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The Type B Manager: Leading Successfully in a Type A World, by Victor Lipman
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In The Type B Manager, Victor Lipman offers a unique lens through which to view the challenging problems of management. While management has long been considered the realm of Type A individuals—hard-driving, competitive high achievers—all too often these high-intensity traits aren’t effective when it comes to motivating your employees. Many characteristics of Type B individuals—being more relaxed, less competitive, more reflective, slower to anger—can be considered “people skills” that better influence motivation and productivity. And successful management after all is the practice of accomplishing work through other people.
In a business landscape where 70 percent of employees are disengaged and not working at full productive capacity, Lipman focuses on practical tactical aspects of management viewed through a Type B lens, including:
· Motivating and developing employees
· Handling conflict, and
· Engendering trust and respect
He examines specific skills, behaviors, and situations where a Type B mindset is advantageous and suggests ways that self-described Type A managers can boost their effectiveness by adopting Type B approaches—and vice versa.
- Sales Rank: #1200024 in Books
- Published on: 2015-08-04
- Released on: 2015-08-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.55" h x .75" w x 5.80" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
Review
Publishers Weekly05/04/2015
Think “manager” and you probably get a mental image of Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross: a domineering, aggressive, highly stressed executive. Lipman, former manager at a Fortune 500 company and a Forbes and Psychology Today contributor, wants to change this perception. While the dynamic Type A executive is often perceived as the most accomplished and efficient, Lipman argues that a calm, low-key personality can be just as good, or even better. After being passed over for a promotion because of his not-typically-managerial personality, he created this book to help readers become better managers, no matter their personality types. According to Lipman, “Type B” managers are likely to value relaxation over competitiveness, to create closer and easier relationships, to maintain consistent high standards, and to value earning employee trust and respect. Lipman provides concrete advice on how Type B managers can lead by example, manage challenging employees, and navigate conflict—all by utilizing those personality traits historically considered un-leaderly. This is an excellent resource for leaders who don’t fit the mold, and for upper managers who need to fill leadership positions. Agent: Janet Rosen, Sheree Bykofsky Associates. (Aug.)
Library Journal06/01/2015
One of the common misconceptions in business is that the perfect candidate for management demonstrates the classic attributes of the type A personality: competitive, driven, and demanding. Writer and management consultant Lipman examines core principles from a relational standpoint and reveals that some traits commonly touted as essential for managers actually do more harm than good. In 30 short chapters, the author provides a solid argument that the most successful leaders must also exhibit type B characteristics. Some of these qualities include being risk averse, highly analytical, and willing to listen to others. Filled with case studies, sidebars on management techniques, and bulleted lists of best practices, each chapter also includes a management insight summary. This work expands upon the research presented in Susan Cain's Quiet and Jennifer B. Kahnweiler's The Introverted Leader to provide a solid argument for the importance of thoughtful leadership. VERDICT Lipman's take on the characteristics of a strong leader provides a simple solution to some of the most common employee disengagement issues.—John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston
Booklist
The hard-driving, competitive personality of Type A managers is essential to business success. Lipman debunks that assumption, arguing that while competitiveness is necessary for success, a manager with a more communicative style and calm demeanor (Type B) is actually more effective. Lipman cites Phil Jackson, the NBA coach known for his Zen management style, and Warren Buffet, known for his modesty and tendency to delegate to those more knowledgeable than himself, as examples of highly effective managers who don't fit the image of the hard-charging executive. He examines the key functions of management and the personality traits needed for effective managers. Lipman points to research showing that people leave managers, not companies. Unhappy employees are less productive than they could be and are more likely to leave if and when they can. And the thing that makes them most unhappy is a domineering, unreasonable boss. Drawing on 24 years as a manager in a Fortune 500 company and research on psychology and management, Lipman offers anecdotes and insight on how to balance drive with the people skills needed to motivate employees to achieve success.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2015 Booklist
About the Author
Victor Lipman has over two decades of Fortune 500 frontline and executive management experience. He’s a regular contributor to Forbes and Psychology Today, and has his own consulting firm, Howling Wolf Management Training LLC.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
Whether you’re a supervisor on the shop floor or an executive in the C-suite, you have an enormous amount of power over the employees who report to you. Think about it: You’re often the person, other than perhaps a significant other or parent, who has the biggest impact on your employees’ minute-to-minute, day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month existence. If you’re not working remotely (which only a small minority of the workforce is), your employees will probably see you often: in meetings, around the office or job site, at the watercooler or in the cafeteria, or simply whenever you’re discussing whatever it is they’re working on. You likely control their compensation and the way others in management perceive their job performance—in short, their livelihood.
