grouping by types or typing in groups

Well, a month in and what seems to be clarifying the most for me is that the familiar stuff I feel I know is extremely familiar, but then all the new and unknown stuff is more utterly unknown than I would have thought possible.
I come from learning disability services my whole adult life, I am realising that I haven't just got a new job, I've actually changed career. We work with impoverished communities, bringing people who have similar life experiences together to learn, share and better their lives together, from the hidden Roma communities who don't trust schools or services, through Bangladeshi elders learning conversational English to fathers groups in the only BNP led area in Leeds, we change the lives of anyone who has the gumption to want to improve. I come from a world which is moving away from segregated services as a solution and challenges mainstream services to change and include.
On the other hand, I am working with people, I have always worked with people. And people are still utterly people. So in terms of management, nothing is really all that different. Everyone is different, but somehow enough like someone else to be categorisable and understandable in a short hand of types that uncomfortably mirrors the experiences of the groups we support to move away from such stereotypes. As a manager I am concerned with who people are in the world and how I support and enable them to grow, develop and be the best they can be. This is the same whether it is getting food into someones mouth with comfort and dignity or leading a 1.5 million investment in engaging excluded young people in education and learning.
In the spirit of these principles I actually said to the head of children's and young people's services yesterday, that it didn't matter to me whether she packed potatoes, as long as she did it well. Her face was the perfect picture of engaged confusion when someone thinks they may have just been insulted but didn't quite understand it well enough to know how. She is a task focused manager, she wanted to account for herself by telling me all the things she had achieved and delivered this month. I wanted to know who she was, what motivates her and how I support her to get the best out of her. It was an odd way to start the conversation and I realised this as soon as I said it. Yes, I had just equated hard to reach children with a sack of spuds. Not the best way to connect with a passionate and committed youth work manager.
I managed to rescue the situation by quickly following with statements of how much I completely trusted her to be delivering fantastic services and unless she let me know, I would assume that anything she delivered would be brilliant. I just wanted to know about her and how she was managing to do it. her face relaxed and finally a small shy smile of pride crept in the corners. I had rescued the situation, but I really must remember to be very clear about how I explain myself and what I am saying!
So I have the task-focused-whizz-worker, I have the attention-to-small-detail-no-eye-on-the-bigger-picture, the leap-in-and-rescue-everyone-overworker and finally the completely-avoiding-my-manager. Seems like enough to be going on with. Perhaps I should put them in touch with their counterparts from my old job and they can support each other in small groups.