The Birkman Method: Your Personality at Work by Sharon Birkman Fink & Stephanie Capparell

Author:Sharon Birkman Fink & Stephanie Capparell [Fink, Sharon Birkman]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-04-22T14:00:00+00:00

THE CHANGING FACE OF AUTHORITY

After nearly twenty years as a management consultant to many chief executives in big companies, Esther S. Powers, PhD, of Greater Atlanta can speak from experience about generational changes in leadership styles, as revealed by the Birkman. When she started coaching in large, heavy-industry companies, “the leaders were like military: they were Red, high Authority, high Structure, high Activity, low Thought, low Advantage, low Empathy,” she recalls. “They were the traditional managers in the plants. They didn’t listen much and they were not collaborative.” These high Authority executives were commanding leaders and tended to be good speakers, but they often lacked diplomacy and weren’t at all welcoming to the changes that were coming as a result of competition, participatory management, and the explosion in high-tech entrepreneurship and information, Esther says. In the early 1990s, companies were starting to create high-performance work teams in an effort to become nimbler. She was brought in to do organizational redesigns at traditional manufacturing companies that wanted to stay abreast of the changes, some wishing to emulate Japanese manufacturing techniques. It was the start of the just-in-time way of doing business, with low inventories and flatter hierarchies.

“It took just a touch for me to win over people on the floor, but the managers wanted to prove everyone wrong,” Esther says. “The managers would try to get me out of there.”

But the economic transformation couldn’t be slowed, let alone stopped. Once the new models were created, however, Esther found many of the senior managers couldn’t lead the new businesses. By the next decade, she says, the chief executives were “altogether different.” She started noticing more Birkman profiles of people who appeared more flexible and optimistic. She also found more Green and Blue types, as leadership increasingly demanded a more democratic and more creative touch. The old-style authoritarian leaders still exist, of course, but they are fewer in number and must share room at the top with a wide variety of people. The precision with which the Birkman has tracked the change speaks to its sophistication.

The Birkman asks executives, “Do others see you as too aggressive or too submissive?” To be successful, bosses have to find the style that best suits the needs not just of the company culture but of various teams, and not just a team as a whole but of each team member. That means moving from the one-style-fits-all leadership model to one that allows you to adopt several styles within your own natural approach.

As with all other Birkman Components, Authority is multidimensional. In addition to revealing how easily a person gives verbal commands, the Authority Component also measures how much a person will tolerate being on the receiving end of strong orders. How much do you actually need, and want, to be bossed? Many people, though they might not readily admit it, prefer a boss who is direct and authoritative. They thrive only when they know who is in charge, feeling most secure with supervisors who let them know what they want done and give some idea of when and how to do it.

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