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Jory MacKay on August 20, 2024

Jory MacKay

Jory is a writer, content strategist and award-winning editor of the Unsplash Book. He contributes to Inc., Fast Company, Quartz, and more.

August 20, 2024 · 9 min read

There’s a famous saying (backed up by an even more famous Gallup survey) that states, people don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses.

Yet, while some bad managers are beyond redemption (i.e.,, the types who shamelessly belittle, overwork, and throw their teammates under the bus to get ahead), others aren’t even aware of just how bad they are.

One of the most common ways that managers can become “accidentally bad” is by taking a one-size-fits all approach to their team’s working styles.

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Teams are made up of individuals — each with their own preferred method and style of working. Fail to take this into account, and you’ll alienate and demotivate the very people you rely on to hit your goals.

But when you understand the different working styles and how they change the way you manage people, you’ll boost team morale, improve your efficiency, and drive better results.

What are work styles? Why are they so important?

A work style is the way that someone approaches their job and working relationships, often shaped by their personality, skills, and past experiences.

No two work styles are the same — each person takes a slightly different approach to how they manage tasks, feedback, and their interactions with others.

To make this even more complex, while most people have a dominant work style, we often change our work style to adapt to different tasks, teams, and environments. So, does this mean you, as a manager, don’t need to worry about your team’s preferred styles? Absolutely not.

As a manager, knowing your work style will help you identify your own strengths and weaknesses, and build self-awareness. While understanding your team’s work styles helps you relate to them better, making you a better manager and leading to other great benefits, such as:

• Boosting productivity. When you know how people work, you can assign them tasks that play to their strengths and, in turn, help them to be more productive and effective.
• Improving communication. Work styles and communication styles are inherently linked. Understanding how people like to work helps them tailor their communication in a way the other person will understand and appreciate.
• Reducing conflict. Inter-team conflicts often arise from mismatched working styles. By understanding how your team members like to work, you can help guide them away from conflict, meaning you spend more time on team collaboration rather than conflict resolution.
• Providing growth. While understanding work styles helps you play to your team’s strengths, it also identifies areas of improvement. As a manager, part of your job is to help people grow and improve, providing them with work that stretches their boundaries and develops new skills.
• Highlighting bias and limiting beliefs. As you explore work styles with your teams, it helps you identify other aspects of their personalities, such as any unconscious bias or limiting beliefs. Knowing these traits feeds into the other benefits we’ve covered, helping you avoid future conflicts, improve communication, and provide opportunities for growth.

The bottom line: Aligning your tasks, goals, and management styles with how your team likes to work is a management super power. Don’t get so caught up in the tasks and timelines that you forget about the people doing the work.

Teams are made up of individuals - each with their own style of working. Fail to take this into account, and you’ll alienate and demotivate the very people you rely on to hit your goals.

4 unique work styles every manager needs to know

While everyone is unique, over the years, many studies have uncovered four main categories of work styles.

Let’s take a look at each of them in turn, focusing on their key characteristics, strengths and weaknesses, and examples of roles these styles best suit.

1. The Logical Doer

Logical workers are great at picking up problems, thinking through them analytically, and then promptly taking action. For this reason, they’re also referred to as ‘doers’ given their ability to complete work at speed to keep the team or project moving forward.

• Strengths: Logical workers are outgoing with strong soft skills (e.g., communication) and rarely shy away from a problem. They like structure and are highly organized, often using a linear approach to tackle problems step-by-step.
• Weaknesses: An eagerness to deliver results can lead to a lack of attention to detail or becoming frustrated when other team members are slow to understand complex issues. As such, they’ll often hold on to work rather than collaborating, with their strong personalities at risk of overpowering quieter team members.
• Common traits: Organized, dependable, driven, rational, analytical.
• Real-life examples: Logical leaders make good project managers, entrepreneurs, and team leaders, as they’re great at solving problems, making plans, and ticking items off their to-do lists.

2. The Idea-Oriented Directors

Idea-oriented workers love coming up with big-picture, transformative ideas, helping to facilitate big changes or new ways of working. People who work in this way often find themselves in leadership roles, using their superior communication skills to motivate and persuade others to buy into their ideas.