A good relationship with a manager makes a bad job bearable, but a bad relationship with a manager can make a good job a misery.
So what makes a good manager? Are some personality types better suited for it than others? Given that management, at its core, involves accomplishing work through other people, the relationship between employee and manager is of central importance. People have to want to do work for others; even compensation and recognition have their limits. So what exactly are the personality traits that make others want to do their best for you? What are the qualities that make you successful as a manager?
It’s a deceptively simple question because one thing we do know is that management isn’t a simple job. Research has made it clear that there’s currently an epidemic of employee disengagement. Numerous studies, as we’ll see in more detail, indicate that between 60 and 70 percent of employees are “disengaged”—management code for not emotionally connected to their organizations and therefore in all likelihood not working at full productive capacity. If being a manager were easy, we’d never see such numbers.
—
As a young manager being considered for executive ranks at a Fortune 500 company many years ago, I had the same odd conversation, with only minor changes in phrasing, with several executives on different occasions. When discussing my future, the dialogue went like this:
Senior executive: “I just don’t know about you. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but you don’t seem like a manager. You just don’t seem like executive material.”
To which I’d normally respond: “Why—what exactly is it that makes you say that?”
The answer would be: “I don’t know . . . you seem too quiet, too soft-spoken, too calm—not authoritative enough.”
By then I was managing complex projects like the company’s annual report, working with a variety of people at all organizational levels—from CEOs and CFOs to product experts, accountants, designers, and printers. So I’d ask, “But doesn’t it make more sense not to judge my personality, but to judge results? Do people generally like working for me? Do I get things done? Am I able to deliver large projects on time and on budget?”
And the concluding answer would be: “Yes, that’s true, but I still just don’t know. . . .”
Over time my own managers came to accept, for the most part, my personal style, my quietness, my soft-spokenness, my lack of excitability—in short, the absence of what are often called classic Type A personality characteristics. I ended up spending twenty-four years in management, becoming a vice president, and routinely overseeing advertising, marketing, and communications programs with annual budgets over $20 million. But the point here isn’t about me. Like most people who spend decades in management I had successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses, good days and bad. I made so many mistakes over the years I used to say I could no longer remember the first couple hundred. It was only about a quarter century later that I began to think more about those earlier conversations, the puzzlement over my personal style, and what it meant about the common perceptions of managers and executives that we’ve so often come to expect.
Excellent managers come in all shapes and sizes. Like snowflakes, no two are exactly alike. Two of the most widely respected of the past half century, for example, have revealingly unique personalities. Phil Jackson, “Lord of the Rings” (a reference to the eleven NBA championship rings he’s won as coach of the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers), is known for using an unorthodox blend of basketball wisdom, Zen Buddhism, and Lakota Sioux philosophy to bring his teams to peak performance. Warren Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha,” legendary investor with a net worth of over $60 billion, still lives in his first home, purchased for $31,500 in 1957. Though Jackson has been fortunate to coach some of the greatest basketball players in history (Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kobe Bryant), it was only when these supremely gifted individuals bought into Jackson’s highly personal vision of team harmony that talent was translated into rings. Similarly, Buffett, who possesses one of the most incisive business minds ever, is known for his insistence on surrounding himself with the absolute best and brightest people he can and then backing off and giving them wide latitude to follow their own instincts. So much so that he’s been called the “Delegator in Chief.”
