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Evelyn, the chief executive of an eco-conscious hospitality company, had flown with her senior leadership team to visit their Costa Rica operations. A hotel that could give the company access to a more upscale market was up for sale, and the head of the local office wanted to move quickly on the opportunity.

However, once the team was assembled on location, it quickly became apparent that the Costa Rica branch had some puzzling financial data that the Denver-based headquarters team hadn’t been fully aware of. Sitting with her chief financial officer, head of retail, and head of new business development, Evelyn wanted to move quickly through the financials so that they could jump on this exciting new opportunity — and she was frustrated that she was the only one talking. She wanted to hear from the team, but they were keeping quiet. The team needed clarity before they could move ahead with a significant financial purchase, and Evelyn felt that her team wasn’t effectively working together to solve the problem.

It’s not uncommon for managers to find themselves in a situation similar to Evelyn’s. This often results from team members’ conflicting decision-making styles. We tend to like to work with people who think – and problem-solve – like we do, reinforcing our own cognitive biases and blind spots, and unwittingly discouraging true, creative problem solving.

I’ve spent 30 years studying how people make decisions and have identified five different decision-making archetypes, which I call problem solver profiles (PSPs). As I describe in my book Problem Solver: Maximizing Your Strengths to Make Better Decisions, these PSPs are personal approaches built from our individual strengths and weaknesses. Once we gain awareness of our own and our team members’ profiles, we can take steps to become more dynamic, flexible decision-makers.

The Five Problem-Solver Profiles

We tend to see the strengths of our own decision-making patterns and the weaknesses of others’. But every problem solver profile has unique strengths and weaknesses; these cognitive biases are two-sides of the same coin. Of course, many of us can be more than one type of problem solver, but in almost all cases we lean on one dominant approach. Below are the five problem solver profiles and how a few of their cognitive biases can help or hurt their decision performance.

Adventurers tend to go with their gut reactions. This optimistic and confident decision-maker often finds the future more interesting than the present. Their optimism bias helps their ability to quickly make many decisions — but it can also skew their assessment of the quality of the decision they face.

Detectives like to follow the data. This evidence-based decision-maker intrepidly searches out the data so that it will lead them somewhere. Yet, their draw to research and facts can also lead them to a confirmation bias that the data is the most important criteria in their current decision. For example, focused on the data, they may miss out on collaborating well with others.

Listeners want to solicit others’ input. This collaborative and trusting decision-maker works well with their colleagues. However, they often suffer from a liking bias that can make it difficult to tune into their own opinion or to express a viewpoint that might be at odds with others.

Thinkers thrive on identifying multiple paths and outcomes. This thoughtful, cautious decision-maker likes to know their options. Their desire to understand the “why” behind a decision can impede their ability to evaluate each option individually as they may fall victim to a frame blindness that limits how they see and understand the problem they are solving.

Visionaries pride themselves on seeing pathways that others don’t. This creative, original decision-maker has a big vision, but they may fall prey to scarcity bias, preferring to seek out a unique solution rather than the obvious solution right before him.

From this very brief overview, you can see how various combinations of PSPs will interact differently. For example, a thinker and an adventurer may effectively counter each others’ cognitive biases, but they might also experience friction in the ways they go about problem solving. A team of visionaries or detectives, on the other hand, may be comfortable working together, but may also amplify each other’s weaknesses. Visionaries are great at coming up with new ideas, but struggle to vet these ideas, while detectives may find a lot of evidence to test their assumptions; once they have the data, however, they are ready to move forward without bringing in the other stakeholders.

Since Evelyn and her team had just completed a professional development workshop, each had identified their PSP. Evelyn knew that she is an adventurer, full of ideas, always thinking ahead, and ready to move forward quickly. But she remembered that morning in Costa Rica that her CFO was a thinker, and the retail leader, new business development chief, and head of Costa Rica’s operations were all listeners. Together they formed a thoughtful and collaborative team — but one that moved relatively slowly, wanting to have time to explore different options and their implications and to come to a consensus-driven decision.

Evelyn realized that her team had fallen into a pattern where she spoke first, offering her favored decision and looking for confirmation from her team — adventurers feel comfortable getting started. She expected the others to behave like adventurers too, moving quickly based on their own skill sets. But when the team was faced with a situation where they needed to drill down into the data, Evelyn’s gut reaction came into conflict with the slower and more methodical decision-making of the thinker and listeners on her team.

Evelyn decided to modify her own behavior, holding back on being the first to speak in order to uplift her team’s ability to work well together. The result: They surfaced questions about the financials that Evelyn hadn’t thought to ask.

Evelyn had started out feeling frustrated, and thinking that her team was the problem. By taking the time to apply her knowledge of problem solver profiles, she was able to identify the causes of the tension she was feeling, and recognized that her decision-making approach had been a barrier to effective problem solving. She could then reframe the problem, thereby reducing the friction and get decision making on track in a way that all team members could contribute positively. Ultimately, the company decided not to pursue a new purchase, but instead to focus on getting the Costa Rica branch on a more solid financial footing.

Evelyn had been selected for her job because of her adventurer characteristics; they are part of her personality as someone who gets things done. But she needed to stop expecting that her management team would behave exactly like her. By stepping back and seeing her team’s strengths rather than their weaknesses, she was able to more effectively lead the company.

Many managers face this same challenge. Reframing — as Evelyn did — can improve your team, your work relationships, and your leadership. Using PSPs to understand different decision-making patterns will help you examine your own decision-making approach, as well as the diversity of decision-making styles and dynamics that arise in your team’s decision-making. With this foundation, you can adjust your approach to more effectively work with others to make better big decisions together.