his place there could be someone more useful to implement your ideas.

But for some reason, there are always a lot of people around him who are happy to turn to him for advice. He chats with them for hours, wasting not only his time, but also their useful time on small talk. What so useful can he tell them? You should never dive into it. For now, you agree to put up with him because at least he’s not too disruptive unlike the administrator.

What really?

This person is the most useful for you, because by his activities he creates an environment that holds the system at the moment when such desired changes for you are implemented. The fact is that changes always disintegrate the existing system for some time to give it the opportunity to change its form and become something else. At this moment, it is very vulnerable. If there are no forces to keep it from finally disintegrating, there is a good chance that all or parts of it will be lost.

An integrator builds a superstructure between people, the existence of which does not depend on what each person is doing at any given moment. They create the same trust and respect that allows communication and all other processes in the company to grow. They create a sense of security in people and thus motivate them to open up and trust each other. This process can be quite lengthy because it depends on people who change very slowly and only f they want itl, so the results of the integrator’s work are not noticeable in the short term. But when you say that your company has a corporate culture, know that this is the result of the integrator’s daily hard work, which only seems simple and easy.

What to do?

Slow down and occasionally come down to earth. This way you will see the environment where your ideas are realized and better understand those involved in the process of their implementation.

Take a dangerous mountain trail to the summit with the (I)ntegrator team (P)roducer using the map created by the (A)dministrator. Feel the distance you have to cover and the impact on your muscles and speed on steep slopes. Observe how individual team members perceive these difficulties differently and how the (I)ntegrator helps them cope and keep the team together and motivated to move forward and upward together.

Restrain yourself when you want to jump ahead despite the efforts of those around you to first lay out a clear and safe route to the finish line. Respect their work and themselves. Everything they demand of you (and what constantly annoys you) – long meetings, endless iterations of agreements, fussing over the smallest details, etc. – is really necessary for the company to move forward and upward along dangerous paths continuously and rhythmically, maintaining its breath and avoiding injury.

Of course, from time to time, any business needs to take risks – you need to go where competitors won’t go, break the rules, and jump over steep streams and chasms. But all this must be done after coordinating the jump with the entire team so that all the “muscles” of the system work for the jump, so that everyone is ready for a possible hard landing. If this is the case, your jumps can be much longer than when everyone jumps with their eyes closed.

Take yourself off the air. Due to your activity, you can talk for hours and often try to bend people to your opinion by not letting them get a word in until they get tired of the endless stream of your arguments. You think you’re persuading them, but this is a false notion. They just don’t have the strength to resist you. Remember that a victory in an argument obtained in this way will not benefit the company. Create a strict regulation for yourself and others and stick to it. Let everyone have equal opportunities to speak. Don’t interrupt others and don’t show your contempt, even if you think the speaker is talking nonsense and you’re wasting your time. Force yourself to listen when you’re not talking. It’s hard, but you’ll get through it if you really want to.

Learn to independently identify the significant ideas from your own and reject those that can be rejected. This will give important projects more resources and reduce the team’s futile oscillations around the main course. Believe me, these fluctuations exhaust people more than a steep but steady climb up Everest.

And above all, don’t think that everything in the company happens solely because of you. Don’t even think about it. “Don’t make yourself an idol.” You do play an important role in moving the company forward, but without everyone else, without a cohesive synergetic team, you wouldn’t get past the first obstacle. You would be left behind to dream about how great it would be if you could overcome this obstacle alone.

Hopefully, you are not too disturbed by the revelations about yourself and the sometimes harsh style of information delivery, and you are ready to work to better understand your environment and become a unifying and motivating factor for it.

Most likely, you now think that the recommendations we provided are too general for direct application in life. This is true. It is impossible to fit all the nuances and details of such a complex process into a relatively short text. However, these recommendations will be useful to you if you take them to heart and work hard to apply them in practice.

The path will be overcome by the one who walks it

© Createria Team, 2023