Which Type Are You?

Paul Maritz, president and CEO of the software firm VMware, thinks leadership teams need to have four personality types. He explains his view in the following:

At the risk of oversimplifying, I think that in any great leadership team, you find at least four personalities, and you never find all four in a single person.

You need to have somebody who is a strategist or visionary, who sets the goals for where the organization needs to go.

You need to have somebody who is the classic manager - - somebody who takes care of the organization, in terms of making sure that everbody knows what they need to do and making sure that tasks are broken up into manageable actions and how they're going to be measured.

You need a champion for the customer, because you are trying to translate your product into something that customers are going to pay for. So it's important to have somebody who empathizes and understands how customers will see it. I've seen many endeavors fail because people weren't able to connect the strategy to the way the customers would see the issue.

Then lastly, you need the enforcer. You need somebody who says: "We've stared at this issue long enough. We're going to make a decision. We're going to deal with whatever conflict we have."

You very rarely find more than two of these personalities in one person. I've never seen it. Great teams have a group of people who provide those functions and respect each other and, equally important, know who they are and who they are not. Often, I've seen people get into trouble when they think they're the strategist and they're not, or think they're the decision maker and they're not.

We need a degree of humility and self-awareness. Really great teams have members who know who they are and who they're not, and they know when to get out of the way and let the other team members make their contributions.