Life Orientations

Management Styles
Many public sector organisations including Oxford City Council, the Royal Town Planning Institute and The Liberal Democrats have used the Life Orientations®‚ method to great effect on management courses.

The programmes run through a range of management issues including time management, team building, communications, motivation, delegation, handling work performance problems, and stress.

The Life Orientations®‚ model is introduced to gain an insight into participants’ personal behavioural preferences and strategies and how these impact on the way they manage. By recognising that everyone has individual needs, comfort zones and stressors, participants come to understand how these affect the ways in which they might be best communicated with, motivated, and so on.

The emphasis on individual needs and tailoring approaches to individuals is a theme throughout the programmes and a means to providing managers with a broad tool-kit of appropriate behaviours. It emphasises that particular actions will not always receive a uniform response.

In the time management section they identify time blocks that naturally follow on from particular behavioural styles and encourage course participants to seek solutions to those blocks that they will actually carry out because they fit within their behavioural preference.

The Life Orientations®‚ method fits well with the Belbin Team Roles model as a way to identify how people prefer to operate in a team environment. It also highlights their likely strengths and allowable weaknesses. Participants are able to identify how the dynamics of conflict and co-operation within teams are affected by their own preferred behaviours and their automatic responses to behaviours in others which they do not share. It also gives an insight into likely team culture issues, given the style of the team leader.

This is a key issue when looking at barriers to communication and how people prefer to get and give information: why some people prefer very structured and detailed explanations and others are content with little information and a broad overview. The Life Orientations® method highlights the likely communication gaps of the different styles.

The Life Orientations®‚ method is also important when looking at management issues surrounding change and stress, particularly demonstrating that one person’s exciting challenge is another person’s worst nightmare. For example, a manager seeking to create a democratic, participative and creative work environment may create intolerable strain for colleagues who require a structured and predictable environment.

Course participants also find the Life Orientations®‚ method invaluable in unlocking some of the reasons why they may have particular difficulties with individuals within the workplace - not just those they manage but also their peers and their own managers.

One-to-One Counselling and Change
Following a major reorganisation, the IT department of a financial institution chose to use the Life Orientations® method as the basis of the staff support intervention of the change management programme. An experienced consultant who is licensed to use the Life Orientations® method worked with three members of staff from different areas of the business to design the “Handling Change” project.

The three staff members were licensed to use the Life Orientations® method and worked with the consultant, firstly to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their team, then to develop their counselling and feedback skills. The team, led by the consultant, then designed a three-stage process.

1. a workshop for all staff to explain change and how it affects individuals differently; an introduction to the Life Orientations® model; and a description of the causes and symptoms of stress and how to deal with them;

2. one-to-one feedback/counselling sessions using the Personal Style Survey for any member of staff who wished to take advantage of the opportunity to do some personal awareness work or wished to talk through how the changes were affecting them;

a half-day workshop for all staff following the voluntary redundancies based around two large team exercises, with the objective of creating a new team spirit and beginning the team building process.
Of the 34 staff involved 32 chose to have the one-to-one counselling sessions. Some of the outcomes of these 1-1s were:
a greater self-awareness which was helpful during this stressful period, and also forewarned the individual about which parts of the process they would find created the most stress for them;
an understanding of communication gaps with managers or colleagues, and an insight into how to bridge the gap;
a chance to explore whether their preferred behavioural style would be of use to the new departmental and organisational culture.

3. Follow-up work also included a number of sessions with the new management team to decide on departmental objectives; performance management issues; and communication between members of the team. The Life Orientations® method’s 360º capabilities were used to improve understanding between the team members and also to tackle realigning departmental culture with the aims and objectives of the organisation.

Recruiting Case Study
The flagship office of the world’s largest public relations company, had a diminishing client list. Amongst issues it identified as the cause of this was the lack of entrepreneurial flair and drive among its director-level (3rd) tier who generally had been in the role for sometime. Following a restructuring of the tier the Company agreed it needed to hire a new breed of directors who combined both strong consulting skills with entrepreneurial flair and drive. In a world where everyone is a professional communicator, conventional interviews proved ineffective in getting under the skin of potential candidates.

The Company pioneered a creative use of the Lifo® method Personal Style surveys. Firstly the leadership team (2nd tier) was profiled in order to identify the key components of successful behaviours in the industry. Shortlisted candidates were compared to this blueprint and any marked differences were noted. At final interview stages the CEO used the information to gain a more in-depth view of the candidates and to identify areas that needed to be probed more thoroughly. Forewarned is forearmed!

The outcome was the successful recruitment of 5 senior directors who between them have contributed to growing their lines of business by over 50% in less than one year. In addition to the immediate benefit for the Company, the individuals felt that they had participated in a valuable process which helped develop them personally and demonstrated how seriously the Company took their appointment. The results of the survey now form the basis of continued in house training and development for those concerned as they develop and refine their management skills.

