Visionaries and Integrators

Do personality types affect what roles you excel at as a leader in a smaller business?  Absolutely yes!  Especially at the owner/CEO/COO level, your personality will affect the role that you should be filling.  The Entrepreneurial Operating System or EOS identifies the two important roles that top leaders can fill in a business: a visionary and an integrator.
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In recent conversations with smaller companies, many people are relieved and happy to understand the difference between these roles.  The concept helps them understand how to structure their organization for maximum benefit.  Here’s what I’m hearing from frustrated leaders: “That completely explains the friction we’ve been having,” or “Well, that makes sense of what I’m seeing in our company.”

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Let’s start with the visionary. If you are familiar with common personality assessments such as Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, DiSC personality model or the StrengthsFinders assessment, the following will be meaningful to you. If not, you can find out more about these assessments in the footnotes of this article. A visionary is a person who might be an Intuitive (“N”) on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, an Influencer (I) on the DiSC personality assessment, or have strengths such as Ideation, Adaptability, Futurist or Strategic on the StrengthsFinder assessment.  These are some of their traits:

• They are big picture thinkers with lots of ideas (some of which are brilliant)
• They like to schmooze the big clients
• They are passionate about keeping the culture
• They love to keep up to date with industry trends 
• They might be the founder of the company, but not always 

What they are not good at is managing the day-to-day operations of the company and keeping people accountable to their day-to-day goals.  Instead, they prefer to chase the fun, big ideas rather than conduct the “boring” tasks of keeping a steady hand on the rudder.

An integrator, on the other hand, is much more attuned to the rhythm and rigor needed to run a well-disciplined company.  They are typically the Sensors (“S”) on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a Conscientious (C) on the DiSC personality assessment, or have strengths like Reliability, Achiever, Responsibility and Discipline on the StrengthsFinder assessment.  These are the folks who are good at:

• Managing the day-to-day routine of the organization 
• Having difficult conversations with employees who are not accountable 
• Ensuring the leadership team is in sync together
• Keeping track of the details of the company

In our experience with EOS, we find that both of these roles are important in a company.  If a visionary is stuck in the integrator seat, he/she will be unhappy and unable to consistently focus on attaining a long-term vision.  An integrator is needed to manage the details and keep the ship on a steady course.

If you’d like to learn more about visionaries and integrators, please view a video with a graphic illustration and this one also to watch EOS founder, Gino Wickman, share his wisdom about these two important roles in your company. You might want to purchase a copy of the book, Rocket Fuel, which describes the concept in detail. Lastly, to help you discover which role best suits you, take the visionary/implementer quiz.

Interested in exploring EOS for your business?  I will gladly spend 90 minutes with you and your leadership team to introduce you to this proven process – at no cost to you! Contact Kristin today at 817 706 7027 or [email protected]

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