• Strengths: They’re great at seeing the bigger picture and thinking strategically when solving complex problems. They’re creative in their ideas, comfortable with taking risks, and are great at inspiring the team towards a new vision.
• Weaknesses: Idea-oriented people don’t do well with details, and in many instances they’re quite unorganized. Others may view them as a bit of a ‘wrecking ball’ as they like to disrupt the norm without the skills to plan the step-by-step tasks needed to make changes happen.
• Common Traits: Strategic, creative, influential, motivating, compelling, resilient.
• Real-life examples: Change managers, artists, and marketing leads often favor an idea-oriented style, as they’re great at coming up with exciting new ideas and painting a picture of a better, brighter future.

3. The Detail-Oriented Analysts

Detail-oriented workers are the analysts of every team, working to ensure no stone is left unturned, and every task is completed to the letter. People in this style have superior attention to detail, are comfortable with complex data sets, and aren’t afraid to challenge if something doesn’t seem right.

• Strengths: They’re great at working through complex problems, taking an analytical approach to complexity by dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s. They very rarely make mistakes and are extremely accurate, often seeing things that other people miss.
• Weaknesses: All of this analysis takes time, meaning detail-oriented people are sometimes seen to be slower. They struggle with ambiguity and don’t do well with strategic, big picture thinking. Often, they’re not the best communicators and are shy or introverted.
• Common Traits: Diligent, methodical, organized, analytical, averse to risk.
• Real-life examples: Analyst-based professions such as accountants, data analysts, software developers, and writers often work in a detail-oriented style where accuracy and organization are critical to success.

4. The Supportive Amiables

People with a supportive work style are the empaths of the team, using their superior emotional intelligence and communication to bond the group together. They prioritize people above all else, always willing to lend a hand to support, keep the peace in the role of mediator, and boost the overall team morale.

• Strengths: As people-focused communicators, supportive workers help facilitate collaboration and decision-making by bringing the team together. They build strong relationships and are great at influencing others to reach a consensus.
• Weaknesses: When the going gets tough, amiables don’t always have the resilience to push through, causing them to lose motivation and risk burning out. Given their tendency to keep the peace, they struggle to make tough decisions that may carry negative consequences.
• Common Traits: Empathetic, diplomatic, helpful, collaborative, motivating.
• Real-life examples: Team leaders, operations managers, and HR professionals are often supportive in nature, using their emotional intelligence to connect with colleagues and build a productive working environment.

As a manager, it’s your job to knit your team’s working styles together to create a cohesive unit that works together and delivers great results.

Work style self-assessment: How to understand you and your team’s ideal working styles

While work styles are complex, there are some simple ways you can begin to uncover preferences in how you tackle tasks, work with others, and take risks — all of which indicate a preferred work style.

This simple questionnaire is a fun way for you and your team to get started, laying the foundation for you to explore your work styles in more detail as the team develops.

What to do:

For each of the questions below, rank the answers from 1 to 4, with 1 being the answer that matters the least to you, and 4 the answer that matters most.

1. When completing a task, it’s important that I:

   a. Understand the basics and get started quickly.

   b. Understand how it aligns with the company strategy.

   c. Take my time to get it right, regardless of how long it takes.

   d. Involve all of my team members to get their opinions.

2. The most enjoyable part of work is:

   a. The results you achieve when a task is finished.

   b. Making an impact on the organization.

   c. Overcoming complex challenges.

   d. The people you meet.

3. When there are several ways to complete a task, I usually:

   a. Review the pros and cons of each option and push forward.

   b. Choose an option that instinctively feels right.

   c. Analyze the problem in detail to choose the best option.

   d. Ask others for their opinion on the best option to proceed with.

4. When working in a team, it’s important that we:

   a. Work together to get the job done quickly and effectively.

   b. Align around a common vision and objective.

   c. Each know our roles and responsibilities.

   d. Work well as a team to get the best from each other.

5. I am willing to take a risk if:

   a. It’s most likely to help us achieve the goal.

   b. The outcome benefits the organization.

   c. All the options have been carefully considered.

   d. We as a team agree it’s the right thing to do.

Once you’ve answered all the questions, add up your scores to give you a total score for A, B, C, and D. The letter with the highest score indicates your preferred working style.

• A = Logical Doer
• B = Idea-Orientated Director
• C = Detail-Oriented Analyst
• D = Supportive Amiable

If your scores are close together, it may indicate that you frequently work across different styles, adapting to changing situations as they arise. Where one score is particularly low, this may indicate skills you should look to develop.

