Four dimensions of a leader's operating style, four archetypes each. Pick the cell that matches what you have actually observed — not what the org chart implies — and the brief below assembles itself.
Rank the rows by cost of error, not by how interesting they are. Getting decision control wrong ends careers; getting communication style wrong only wastes effort. Left to right, each row runs from wanting less of your reasoning to wanting more — loosely, in the case of control.
A read you cannot cite is a guess. Log what you actually observed and mark it confirmed or inferred, the same discipline you would apply to a finding. Confidence rises with confirmed observations and stalls on inference alone.
The most durable artefact of managing upward is a short written agreement on decision rights. Draft it yourself and hand it over — most leaders will happily edit a straw man and never author one. Revisit it after the first thing goes wrong, because that is when you find out where the real line was.
Single cells rarely explain a relationship; pairings do. The ones below are highlighted automatically when your selections match.