Neither of these enormously successful individuals conformed to any preconceived notions of how managers or coaches or executives should think or act. They both forged their own unique styles.
As a longtime manager, and one who’s been fascinated for decades by both the challenges and satisfaction that management can bring, I have no desire to write a management textbook. But what I do want to do is explore from a manager’s perspective, an insider’s perspective, some of the key functions of management, the real pain points of management, and examine the personality traits that help you succeed as a manager—to better understand why some people are successful and others aren’t. What you’ll find, I believe, is that many of our most commonly held assumptions about what makes a successful manager are just plain wrong.
Consider the widely accepted stereotype of the hard-driving, demanding, highly stressed Type A executive. Most often this is what we just assume managers should be. But since management is all about accomplishing work through others, is this really the best sort of personality to make others want to do their best for you? Or might there be another style—a more relaxed, measured, lower-volume Type B approach, let’s say, that can elicit at times even better results? We’ll explore these questions in these pages.
Like a writer who needs to find his or her own voice or a baseball pitcher who needs to find the best arm angle for optimal delivery, all managers ultimately need to find their own personal styles. But even though there’s no absolute right way to manage, there are broad themes that emerge when we examine successful management, best practices that often involve some skills and traits you might not normally associate with management success. Helping you uncover these qualities—and helping you become the best manager you can—is the purpose of this book.
PART I
Research has shown that there’s an epidemic of employee disengagement. Vast numbers of employees are not emotionally committed to their companies and not working at full productivity. These problems most often have their roots in manager-employee relationships. In order to find ways to boost employee engagement we first need to understand fully the importance of a manager and why personality plays so critical a role in management effectiveness.
CHAPTER 1
People say many things about managers:
He’s too demanding. She’s too intense.
He’s a great motivator. Her team really likes working for her.
You can count on him. She gets things done.
He’s a terrific leader. She’s a real strategic thinker.
He doesn’t know what he’s doing. She doesn’t have a clue.
But there’s one thing I’m willing to bet you never hear. You never hear people say management is an easy job.
After I retired from management in 2012, I wanted to step back and gain some perspective on what I’d been doing for the last quarter century. As I began to spend time with different organizations’ management and employee studies, trying to get a broader sense of the common issues managers were grappling with and how they compared with my own experiences, one inescapable truth struck me: Vast numbers of employees are disengaged. By “disengaged,” I mean not emotionally committed to the organizations they work for, and therefore in all likelihood not highly motivated and fully productive.
There are subtle differences in how different studies define “employee engagement,” but the commonalities among the various studies are far more important than the differences. No matter how you slice the data, in the big picture somewhere around 60 or 70 percent of employees are simply not working—say it straight—as hard as they could be. Let’s take some examples. Gallup data shows 30 percent of employees “engaged.” Towers Watson data shows 35 percent “highly engaged.” Dale Carnegie data shows 29 percent “fully engaged.”1 And these aren’t small studies; the Gallup survey includes more than 350,000 respondents and the Towers Watson survey includes more than 32,000. Gallup goes on to estimate an annual cost in lost U.S. productivity of more than $450 billion. This is a staggering figure. Even if it’s imprecise, it gives a sense of the magnitude of the problem.
What high-level factors contribute to this epidemic of disengagement? To return to the title of this chapter: “People leave managers, not companies.” In short, the central relationship between manager and employee plays a critical role. Beyond that, other factors also contribute. These include belief in senior leadership, pride in one’s company, and the chronic uncertainty resulting from a steady stream of reorganizations, layoffs, and pressure “to do more with less.” But no matter the precise constellation of factors, which vary according to the character and circumstances of an organization, there’s no question that a chronically high level of employee disengagement represents both a failure of management and a fundamental challenge to it: a challenge to do what is needed to keep vast numbers of individuals interested in their work, feeling good about their organizations, and working as productively as they can.
