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Jory MacKay
Jory is a writer, content strategist and award-winning editor of the Unsplash Book. He contributes to Inc., Fast Company, Quartz, and more.
August 20, 2024 · 9 min read

How to find the perfect work style for your team (with free assessment)

🎁 Bonus Material: Free Work Style Self Assessment


How to find the perfect work style for your team)

There’s a famous saying (backed up by an even more famous Gallup survey) that states, people don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses.

Yet, while some bad managers are beyond redemption (i.e.,, the types who shamelessly belittle, overwork, and throw their teammates under the bus to get ahead), others aren’t even aware of just how bad they are.

One of the most common ways that managers can become “accidentally bad” is by taking a one-size-fits all approach to their team’s working styles.

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Teams are made up of individuals — each with their own preferred method and style of working. Fail to take this into account, and you’ll alienate and demotivate the very people you rely on to hit your goals.

But when you understand the different working styles and how they change the way you manage people, you’ll boost team morale, improve your efficiency, and drive better results.

What are work styles? Why are they so important?

A work style is the way that someone approaches their job and working relationships, often shaped by their personality, skills, and past experiences.

No two work styles are the same — each person takes a slightly different approach to how they manage tasks, feedback, and their interactions with others.

To make this even more complex, while most people have a dominant work style, we often change our work style to adapt to different tasks, teams, and environments. So, does this mean you, as a manager, don’t need to worry about your team’s preferred styles? Absolutely not.

As a manager, knowing your work style will help you identify your own strengths and weaknesses, and build self-awareness. While understanding your team’s work styles helps you relate to them better, making you a better manager and leading to other great benefits, such as:

The bottom line: Aligning your tasks, goals, and management styles with how your team likes to work is a management super power. Don’t get so caught up in the tasks and timelines that you forget about the people doing the work.

Teams are made up of individuals - each with their own style of working. Fail to take this into account, and you’ll alienate and demotivate the very people you rely on to hit your goals.

4 unique work styles every manager needs to know

While everyone is unique, over the years, many studies have uncovered four main categories of work styles.


4 unique work styles every manager needs to know

Let’s take a look at each of them in turn, focusing on their key characteristics, strengths and weaknesses, and examples of roles these styles best suit.

1. The Logical Doer

Logical workers are great at picking up problems, thinking through them analytically, and then promptly taking action. For this reason, they’re also referred to as ‘doers’ given their ability to complete work at speed to keep the team or project moving forward.

2. The Idea-Oriented Directors

Idea-oriented workers love coming up with big-picture, transformative ideas, helping to facilitate big changes or new ways of working. People who work in this way often find themselves in leadership roles, using their superior communication skills to motivate and persuade others to buy into their ideas.

3. The Detail-Oriented Analysts

Detail-oriented workers are the analysts of every team, working to ensure no stone is left unturned, and every task is completed to the letter. People in this style have superior attention to detail, are comfortable with complex data sets, and aren’t afraid to challenge if something doesn’t seem right.

4. The Supportive Amiables

People with a supportive work style are the empaths of the team, using their superior emotional intelligence and communication to bond the group together. They prioritize people above all else, always willing to lend a hand to support, keep the peace in the role of mediator, and boost the overall team morale.

As a manager, it’s your job to knit your team’s working styles together to create a cohesive unit that works together and delivers great results.

Work style self-assessment: How to understand you and your team’s ideal working styles

While work styles are complex, there are some simple ways you can begin to uncover preferences in how you tackle tasks, work with others, and take risks — all of which indicate a preferred work style.

This simple questionnaire is a fun way for you and your team to get started, laying the foundation for you to explore your work styles in more detail as the team develops.

What to do:

For each of the questions below, rank the answers from 1 to 4, with 1 being the answer that matters the least to you, and 4 the answer that matters most.

  1. When completing a task, it’s important that I:

    a. Understand the basics and get started quickly.

    b. Understand how it aligns with the company strategy.

    c. Take my time to get it right, regardless of how long it takes.

    d. Involve all of my team members to get their opinions.

  2. The most enjoyable part of work is:

    a. The results you achieve when a task is finished.

    b. Making an impact on the organization.

    c. Overcoming complex challenges.

    d. The people you meet.

  3. When there are several ways to complete a task, I usually:

    a. Review the pros and cons of each option and push forward.

    b. Choose an option that instinctively feels right.

    c. Analyze the problem in detail to choose the best option.

    d. Ask others for their opinion on the best option to proceed with.

  4. When working in a team, it’s important that we:

    a. Work together to get the job done quickly and effectively.

    b. Align around a common vision and objective.

    c. Each know our roles and responsibilities.

    d. Work well as a team to get the best from each other.

  5. I am willing to take a risk if:

    a. It’s most likely to help us achieve the goal.

    b. The outcome benefits the organization.

    c. All the options have been carefully considered.

    d. We as a team agree it’s the right thing to do.

Once you’ve answered all the questions, add up your scores to give you a total score for A, B, C, and D. The letter with the highest score indicates your preferred working style.

If your scores are close together, it may indicate that you frequently work across different styles, adapting to changing situations as they arise. Where one score is particularly low, this may indicate skills you should look to develop.

As you dive deeper into work styles, personality tests such as Myers Briggs Type Index (MBTI) or the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) are also great at identifying how people like to work on a day-to-day basis.

How to make different work styles work: The key to successful collaboration

Great! Everyone on your team knows their own work styles, and the strengths and weaknesses that go with them. Now what?

As a manager, it’s your job to knit all of these styles together to create a cohesive team that all work together to knock it out of the park every day.

Unfortunately, this isn’t always straightforward. Different work styles can clash, leading to conflicts, loss of productivity, and poor team morale. But, when you do get it right, you create a team that plays to each other’s strengths, solving complex challenges, creating fresh new ideas, and delivering great results as one collaborative mega-team.

To increase your chances of work styles success, here are some things you should do as a manager once everyone’s identified their work style:


The key to successful collaboration

Lastly, make sure you align working styles with roles and tasks. Once you have transparency across the team, it’s your job to align different roles and tasks to the right work styles. The key here is to get balance and ensure this assignment isn’t too strict, allowing everyone to play to their strengths while still having variety, autonomy, and the chance to develop and grow.

Planio’s task management can really help here, allowing you to assign and monitor the workload across your team.


Pllanio issue which is 50 days late and a comment from the manager asking how they can help.

If someone is struggling with a certain task, Planio can flag this to you, giving you the opportunity to step in and support the team moving forward.

Final thoughts: Don’t forget to tailor your own work style

Pretty much everyone has dealt with a bad manager at some point — and much of the time, it’s because they didn’t adapt to our needs.

Understanding the different work styles and their unique characteristics is important if you’re a manager as it will help you assign tasks, tailor your mentoring approach, and spot conflicts before they arise.

Knowing your own work style is essential for this. When you understand how you best work, you’ll be able to adapt to your team’s needs and support them properly and fully.

To finish, here’s some advice on how you can adapt depending on your work style:

No matter your work style, Planio is here to help you manage your team to deliver great results. With features for task management, document storage, communication, and time tracking, you can keep across everyone’s activity, identifying when team members are potentially struggling, so you can be there to boost them back up!

Try Planio with your own team — free for 30 days (no credit card required!)