Negotiating Styles
A Life Orientations®‚ based Negotiating Skills programme proved highly effective for a London Borough that had been criticised by the Audit Commission for dealing with contractors in a uniform style. The Commission pointed out that whilst the Council might achieve a low initial price for the contract, they were subsequently running into difficulties in developing long-term relationships essential for creative flexible solutions to mid-contract problems.

The Life Orientations®‚ method as a negotiating styles model is particularly useful when negotiators are required to respond to different styles of negotiating culture and need to clear the blocks created in the negotiating process by individuals’ own personal agendas and communication needs.

Individual behavioural styles have particular strengths in negotiating, e.g. the Controlling/Taking-over behavioural style is particularly objective-orientated and drives the process forward; the Supporting/Giving-in style maintains high ethical standards in negotiating and avoids opportunistic win-lose scenarios; the Adapting/Dealing-away style pours oil on troubled waters and is able to avoid or minimise unnecessary conflict, as well as keeping their finger on the pulse of where each party is coming from; whilst the Conserving/Holding-on style with its focus on structure, logic and facts ensures that detailed resolutions are recorded and all options are explored.

The Programme provided opportunities for role playing realistic negotiating scenarios from the first ice-breaking session to a half-day complex negotiation at the end of the course which required participants to use a wide range of behaviours in pre-negotiation planning, developing best result and fall-back positions, identifying who should take what role as a negotiating team and how to deal with conflict or unexpected changes in the dynamics of the situation.

The identified aim was to enable course participants to understand that developing long-term relationships with contractors, internal or external, required a recognition of formal and informal needs and a willingness to adopt a co-operative win-win approach rather than a confrontational approach which could lead to early trench warfare and impasse.

The Life Orientations®‚ method enabled the negotiators to recognise how their own styles helped the process of negotiation but, when inappropriately used, could also cause conflict and difficulties. The Controlling/Taking-over orientation’s emphasis on competition can degenerate into win-lose confrontation; the Supporting/Giving-in’s high ethic can lead to intolerance of others’ agendas; the Conserving/Holding-on orientation can become data bound and inflexible; whilst the Adapting/Dealing-away orientation’s desire for harmony can lead to too much being given away or leaving the final results of negotiation vague and open to re-interpretation later.

Course participants, used to what they believed to be an organisationally imposed negotiating culture with which they were not comfortable, found the Life Orientations®‚ method useful in developing a range of negotiating behavioural options. These allowed them to understand “the other side’s” needs and objectives and allowed them particularly to avoid or use conflict constructively as appropriate.

Those participants who often negotiated as a team also found particular insights into how to play to each other’s strengths and identify weaknesses where particular communication styles might cause misunderstandings.

There is also an interesting international cultural dimension. Research using the model has shown that Western negotiators tend to operate in a high Controlling/Taking-over and competitive way whilst, for example, Japanese negotiators’ styles tend to be more balanced with an emphasis on long-term relationships with an ethical base built around co-operation. Life Orientations® materials are available in many different languages and cultural trend data is available.

Personal High Performance
The Lifo® method can work even when the individual isn’t initially motivated to change! By allowing a person to see how their strengths don’t always deliver the expected outcomes or achieve their objectives, the motivation to change can be developed during a session. This is often the case when we are brought in to “deal with” so-called difficult people.

One notable success that is still being talked about within the company in which it took place was the case of Bill (names changed!). The company was a food manufacturing company and Bill was one of the operations managers, responsible for night and day shifts of a relatively labour-intensive production facility. The factory manager wanted the management style to be more respectful and careful of people as, not only was this the culture they wanted to promote but he was also trying to run an outfit in an area of low unemployment – retaining people was proving very difficult.

Bill was of the old school: management is about systems, processes, carrots and sticks. He was ex-forces and knew that you had to keep a tight ship if you were to succeed. This style just didn’t fit with the new culture and despite his manager talking to him about it, he saw no reason to change what had been a successful style for over 40 years. What’s more, the subordinates who worked closely with him were passionately loyal to him – but the production workers were highly critical of his distance, doing everything through his direct reports.

When our consultant met with him, he was extremely anxious. Defensively and somewhat aggressively he opened with “I suppose you’ve come here to make me smile”. The consultant explored with him his attitudes to management and how he viewed each set of people with whom he came into contact. The first breakthrough – the motivation to change – came when he was introduced to the Lifo® method model – “so there’s at least a quarter of the population need a personal “good morning” to carry on working well?” he mused. “But it’s such a waste of time, stopping to chat”. However, this thought clearly stayed with him and at the next session he reported that he had tried some pleasantries and got a good response. He was concerned that people would start crossing the line, though, and didn’t want any familiarities to creep in.

