Ponderings of a Small Town Girl in the City: What style leader are you?

Last week - on Halloween Day, no less, everyone in our Bureau at work attended a retreat at Walnut Woods - a state park located on the Southwest side of Des Moines. Because it's like pulling teeth to have catered meals at such events - our bosses don't want to see the next Des Moines Register be "Taxpayers foot the bill for state employee lunches".

Our new boss, Alex got creative - a soup and dessert contest! I took Chicken Noodle, using a HyVee roasted chicken and frozen noodles. It was good. There was a late plea for soup sign ups, and it must have worked, because we had plenty for the group of about 50. A couple chilis, veggie with beef, another chicken noodle with real homemade noodles. I even had squash soup - not quite as good as my pal Julia's recipe. The desserts were fab - scary fattening and scary themes. Former bureau chief Brian Tormey stopped by to help with the judging - so nice to see him! Creston's Bill Ehm, the Bureau's Division Administrator, was also there for part of the day.

We did a session on customer service first thing. You may now picture me answering the phone with a smile on my face. (insert goofy smile here). We are public servants - and I thought it was a good reminder - regarding outside customers, and internal ones. We tend to forget that our co-workers are customers too. Michelle Wilson, who grew up as the daughter of a DNR wildlife guy somewhere in Southwest Iowa, was the speaker for this session. She was good.

The next speaker is working on her PhD at Drake. She was tasked with helped our bureau work through some things that haven't ranked high on our annual survey. She first wanted to help us determine what type of leaders we are. She uses Lee Bolman and Terrance Deal's Four Framework Approach to Leadership: political, human resources, symbolic, structural. We ran through a list of questions, checking responses and then scoring to help us identify where we fall in the Framework.

I borrowed from a slideshow to get more information:
Bolman and Deal's Four Framework consists of:

Structural Framework - Social architect whose leadership style is analysis and design - focus on structure, strategy, environment, implementation, experimentation, and adaptation.
Human Resource Framework - Catalyst and servant whose leadership style is support, advocate, and empowerment - visible and accessible; they empower, increase participation, support, share information, and move decision making down into the organization.
Political Framework - Advocate, whose leadership style is coalition and building - clarify what they want and what they can get; they assess the distribution of power and interests; they build linkages to other stakeholders; use persuasion first, then use negotiation and coercion only if necessary.
Symbolic Framework - Prophet, whose leadership style is inspiration, view organizations as a stage or theater to play certain roles and give impressions; these leaders use symbols to capture attention; they try to frame experience by providing plausible interpretations of experiences; they discover and communicate a vision.

It was especially interesting to me, since I had just done a mini Myers-Briggs test when I was in Austin with my High School friends. They both came out pretty similar. I came out as a Structural Framework kinda person - with Political coming up closely behind. We had to graph our type and my graph was a bit warped. Hmmm is this a theme with me?

I feel that I'm more of a people person then these self-tests keep reflecting. Hmm. I evidently come off more Pat Bullock than I ever knew. Under this crusty exterior, believe me, there is a very gooey inner core. I am highly empathetic! Of course that does not lessen my expectations from ya'll! I think you can do good things and expect nothing less. I can deal with the aftermath quite well, once the dust settles, if things don't go well.

I do realize I am a very structural person. I need to know what the rules are. Moving targets drive me wild! When I worked at Gits Manufacturing, I would prepare 250 parts as ordered by an automotive customer - there was a lead time of 9 months to put the parts together. At the last minute the customer would change the order. It drove me nuts! Just tell me the rules - and I will figure out how to deal with them, or if I want to quit the game.

I also trend as Political - creating coalitions. I was lucky in this job in that I already had been friends with many of the key players in the industry. Our office has been a difficult place for me to form coalitions - simply because I don't do what anyone else does. Plus I don't have peers my age in my section that are women. I tend to go with the flow.

Many of the people that I work with are Structural. Not surprising since I work with engineers and other scientific, process oriented type people. Later that day we broke out into groups with the various types of frameworks spread throughout the groups. I'm not sure we solved anything - but it was an interesting exercise and the food was good. And we taxpayers didn't have to pay for it. The food I mean. Your trash paid for our part of the day as it pays for our programs.

While I don't think personalities or people can be parsed easily into categories, I do believe exercises such as this have value. It helps us understand our own tenancies and others'. We are all leaders - at work, in our families and yes, even at play or in social situations. Someone has to decide what restaurant we're eating at tonight!