As you dive deeper into work styles, personality tests such as Myers Briggs Type Index (MBTI) or the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) are also great at identifying how people like to work on a day-to-day basis.

How to make different work styles work: The key to successful collaboration

Great! Everyone on your team knows their own work styles, and the strengths and weaknesses that go with them. Now what?

As a manager, it’s your job to knit all of these styles together to create a cohesive team that all work together to knock it out of the park every day.

Unfortunately, this isn’t always straightforward. Different work styles can clash, leading to conflicts, loss of productivity, and poor team morale. But, when you do get it right, you create a team that plays to each other’s strengths, solving complex challenges, creating fresh new ideas, and delivering great results as one collaborative mega-team.

To increase your chances of work styles success, here are some things you should do as a manager once everyone’s identified their work style:

• Spend time sharing work styles. Create opportunities for everyone to share their preferred working style in an environment that’s safe and without judgment. This will give everyone a full awareness of how each other likes to work, while creating an honest discussion about strengths and weaknesses moving forwards.
• Self-reflection and planning. While it’s important for the team to know how their work styles impact each other, it’s important you do the same as a manager. You have to be the most adaptable, so understanding where you are similar and different from your team will help you better plan your management approach.
• Adapt your coaching techniques based on work style. Everyone on your team needs support and, armed with work style information, you can ensure you support them in the right way. Adapting your style is essential here, taking a more people-focused approach for supportive workers, while giving detail-oriented team members more tactical guidance in one-to-one meetings as required.
• Adjust ways of working. Work styles are strongly related to communication styles, so take the time to explore how each of your team members likes communicating. While some team members will enjoy regular, two-way conversation (e.g. Logical or supportive styles), others may prefer asynchronous techniques that allow them to remain focused on their work until they’re ready to communicate (e.g. detail-oriented styles). There’s likely to be a mix of opinions here, so work to come to a consensus, and create team rituals that everyone can buy into.
• Be the role model. While it’s important to adjust to other people’s work styles, developing your own blend of styles is important, too. As a manager, be the role model for personal development, actively improving your areas of weakness to become more rounded and adaptable across the work styles. This sets the right example and will encourage others to develop their work styles too.

Lastly, make sure you align working styles with roles and tasks. Once you have transparency across the team, it’s your job to align different roles and tasks to the right work styles. The key here is to get balance and ensure this assignment isn’t too strict, allowing everyone to play to their strengths while still having variety, autonomy, and the chance to develop and grow.

Planio’s task management can really help here, allowing you to assign and monitor the workload across your team.

If someone is struggling with a certain task, Planio can flag this to you, giving you the opportunity to step in and support the team moving forward.

Final thoughts: Don’t forget to tailor your own work style

Pretty much everyone has dealt with a bad manager at some point — and much of the time, it’s because they didn’t adapt to our needs.

Understanding the different work styles and their unique characteristics is important if you’re a manager as it will help you assign tasks, tailor your mentoring approach, and spot conflicts before they arise.

Knowing your own work style is essential for this. When you understand how you best work, you’ll be able to adapt to your team’s needs and support them properly and fully.

To finish, here’s some advice on how you can adapt depending on your work style:

• If you’re a logical leader: Don’t forget to communicate and build relationships. While you may have your eyes on the finish line, don’t forget that some of your team may be looking to you for more than just a list of tasks and deadlines.
• If you’re idea-orientated: Remember that big ideas only come to life with small steps. Your logical and detail-oriented team members will need your support to make things happen, so try to slow down and offer them the guidance they need.
• If you’re detail-oriented: It can be easy to forget that others can find details overwhelming. Try to summarize complex situations in simple ways and bring together thoughts and opinions from the rest of the team to move things forward.
• If you’re a supportive manager: Remember that some people prefer to ‘get their head down’ rather than collaborate as a group. Try using different communication techniques, and don’t panic if some team members are quieter than others.

No matter your work style, Planio is here to help you manage your team to deliver great results. With features for task management, document storage, communication, and time tracking, you can keep across everyone’s activity, identifying when team members are potentially struggling, so you can be there to boost them back up!

Try Planio with your own team — free for 30 days (no credit card required!)