Every manager supposed to know all of his strengths and weaknesses knowing that he/she will be dealing with people of all different behaviors. Knowing your strengths and weakness is the key asset to successfully manage an organization. For this purpose Dr. J. Clayton Lafferty developed The Life Style Inventory (LSI) for self-improving purposes for the reasons of increasing a personal and professional effectiveness. The LSI measures 12 specific styles of patterns of thinking that can either help or hinder a person from reaching his or her potential. The 12 styles measured by LSI are organized into three general clusters: Constructive, which includes: achievement, self-actualizing, humanistic-encouraging, and affiliate thinking style. Passive/Defensive, which includes: approval, conventional, dependent, and avoidance thinking styles. Aggressive/Defensive, which includes: oppositional, power, competitive, and perfectionistic thinking styles.
After honestly answering 240 questions I received the results that my primary personal style is achievement where I received the highest score of 95%. This style shows the following characteristics: focusing on achieving self-set goals, believes that individual effort counts, commits to make things better, take on challenging tasks and prefer to setting and accomplishing realistic goals rather than goals imposed by others. My secondary personal style is self-actualizing. This style shows the following characteristics: self-respect, receptive to change, strong instincts and intuition and strong desire to know about thing and experience them directly. I absolutely agree with my description because it says a lot about me and what drives me in order to succeed in personal and professional life. I have very high self-respect because I believe that in order to respect others and be respected back you have to respect yourself first. The same way I respect very much abilities and talents of others and believe that we are all individuals with different values and talents, but when we put those values and talents together we will definitely work better as team than as individuals. I was always able to accomplish all the self-set goals and probably that was because they were realistic. I realized that I have that characteristic at the college. My major was Computer Science and in the third year I realized that I actually do not like computers and programming at all, but in my head from the beginning of college I set this goal for myself that I will get a degree in computer science and nothing else. So, even though I realized that I do not like something I decided to reach my goal and graduated with the GPA of 3.5. Then, after graduation I came up with this idea how it would be nice to own a business. In my head I knew that if I open a business it has to be connected to food, weddings or funerals, because whatever happens to economy people will have to eat, get married and die. I talked to my husband about those ideas and we decided to go with the wedding décor. Now looking 13 years back we’re running a successful business in the industry that I enjoy working in, and I achieved most of my self-set goals through taking challenges, learning how to share responsibilities and believing in me and my efforts to come up with the new ideas. I chose my oppositional style as my limiting style that if limiting my professional effectiveness. Oppositional style has the following characteristics: opposing new ideas, negative, critical and cynical to others, love to argue and look for flaws in everything. I do not see myself as negative, critical or cynical person or that I do not like new ideas. My business is based on being creative and bringing new ideas to the table at all times. In order to survive in today’s competitive market in our business new ideas are must. Probably some of the characteristics do not apply to me because I have very strong humanistic-encouraging and affiliative scores. The characteristics of those two styles probably help me to eliminate some of the oppositional style characteristics. However, I do admit that I love to argue and I do see the flaws in everything. In every project I will see a mistake. This affects my productivity because I will always spend extra time on something that everybody sees as finished project, but I always think that it can be better. For example: When we were working on this huge event we had very short period of time to set up everything. While working on the floral centerpieces I would complain and tell everybody that they have to go back and fix this and that. They would remind me of the time, but I just did not listen. At the end when everything was done, I went back and started fixing the things that were perfectly done and still find something wrong with it. When I saw the bridal party at the door, I realized that I should not do this anymore. Everybody already left, bridal party was there and I was still looking for mistakes that did not exist. Looking at my LSI styles I can see that this characteristic is also seeable through my perfectionistic style that says that I like to personally take care of every detail. While the others are moving onto other tasks, I will be still stuck at the project fixing something where there is nothing to fix wasting my time.
In order to for us to be effective as managers we have to know our strengths and weaknesses. Going over my LSI results in terms of the four functions of management: planning, organizing, leading and controlling I find my self-management qualities as follows.
Planning: When planning a project I prefer to be in control and be on top of everything that needs to be done. Simply put I like to be in charge and love to take challenges. I’m willing to take risks, but before taking a risk I will calculate every possibility of outcome. I like to include everybody in the project and encourage them to think and give their best effort in order to finish the project in timely manner with productive results.
Organizing: When organizing I will usually assign the task according to employees’ talents and abilities. I will also encourage them to tell me their opinion and let me know which tasks they would like to receive before making a decision, because this way I let them know that I value their opinion. At the end even though I listened to their opinions I will bring a decision based on my own judgments and instincts. For example: For one event my employee Maria wanted to manage the whole event because she was familiar with place of the event and she was the one who was dealing with this company couple of times before. I listened to her explanation why would she be the best to manage this event, but I had it in my had that all the previous event were small comparable to this one, and in this case I relied on my instinct that George will do much better job because this was one huge event and he was the best with handling big event, even though he was not familiar with the facility and he was not dealing with any of those companies events before. At this point I know that I should let Maria handle this event, because she really wanted it. George did a great job, but I believe that she would too if I gave her a chance. I know that my way is not always the best solution and incorporating ideas of others will bring diversity and bring ideas upfront with different alternatives to solutions. So, I have to start accepting and respecting more of other people’s wishes and ideas.
Leading: I scored very highly in self-actualizing and humanistic encouragement, and very low in approval and dependent styles I believe that I have very good qualities in leading function. I am always bringing decisions on my own, and I’m not preoccupied with being accepted by others. I love to encourage my employees and motivate them to do their best.
Controlling: I like to be on top of everything. I have to make sure that everything is done to perfection in order to move to the next project. I’m known to set very unrealistic standards because I like everything to be perfect, and that is one of my characteristics that I have to work on in order to be more productive as a manager.
How did I develop my personal styles that were reveled in my LSI?
I developed my personal styles through various channels. I personally believe that we are all born with certain characteristics and then we shape them through our family, friends, schools, culture..etc. Most of my personal styles were shaped by my parents and early childhood cultural environment. I grew up in a little town in Europe. All of us kids grew up as being very independent because we used to be outside whole day without non- stop supervision of our parents. This way we grew up being very independent and self-conscious. We used to create games on our own and assign roles and delicate tasks to each other. Those games included some very challenging and competitive tasks. There was this very interesting game where we would create the teams and each team would have a leader. One leader would go and hide the rest of the kids from his group, come back and draw a plan to the other leaders and their groups where he hid his group. Then they would go and search for them. This is just an example and there were many games like this. Also, as a child I used to watch my parents and other neighbors how they were helping each other without any hesitation even in the middle of the night made me to trust people, share responsibility, think for myself, believe that each individual effort makes difference and encourage others and respect their believes and values. When I was 18 years old I moved with my family to United States from country affected by war. We had to leave everything behind and start a new life. Living in two different cultures and watching my parents in their 40’s without even knowing a word of English language, working for minimal wages and yet accomplishing a lot also had a big impact on developing my personal styles.
All in all, I feel that LSI did an impressive job in explaining my personality. It is very detailed report and I realize that there are several areas like oppositional style, perfectionistic style and avoidance style which need improvement in order for me to be more productive and effective as a manager. Some areas I have been able to improve to date, but I’m still working on. As I develop my career I believe that I will be stronger and more effective. It is amazing to note how analyzing personality styles really can impact professional effectiveness. Combining all of those skills and learning from them will be fun challenge in going above and beyond personal goals expectations.