- How work styles differ between business owners
- How your work style impacts your business
- How to use your work style to your advantage
- What kind of work style works best with modern digital tools
Q: What is a work style? As a business owner, how will knowing my work style benefit my company?
A: Simply put, your work style is the way that you work — including your thoughts, how you organize things, how you delegate and set deadlines, and just about everything else that pertains to your work. Understanding your work style will give you insights into how you connect with customers, strengthening your infrastructure, and the most effective way that you can scale your business.
Just like the market ebbs and flows, the way the average American works is constantly changing and evolving.
In the past, supervisors didn’t really worry about bringing employees together to meet common goals. Instead, the workplace was a fairly unforgiving place.
One supervisor typically oversaw several employees, the chain of command was staunchly enforced, and innovation was generally discouraged in favor of maintaining the status quo.
This authoritarian work style led to falsely inflated productivity, heavily reduced innovation, and in some cases, a toxic working environment.
Thankfully, this authoritarian management style has fallen out of favor and is quickly being replaced by a more collaborative work style.
This collaborative management style draws upon the value of delegation and reflects the fact that employees bring their best to work when they feel happy and healthy.
This management style doesn’t put one person in charge of all key decisions. Instead, it spreads the responsibilities to several employees – helping each focus on one common goal rather than merely checking boxes.
This collaborative work style is a direct result of a transition to remote work, the booming e-commerce sector, and a new understanding of the importance of mental health in the workplace.
Within this broader collaborative management style categorization, business owners tend to fit within four different characterizations of modern work styles. We’ll dive into those shortly.
As a business owner or entrepreneur, you should familiarize yourself with the work style meaning and the four different characterizations to help you better understand how to use your work habits to your advantage.
In this article, we’ll be looking at a work style example, the difference between work styles, how your work style impacts your business, how to use that to your advantage, and what kind of work style works best with modern digital tools.
In addition, we’ve included a work-style quiz to help you better understand your advantages and impediments.
If a work style assessment sounds like something you’re interested in, keep reading and strive for the best management style possible for your business.
- How work styles differ between business owners
- How your work style impacts your business
- How to use your work style to your advantage
- What kind of work style works best with modern digital tools
How work styles differ between people
As you might expect, different people have different work styles.
An obvious fact — but when it comes to business owners, it’s a fact that is often overlooked. People like to think business owners all share the same work style, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Just consider the various ways American business owners are treating remote work!
Before the pandemic, only 6% of American employees were regularly working from home. Two years later, approximately 60% of American workers are regularly engaged in remote work.
Some business owners might see the merits of a four-day workweek, others might think it’s just laziness.
Similarly, some business owners might value employee happiness over arbitrary participation metrics, whereas other employers might still be practicing an authoritarian management style.
Read more: Lazy or Lucrative? Pros and Cons of a 4-Day Workweek
These differences show that each business owner has a distinct work style.
When it comes to denominating these work styles, there are several ways you can determine where you fit in.
For instance, a simple Myers-Briggs personality test would give any individual a better understanding of how to manage their work. This might lead to new approaches to problem-solving, a better idea of how you manage your time, improvements to conflict resolution, and more.
We’ve created a quiz that you can use to determine your business owner’s work style. But before we get to the quiz, let’s take the time to understand the different work styles you can choose.
Below, we’ve covered each work style in depth:
- Innovators
- Agents
- Teachers
- Connectors
Innovators
Innovators are self-sufficient. They like to control as much of the process as possible while not asking for help. They value the “what if?” questions, and their imagination is a crucial asset.
This has some clear benefits along with some fairly obvious disadvantages.
Self-sufficiency is a huge plus for innovators, making it easy for them to come up with new solutions to any issues that their company might be facing.
Additionally, innovators excel at identifying niches, being at the forefront of the latest technologies, and keeping consumer attention. Likewise, innovators typically make good brand builders.
This allows innovators to improve productivity, create valuable connections, and build effective branding materials.
Unfortunately, innovators’ sense of self-sufficiency can lead to a hardheaded demeanor, and these business owners might struggle to connect with their employees.
As an innovator, you’re so focused on pushing your business to the next level and coming up with your next big idea that it can be easy to lose sight of things like keeping your employees happy, properly communicating with them, and staying within your budget.
Agents
Agents are very effective managers and strong communicators. These individuals place value on what they can accomplish and are typically the driving force behind their businesses.
Similar to innovators, agents are focused business owners with keen eyes toward progress. But while innovators occasionally struggle with team building and delegating tasks, agents excel in both of these categories.