He then compared the Lifo® method feedback he received from his direct reports to that received from the production line workers. It startled him. His subordinates reported him as being highly team and task-focused, fair and concerned about doing things in the right way as well as doing things right. The workers found him extremely introverted, cold and detached, without humanity. This actually was a fair reflection of his behaviour but not at all of who he was as a person, or indeed, wanted to be as a manager. This was the final piece in the motivation to change jigsaw. He turned to the consultant for help in how to square making pleasantries and actually talking to people with keeping sufficient managerial distance. The solution was simple. Have a purpose for going beyond “good morning”- perhaps trying to gauge motivation or dissatisfaction; asking for ideas on how to improve the production process from a people point of view; giving personal feedback when a job had been done well, not doing it through his managers. If he gained respect through contact, managerial distance would be maintained in a positive not negative way.

It worked and he gained loyalty and support from all of his staff which meant that he turned in better production figures than ever before. He was also happier than he had been in a long time and he became a very popular manager because he now had the “what” and the “how".

Helping staff respond well to change in stressful times
In order to respond positively and dynamically to a major reorganisation and downsizing, the IT department of a nationwide financial institution chose to use the Life Orientations® method as the basis of its staff support programme. An experienced the Lifo® method consultant worked with three members of staff from different areas of the business to design the “Handling Change” project.

The three staff members were licensed to use the Life Orientations® method and worked with the consultant, firstly to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their own small team and then to develop their counselling and feedback skills. The team, led by the consultant, designed a three-stage process.

a workshop for all staff to explain change and how it affects individuals differently; an introduction to the Life Orientations® model; and a description of the causes and symptoms of stress and how to deal with them;
one-to-one feedback/counselling sessions using the Lifo® method Personal Style Survey for any member of staff who wished to take advantage of the opportunity to do some personal awareness work or wished to talk through how the changes were affecting them;
a half-day workshop for all staff following the voluntary redundancies based around two large team exercises, with the objective of creating a new team spirit and beginning the team building process.

Of the 34 staff involved 32 chose to have the one-to-one counselling sessions. Some of the outcomes of these 1-1s were:

a greater self-awareness which was helpful during this stressful period, and also forewarned the individual about which parts of the process they would find created the most stress for them (for example was it the uncertainty of the outcomes of change or the distress the redundancies were causing to others);
an understanding of communication gaps with managers or colleagues, and an insight into how to bridge the gap;
a chance to explore how their preferred behavioural style would be of use to the new departmental and organisational culture.

Follow-up work also included a number of sessions with the new management team to decide on departmental objectives; performance management issues; and communication between members of the team. The Life Orientations® method’s 360º capabilities were used to improve understanding between the team members and also to tackle realigning departmental culture with the aims and objectives of the organisation.

Team Development Workshops
The Life Orientations® method is an excellent tool for team development workshops because it can raise awareness of so many things: individual self-awareness; understanding the team leader; communication styles; strengths and weaknesses of the team as a whole; team perceptions of its effectiveness; team culture vs. organisational culture.
All these areas were covered in a project carried out for a public health team in an NHS trust.

Each of the 7 members of the team completed a Personal Style Survey on themselves and Personal Style Feedback Survey on the team leader. The team leader completed Personal Style Feedback Surveys on each of the team members.
An experienced consultant who is licensed to use the Life Orientations® method spent two hours with each team member, giving them feedback on their profile, discussing issues such as stress levels and communication problems, and establishing agenda items for the team workshop to be held at the end of the process.

It became clear from these discussions that the two managers in the team found communications with the team leader (a director) straightforward and efficient (although they didn’t meet as often as they would have liked), the team members (all themselves well-qualified doctors) found communications with the team leader insufficient and too sporadic. They found her to be facing more towards the organisation than towards the team, which, whilst this was clearly a major part of her role, was difficult for them as a relatively new team.

The consultant also observed that each team member had their own office along a corridor, sharing a team secretary, which also created communication and social issues.

The consultant and the team leader then analysed the Personal Feedback Style Survey responses from the team on her: they were all pretty close to her self-appraisal. However, her Personal Style Feedback Survey scores for the team members, apart from the managers, were not as they saw themselves. In discussion, the theory that emerged was that the team members would adapt their behaviour to suit the highly Controlling/Taking-over, task-focused nature of their boss. They would have preferred meetings that talked around issues, giving the pros and cons of options, and sounding her out; she preferred short, sharp, bottom line discussions “don’t bring me options - choose one and justify it”.

This incongruency of communication style explained quite a lot about the levels of stress the team members were facing. It was a very interesting and useful piece of feedback for the team leader because she realised that she wasn’t seeing the “real” team members when she met them: she immediately decided to flex her behaviour to improve the communication congruency.

At the team workshop, the team scores were analysed in some depth and many conclusions drawn that focused the team on issues such as:

how to run team meetings in future, to incorporate all their styles
how the team leader and managers’ styles were dominating the cultural direction of the group, which ran counter to the preferences of the team members - and what to do about it
how the team culture needed to flex to meet the organisation’s preferred style of operating
how the lack of Adapting behaviour in any of the team’s scores had to be addressed, particularly as one of the department’s roles was to network across a wide field, using diplomacy and persuasion