[ 11 ] Career Development International 4/1 [1999] 11–18 © MCB University Press [ISSN 1362-0436] Colour your managerial type, colour your organization Ronnie Lessem City University Business School, London, UK Yehuda Baruch University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Keywords Leadership, Management development, Management styles, Management theory Abstract The paper presents Spectral Management Theory as well as its applications to managerial and learning styles to a wide audience – management trainers, human resource managers and general managers who have an interest in managerial development and organisational learning. The spectral approach leads to eight different kinds of management types or styles. The eight dimen- sions stem from the spectral theory of personality. It is based on three characteristics of a manager – cognitive, affective, and behavioural. Recent manager- ial approaches lack a developmen- tal element. The spectral approach answers this need. Apart from being a multidimen- sional analytical tool based on the reality of working life, it leads to individual and organisational development and learning. The Spectral Management Type Inventory (SMTI) is an analytical instrument designed to enable people to identify their personal management style. Moreover, it serves to stimulate learning processes that enable manage- ment to evolve through develop- mental stages. Introduction Managing flexibility Increasingly, flexibility of response, both internally and externally, is becoming a pre- requisite for business success. Whereas, for example, Steve Jobs appeared to be the ideal person to create an Apple Computers, and John Sculley seemed to have the right man- agerial qualities to move it onto a second stage of its development, now it appears that another set of qualities are required to move the company on to yet a third stage. Jobs and Sculley, like Akers at IBM or Robinson at American Express, seemed to have lacked the managerial flexibility to adapt their leader- ship style to the exigencies of the moment. Approaches to management and leadership in the past have tended to limit their focus to two alternative dimensions, be they people or task, transaction or transformation oriented. Thus they have failed to deal with the diver- sity of human nature. An advance in manage- ment assessment and development has evolved over the past decade with just that end in mind. The “SMTI” has been used, predominantly, for matching personality with role, adapting training programmes to individual learning styles, building multi-functional teams, and managing across functions or cultures. The theory of management styles The Spectral Management Type Inventory (SMTI) is an instrument designed to “profile” personality and leadership style for indivi- duals (Lessem, 1987). It was proven as a valid and reliable tool for managerial development (Baruch and Lessem, 1995). Using the same terminology, an organizational assessment can serve to provide the base for a best-match between individuals and specific processes, jobs and tasks in the organization. The full spectrum of characters covering the eight management styles will be presented, focusing on the individual man- ager. The selection of eight dimensions emerges from the spectral theory of personality by Kingsland (1984), later devel- oped by Lessem (1987, 1990, 1991). It is based on three characteristics of a person: 1 cognitive (C); 2 affective (A); and 3 behavioral (B). These characteristics or three aspects of a human being were similarly proposed by philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1966) at the beginning of the twentieth century. He main- tains that thinking (T), feeling (F), and will- ing or doing (W) form the basis for personal functioning. Sometimes a component is domi- nant and is represented by an upper case letter A, B or C; sometimes it is recessive and is represented by a lower case a, b, or c. In each case the management type is associ- ated with a particular colour, selected from the colour spectrum, both for ease of refer- ence and also because of the respective conno- tations. Specifically, then, “violet” is associ- ated with matters regal; “indigo” reflects subtlety of mood; “blue” is often associated with law and order; “green” is indeed the colour of life; “yellow” is associated with curiosity; orange has inevitable connotations of warmth; “red” is associated with activity or immediacy; and finally “grey” fades into the background (see Table I). The managing and learning spectrum in theory The cast of characters The innovator (violet) Truly innovative managers are total origi- nals, able to create something out of seem- ingly nothing. They are propelled forward by an inner compulsion, which is projected onto others by a powerful and visually expressive imagination. Such individuals will be creative learners and while in a group will emerge as inspired team members. The innovator is probably the rarest of all man- agers, though he or she is probably more likely to be found in Silicon Valley than any- where else. They are the inventors and visionaries, pointing a group, in the most picturesque language, towards a promised land. At the same time such team members, if their strengths go unrecognized or are overdone, can become dogmatic, intolerant and intoler- able. In fact often they consider themselves as