In analyzing and writing about the data from our annual survey of corporate researchers for our Q Report (aka The Corporate Researcher Report, which was mailed with your copy of the Researcher SourceBook last month), I was again reminded of how difficult the job of an insights professional can be.
Based on some of the comments to our various open-ended questions on aspects of life as an insights pro, it sounds like it’s an ongoing struggle to gauge the mental state of the people, often executives, to whom you deliver your findings. Are they the type who can’t stand to hear bad news? (Messenger, prepare to be shot!) Does their fragile ego need to be preserved? (Get ready to sugarcoat like you went to confectionery school!) Do they have the attention span of a gnat? (Even a one-page topline has one page too many for this person!)
No matter what your role as an information-deliverer is – whether you’re part therapist, part court jester, part truth-teller or some combination of all three on a daily basis – it’s helpful to understand the psychology of the executives who are the end users of your data. One way to do that is by classifying and describing them, which was the focus of a report earlier this year from consulting firm Deloitte.
Deloitte has identified four primary “Business Chemistry” types: Pioneers, Drivers, Guardians and Integrators. Pioneers value possibilities and spark creativity. Drivers value challenge and generate momentum. Guardians value stability and bring order and rigor. And Integrators value connection and draw teams together.
For a report titled Business Chemistry in the C-suite, researchers from the Deloitte Greenhouse Experience team surveyed 661 C-suite executives and found that two of those four types accounted for nearly two-thirds of the sample: Pioneers – 36 percent; Drivers – 29 percent; Guardians – 18 percent; Integrators – 17 percent.
While each person is potentially a mix of all four categories, based on the above it seems a bit more likely you’ll be dealing with a Pioneer or a Driver, though Deloitte found that factors such as job function (CIO, CFO, etc.), organization size, industry and gender contributed to the differences in the proportion of Business Chemistry types in the C-suite. For example, as outlined in the report, while Pioneers were more prevalent in the C-suite overall, Drivers (37 percent) and Guardians (26 percent) were the two top CFO types represented, while the CIO role contained relatively similar proportions of Drivers (37 percent) and Pioneers (36 percent). Similarly, in the largest organizations in the sample, those with more than 100,000 employees, the proportion of C-suite executives who were Drivers (38 percent) outpaced the proportion of Pioneers (29 percent).
Compared to Pioneers, Drivers tend to be less comfortable using intuition and have a stronger need to verify information and to know the right answer. They also see things in more black-and-white terms than Pioneers do. Guardians are similar to Drivers in these ways, and while Integrators look a little more like Pioneers in regard to these traits, they’re not quite as strong as Pioneers on any of them.
Mentally plot
The report is available for download at http://bit.ly/2gYnzrm. It has a helpful infographic upon which you can mentally plot the execs you work with to better understand how they think. This stuff isn’t groundbreaking – Pioneers (surprise!) tend to be detail-averse risk seekers, for example – but it’s useful to have a rubric like Deloitte’s to give some shape to the landscape before you.
After all, when you’re in the business of presenting research results, it never hurts to do a little research of your own on the people who will have to make decisions based on your work.