Artist, Leader, Or Entrepreneur? Who You Are At Work Can Dramatically Help - Or Hinder - Your Success


What are you? 

It is a question we sometimes lump in with "Who are you?" in the deeper, semi-existential sense and, depending on who you speak to, answers are extremely variable. Luckily Tony Robbins, the master Life/Performance/Business/Development coach on the planet (he invented the field of coaching, by the way) provided some clarity last week as to how to answer that question at his five day Business Mastery seminar in Las Vegas.

He distinguished three categories of business people that he calls "Gifts of Service" in accordance with which we all somehow live our lives. 


The artist is someone who loves creating a product and takes immense pride in the process of serving a customer's needs. Artists love the product and design so much that they are scared of risk and want to protect the business and identity that they created. That way, artists are very mission-driven and focus on continually improving the product and its effect on the customer.


The manager / leader is someone who is proficient at optimizing business systems and making sure everything runs efficiently. Very detail-oriented, this is someone who is fueled by managing and organizing the needs of both the processes within a business as well as the people in charge of those processes. A manager / leader is one who does not pay as much attention to the product design and creation but still wants to mitigate risk as much as possible to ensure the business' sustainability. 


The entrepreneur is the risk taker. They spend the least time thinking about the product design and creation and instead spend the most time on the product's market fit and overall business value with the ultimate goal of selling it and moving on to another venture. The entrepreneur is fueled by the scary rush of building a startup, managing investments, and looking for any opportunity to innovate and grow. 

What it means

Keep in mind that it is common to simultaneously possess characteristics of more than one persona. It is rare to be one and only that one. The persona we inhabit can also change over time, especially once one learns more about themselves in college and then again and again in the real world after college while adopting new skills and experiencing many new things. 

I have always predominantly been an Artist because of how much I love creating things, designing new aspects of service, creative writing, and so on. Not to mention how everything I do is goal-oriented and funneled toward specific outcomes. 

A twist in the plot, however, is the fact that I am largely a Manager / Leader as well. I think it is a 60/40 kind of thing leaning towards Artist but still M/L is right up there. 

This presents itself in my brain by way of my right hemisphere exploding with creativity and then moving the energy to the left hemisphere of my brain as soon as the ideas are formed. Once the ideas move over there, the left side immediately sets to work organizing them for efficiency and sustainability. I can feel when this process happens. It is a cool mutualistic relationship between the hemispheres, and the transfer occurs so quickly once my right has created something new. The left side of the brain is like the idea protector and packages them up nicely into something usable. 

I was definitely an Artist first, playing so much with toys and Legos growing up, but I know that I developed Manager / Leader qualities via family dynamics and subsequently taking on leadership positions in jobs and volunteer experiences. Now the trick is to continue employing both together.

What it also means

This activity not only draws awareness to your dominant personality traits but it also delineates what kind of personality traits you might want to seek and have join you. For instance, the interplay between Artist and Manager / Leader in me is powerful new clarity, but it also shows me that I lack the Entrepreneur's risk-taking, turnover-focused traits.

Even though I am technically an Entrepreneur by general definition, I am very much more the Artist in the sense that I focus hard on protecting what I have created and avoiding financial risk. What this means for the future of my business is that I ought to look for and hire someone who is predominantly an Entrepreneur so that our traits balance and that other person can focus on aspects of business development that my Artist's mind does not feel naturally compelled to. 

This will make it easier for me to describe what kind of person I am looking for when I post a job description in the future. 

What you can do about it

  1. Which one are you?

  2. Are you mainly just one of the personas, or do you show signs of multiple?

  3. What does this mean for you in your job or at your office?

  4. Amongst your coworkers or teammates? 

  5. How do you think you can use this assessment to boost your team's performance and productivity?