The LIFO® Method and Management Styles

Ian Tibbles

The Waltham Group has used The LIFO® Method extensively in its own open 3-day Introduction to Management courses and on management courses for individual clients. 

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

The Lifo® model is introduced on the first morning with a background to the model, and some underpinning psychological theory, and the interpretation of the participants’ own scores. There are two key purposes for using it:

• to gain an insight into participants’ personal behavioral preferences and strategies and how these impact on the way they manage

• to recognize that everyone has individual needs, comfort zones and stressors, and that 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 programme and a means to providing managers with a broad tool-kit of appropriate behaviors. It emphasis that particular actions will not always receive a uniform response.

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

The LIFO 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 behaviors and their automatic responses to behaviors 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 gain and receive information: why some people prefer very structured and detailed explanations and others are content with little information and a broad overview. The LIFO Method highlights the likely communication gaps of the different styles.

The LIFO 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.

We have found that course participants find the Lifo 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. Many have particularly made a point of mentioning this on course evaluation sheets.

The LIFO® Method and Negotiation Styles

The Waltham Group, together with the Human Resource Partnership (“HRP”), developed a Lifo®-based Negotiating Skills programme for a London Borough which had been criticized 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 LIFO® 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 behavioral styles have particular strengths in negotiating, e.g. the Controlling behavioral style is particularly objective-orientated and drives the process forward; the Supporting style maintains high ethical standards in negotiating and avoids opportunistic win-lose scenarios; the Adapting style pours oil on troubled waters and is able to avoid or minimize unnecessary conflict, whilst the Conserving style with its focus on structure, logic and facts ensures that detailed resolutions are recorded and all options are explored.

The Waltham Group/HRP 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 behaviors 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.

Lifo® enabled the negotiators to recognize how their own styles helped the process of negotiation but, when inappropriately used, could also cause conflict and difficulties. The Controlling orientation’s emphasis on competition can degenerate into win-lose confrontation; the Supporting high ethic can lead to intolerance of others’ agendas; the Conserving orientation can become data bound and inflexible; whilst the Adapting 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 organizationally imposed negotiating culture with which they were not comfortable, found the LIFO Method useful in developing a range of negotiating behavioral 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 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. Lifomaterials are available in many different languages and cultural trends data is available. 

 The LIFO® Method for One-To-One Counseling And Change Management

Following a major reorganization, the IT department of a financial institution chose to use the LIFO Method as the basis of the staff support intervention of the change management programme. An experienced LIFO-licensed 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 LIFO MEthod and worked with the consultant, firstly to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their team, then to develop their counseling and feedback skills. The team, led by the consultant, then designed a three-stage process.

• A workshop for all staff to explain change and how it affects individuals differently; an introduction to the LIFO model; and a description of the causes and symptoms of stress and how to deal with them;
• One-to-one feedback/counseling sessions using the Lifo® 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 counseling 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 behavioral style would be of use to the new departmental and organizational 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. A LIFO-based 360° feedback process was used to improve understanding between the team members and also to tackle realigning departmental culture with the aims and objectives of the organization.

The LIFOMethod In Team Development Workshops

The LIFO 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. organizational 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 LIFO Survey on themselves and Another Person survey on the team leader. The team leader completed Another Person survey on each of the team members. 

An experienced LIFO consultant 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 organization 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 analyzed the AP responses from the team on her: they were all pretty close to her self-appraisal. However, her AP 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 behavior to suit the highly Controlling, 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 incongruence 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 realized that she wasn’t seeing the “real” team members when she met them: she immediately decided to flex her behavior to improve the communication congruency.

At the team workshop, the team scores were analyzed 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 organization's preferred style of operating
• how the lack of Adapting behavior 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

The survey results were as follows:

The Team’s Own Survey Results

The Team Leader’s Scores on the Team

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