What does this high-level data mean to you as a manager? It means, first and hopefully encouragingly, that if you find the practice of management challenging, you’re not alone. It is challenging and you have a great deal of company. If 60 to 70 percent of employees are working at less than full capacity, an awful lot of you in management are dealing with motivation problems. It also means there’s a huge opportunity: an opportunity to better engage employees and improve productivity for your department and organization. To use simple numbers, if you manage ten employees and six of them are to some extent disengaged, and you can reach on average two of them to better engage and motivate them, those are immediately very significant productivity gains you’ll achieve.
Of course the challenge lies in reaching those two employees, understanding why they feel the way they do, and improving their mindsets. We’ll dissect these challenges and provide new tools to approach the old task of management in the pages ahead.
“Here’s something they’ll probably never teach you in business school,” wrote Gallup CEO Jim Clifton in the summary accompanying his organization’s 2013 “State of the American Workplace” employee engagement study. “The single biggest decision you make in your job—bigger than all the rest—is who you name manager. When you name the wrong person manager, nothing fixes that bad decision. Not compensation, not benefits—nothing.”2
Management Insight
As a manager, you have an enormous amount of power. Most often you’re the single most important influence on how motivated and productive your employees will be.
CHAPTER 2
How you view the world depends on the lens through which you see it: your background, your experiences, your education, your expectations. Adjust a lens slightly and vision changes as well.
As a manager, you may well spend time observing the behavior of other managers and their teams (I know I did), thinking about what works well and what doesn’t, who commands respect and who doesn’t, and why some individuals seem to have a natural gift for leadership while others are constantly wrestling with a dissatisfied, disgruntled staff. Management styles are as variable as personalities; no two are exactly alike. Yet when you step back, or rather move higher—say to the proverbial ten-thousand-foot vantage point—broad patterns emerge.
One day, I happened across information about studies conducted by Drs. Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman in the 1950s. In these pioneering studies, which were done to investigate the chances of certain types of individuals developing heart disease, Drs. Friedman and Rosenman clinically defined two broad personality types: Type A individuals and Type B individuals.
Type A personalities were characterized by qualities marked by a high degree of competitiveness, achievement orientation, and elevated stress levels—not what would generally be considered especially “people-focused” qualities. In the words of Drs. Friedman and Rosenman, “It is a particular complex of personality traits, including excessive competitive drive, aggressiveness, impatience, and harrying sense of time urgency.”1 In contrast, Type B personalities were more relaxed, reflective, quieter, slower to anger, and possessed lower stress levels. The researchers found that the more stressed, more tightly wound Type A individuals had a greater propensity for developing cardiac issues. It was groundbreaking work, forever adjusting the lens through which heart-related problems were viewed. The findings were described in Friedman and Rosenman’s 1974 bestselling book, Type A Behavior and Your Heart. The notion of the Type A personality thus entered our national vocabulary and over the years became widely understood—even apart from any cardiac implications—as the personality type of a hard-driving high achiever, often perhaps extremely intelligent and capable but also with “workaholic” tendencies.
What intrigued me as I read about this research, most of which was done more than half a century ago, was something that had not been done with it. The implications of the findings had never in any meaningful way been applied to business.
Or, more specifically, to management.
Now think back on the managers you know. Chances are a large percentage of them, especially in the higher rungs of an organization, have Type A characteristics. They work hard, they play hard, they have great intensity and drive. With all the responsibilities, deadlines, and wrenching decisions to be regularly made, management is generally not the province of the laid-back. Though a study assessing the number of Type A’s versus Type B’s in management has never been done, after four decades in the workforce I have no doubt Type A’s predominate. The only uncertainty is by how much.