These business owners view themselves as big-picture thinkers and look to other people to execute their ideas.
As objective thinkers, agents are good at seeing a complete end goal and taking the necessary steps to get there. Agents are excellent leaders and can easily delegate tasks to their employees.
Essentially, agents’ position as natural leaders allows them to create an impressive business infrastructure geared towards long-term success. They put together strong teams that work well under pressure toward a common goal.
Using their thought-based initiatives, agents can break down the parts of a long-term goal and identify the necessary steps to help their business get there.
On the flip side, this bigger-picture approach also has some pitfalls.
First, looking at your business through a wide lens in preparation for the future is great, but if you’re unprepared for the short term, focusing on lofty and distant goals isn’t going to get you anywhere.
Next, agents can occasionally miss key details by thinking too big. And finally, agents might find themselves focusing too much on delegation and accidentally alienating their employees.
Teachers
Teachers view themselves as educators more than bosses and want nothing more than a stable work environment that is consistent and orderly.
This doesn’t mean that teachers aren’t willing to reprimand reprobate employees or put their fists down when necessary.
At their core, teachers understand the value of educating their employees.
The benefits of focusing so much on education are clear:
Your employees are better suited for longevity, the education allows you to give newer employees sizable workloads, and constantly teaching employees keeps you at the top of your game.
Generally, teachers can expect lower turnover rates, a better-equipped workforce, impressive attention to detail, a consistent schedule, and predictable workloads.
Teachers have some disadvantages:
A lengthy onboarding process can get expensive, and if you’re not making good hires, the process isn’t doing you any favors.
Sure:
Better-trained employees last longer than poorly-trained employees, but you need to be selective about the applicants you’re willing to invest in.
Teachers’ increased focus on the smaller details might also lead to more obvious issues going unnoticed.
In addition, flexibility is a fixture of modern businesses. A rigid schedule and firm working hours might not be right for all potential employees.
Read more: Modern Business Solutions: Boost Efficiency, Maintain Flexibility
Connectors
Last but not least, connectors see themselves as “gap-fillers”. They put a lot of stock in connection, creating networks, and bringing teams together.
These business owners operate as an all-purpose tool, looking to fill any spaces that might be left by their team members.
Connectors focus more on relationships than operations. A connector is a people-person who knows how to use their interpersonal skills for entrepreneurial success.
Connectors are more emotionally intelligent than other business leaders on this list and are supportive enough to build valuable relationships with ease.
Overall, connectors are willing to play any role necessary for their business. They can provide emotional support and healthy work-life balance guidance to their employees in order to cultivate wholly collaborative environments.
As for negatives, a connector may risk of caring too much or letting their emotions cloud their judgment.
In addition, a connector’s heavy support role might lead to some employees questioning their leadership abilities.
As you can see, each work style has its own unique pros and cons. Let’s examine how these work styles might affect your business in more detail.
How your work style impacts your business
It’s no secret:
The way you work impacts how you prioritize tasks. This isn’t inherently negative, but it’s important to be aware of potential biases.
As a business owner, you probably naturally gravitate toward certain tasks. This means you put your strengths at the fore and build a business that reflects your natural talents.
Unfortunately, this can also lead to imbalances within your business. You may find your business lags in much-needed areas because your work habits lead you to focus on other areas.
In addition, your work style can impact your hiring process.
Many business owners try to hire people like themselves. While this might work in some cases, it’s also very important to hire people with varying personalities and ideas.
Innovation doesn’t come exclusively from one person. Using your work habits to cultivate an ecosystem that incentivizes this innovation will help you get the best out of each of your employees.
Despite this, the truth is that some work styles might clash – and this isn’t a bad thing.
Unique perspectives help your business. There’s no point in having employees who cosign every bad decision you make! The last thing you want is a workforce of “yes men.”
Despite clashing personalities and differing work styles, many corporations are turning to workstyle agreements that are designed to foster open and honest communication while also giving employees and managers the opportunity to explain how they work best with others.
Your work style can impact virtually every aspect of your business, from the workspace you use to the products or services you offer. Once you understand how you work best, you can make the necessary adjustments for greater success.
Read more: What Type of Shared Workspace is Best for Your Business?
For example, you probably won’t want to take on detail-heavy tasks that could force you to outsource if you’re an innovator.
On the other hand, you probably won’t want to put yourself in a position that requires you to handle tasks that you don’t have any experience with if you’re a teacher.
As a whole, your work style can give you valuable insights into how you should run your business.
Keep in mind how your management habits will affect your operations to develop a well-rounded business. Use your workstyle to your advantage rather than aimlessly trying things that aren’t conducive to how you work.
How to use your work style to your advantage
Once you’ve familiarized yourself with your work style, you can start building your business far more effectively with the knowledge you’ve gained.
Before you get too ahead of yourself, keep this in mind:
Work style reliability, while trustworthy, doesn’t account for all the nuance involved with the various work styles.
You need to leverage traditional business advice like strategy planning, market research, and targeting niche audiences along with catering to your business work style.
Read more: 5 Extremely Effective Small Business Strategy Planning Tips
Whether it’s through beefing up your company’s infrastructure, focusing on expansion, or introducing new product offerings, playing to your work style strengths is a great way to help your company stay competitive.
Below, we’ve detailed a guide filled with actionable tips about how you can use your work style to your advantage. Keep reading for more!
- Understand your work style’s impact
- Determine your least favorite activity
- Identify your strengths and weaknesses
- Point to specific areas your business is lacking
- Make hires or create other solutions to these issues
1. Understanding your work style’s impact
First, you need to understand how your work style impacts your priorities.
Take stock of what you spend the majority of your day working on. These are tasks that are probably conducive to your work style.
Once you see how your work style is affecting your daily operations, you’ll have an easier time making any necessary changes.
2. Determining your least favorite activity
Next, take a look at what you spend the least time doing or have the strongest aversion to.
If there are several things you’re avoiding, then it’s probably time to take a look at how you expect to accomplish anything.
If you’re spending less time on a specific area of your business’s operations, you might need to bring in team members with different work styles in order to handle these tasks effectively.
You might have hired people with similar work styles simply because you relate to their personalities, but hiring a more diverse work force with different work styles ensures that there are no weak areas in your business.
3. Identifying your strengths and weaknesses
Draft a list of your strengths as a business owner as well as your weaknesses.
Writing out these strengths and weaknesses is the best way to get a comprehensive look at what your business might be lacking. You can’t fix anything if you’re unaware of what’s broken.
Once you’ve identified your strengths and weaknesses, you should start to consider what issues these strengths and weaknesses might have led to.
4. Pointing to specific issues
Pointing out specific issues within your company gives more insight where you should be focusing your attention.
These issues could be something as simple as “I’m too distracted by business phone calls to get anything done.” All that matters is that you’ve pointed out a specific issue that you’d like to work on.
5. Making hires and crafting other solutions
The obvious answer to many of the issues that you might find within your business is to simply hire more employees.
Before meeting with potential new employees, craft some interview questions that will help you find complementary work styles for your team.
Remember, a bad hire is worse than no hire at all.
Alternatively, if your business isn’t big enough yet to hire, consider how you can build workflows and processes that will set you up for success when you can.
For example, if you see yourself as a teacher, you can start building guides and materials that will help more action-oriented people understand how to run things when they join the business.
In a perfect world, business owners would spend the early days of their business determining their work style and crafting category-specific onboarding materials that speak perfectly to each group. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
With this guide, you should have a better idea of how you can use your work style to your advantage. Keep reading to see what work styles work best with modern digital tools!
What kind of work style works best with modern digital tools
The modern working world couldn’t be more different than its traditional predecessor.
Entrepreneurs are being rewarded like never before and the future for digital businesses is bright.
To keep up with these constantly changing times, Alliance Virtual Offices offers several digital tools designed for established entrepreneurs, motivated business owners, and everyone in between.
What work style works best with these tools? The question is more rhetorical than anything because the truth is that every work style can benefit from new digital tools.
That said, entrepreneurs with idea-oriented work styles like innovators and agents might benefit more from our Live Receptionists or Virtual Phone Numbers than the more detail-oriented work styles — solely because innovators and agents aren’t well-known for their attention to detail.
On the other hand, all four work styles can benefit from our Virtual Offices, Meeting Rooms, and Coworking spaces.
Further reading
- 5 Extremely Effective Small Business Strategy Planning Tips
- What Type of Shared Workspace is Best for Your Business?
- Modern Business Solutions: Boost Efficiency, Maintain Flexibility
- Lazy or Lucrative? Pros and Cons of a 4-Day Workweek
Understanding your work style is an important part of being a business owner.
It allows you to identify your strengths and weaknesses to build a well-rounded team.
For more information about the services and products that Alliance Virtual Offices offers, contact us today!