Consider one other fundamental aspect of management. At its core, of course, management involves accomplishing work through others—and having others want to continue to do that work for you on an ongoing basis. The problem, if we accept the assumption that management has a high concentration of Type A personalities, is that some of their salient qualities—impatience, competitiveness, high stress levels—are not qualities that are easy to be on the receiving end of. Indeed, even many of the positive characteristics commonly associated with effective management—being authoritative, forceful, decisive—admirable qualities that help people make difficult decisions quickly and successfully deliver large, complex projects in a timely manner—are also qualities that have the potential to alienate. Let me state this clearly: Some Type A managers are unquestionably among the finest individuals I’ve ever had the privilege to know: brilliant, boundless energy, superior role models. But in the aggregate, the difficulties associated with Type A personalities take a managerial toll. It’s just human nature—most people chafe under too much authority, too much forcefulness, too much control.
—
“Now, there’s one phrase I hate to see on any executive’s evaluation, no matter how talented he may be, and that’s the line: ‘He has trouble getting along with other people,’” wrote Lee Iacocca, former Chrysler chairman and CEO, in Iacocca: An Autobiography (with William Novak). “To me, that’s the kiss of death. ‘You’ve just destroyed the guy,’ I always think. ‘He can’t get along with people? Then he’s got a real problem, because that’s all we’ve got around here. No dogs, no apes—only people. And if he can’t get along with his peers, what good is he to the company? As an executive, his whole function is to motivate other people. If he can’t do that, he’s in the wrong place.’”
These lines were written in 1984, and the only addition I’d suggest today would be to include “or she” in the first sentence about the hypothetical executive. But the point about the fundamental importance of “getting along with other people” couldn’t be said better. Because that’s who you as a manager have to be at your best with. No dogs, no apes—only people.
Given this perspective on the macro-level managerial environment, is it surprising we have chronic employee disengagement levels hovering around 60 to 70 percent? I don’t believe it’s surprising at all. But what options do we have? Well, let’s consider the core qualities of the Type B individual: the calmness, the slowness to anger, the patience and thoughtfulness in dealing with others. These are all qualities that people find easy to work with.
Is it reasonable to expect that high-performing organizations will ever be completely dominated by the more easygoing and people-oriented style of the Type B manager? Such managers possess numerous qualities—they’re good listeners, open communicators, of calm demeanor—that help them build the all-important closer rapport with their employees. But will they be consistently able to make the hard decisions and drive productivity with the urgency business requires? Perhaps not always so easily.
But there are clear benefits that a more measured Type B approach confers. And there is also a constructive middle ground where Type A’s can gain some helpful Type B characteristics to build more “engaged” employee relationships and where Type B’s can elevate their intensity to drive just a bit harder for the results business requires. While a leopard may not be able to change its spots, as the saying goes, it’s certainly possible to make changes at the managerial margins. Add some more B to the A, add more A to the B—this balance can be a constructive intersection. Personalities of course are endlessly individual and variable. But whatever the ultimate makeup, a solid dose of Type B characteristics is a valuable element in the managerial mix.
—
There are numerous different psychological frameworks by which to categorize personalities. From Sigmund Freud to Carl Jung to Abraham Maslow (who focused on a hierarchy of needs) to David McClelland (who focused on key elements of motivation) to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (currently used extensively in business), among others, there are well-conceived paradigms that help explain and order human behavior. But the Type A / Type B framework, long neglected, has particular relevance for management. It’s simple, practical, and has great potential, as Type A managers are so prevalent and Type B qualities so potentially useful.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Worth my time to read
By BijouRoi
Offers some good nuggets for making practical changes toward greater employee satisfaction! A quick read with opportunities for introspection.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
The chapters don't have a super organized feel
By Amazon Customer
The chapters don't have a super organized feel, but readable. I enjoyed it but nothing radically deep or groundbreaking concerning the Type B personality in the context of the workplace. Check it out from the library as I did.
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