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theadmiringbog · 6 years ago

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Measuring the strength of a workplace can be simplified to twelve questions.

These twelve questions don’t capture everything you may want to know about your workplace, but they do capture the most information and the most important information. They measure the core elements needed to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees.

Here they are:

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?

2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?

3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?

4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?

5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?

6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?

8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?

9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?

10. Do I have a best friend at work?

11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?

12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

In 1975 two hundred books were published on the subject of managing and leading. By 1997 that number had more than tripled. In fact, over the last twenty years authors have offered up over nine thousand different systems, languages, principles, and paradigms to help explain the mysteries of management and leadership.

Great managers reject this out of hand. They remember what the frog forgot: that each individual, like the scorpion, is true to his unique nature. They recognize that each person is motivated differently, that each person has his own way of thinking and his own style of relating to others. They know that there is a limit to how much remolding they can do to someone. But they don’t bemoan these differences and try to grind them down. Instead they capitalize on them. They try to help each person become more and more of who he already is.

this is the one insight we heard echoed by tens of thousands of great managers: People don’t change that much. Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough.

This insight is revolutionary. It explains why great managers do not believe that everyone has unlimited potential; why they do not help people fix their weaknesses; why they insist on breaking the “Golden Rule” with every single employee; and why they play favorites. It explains why great managers break all the rules of conventional wisdom.

a manager must be able to do four activities extremely well: select a person, set expectations, motivate the person, develop the person. These four activities are the manager’s most important responsibilities.

you must know how much of a person you can change. You must know the difference between talent, skills, and knowledge.

You must know which of these can be taught and which can only be hired in.

When selecting someone, they select for talent … not simply experience, intelligence, or determination. • When setting expectations, they define the right outcomes … not the right steps. • When motivating someone, they focus on strengths … not on weaknesses. • When developing someone, they help him find the right fit … not simply the next rung on the ladder. We’ve labeled

talent as “a recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied.” The emphasis here is on the word “recurring.” Your talents, they say, are the behaviors you find yourself doing often.

Your filter, more than your race, sex, age, or nationality, is You.

Skills, knowledge, and talents are distinct elements of a person’s performance. The distinction among the three is that skills and knowledge can easily be taught, whereas talents cannot.

Skills are the how-to’s of a role.

Your knowledge is simply “what you are aware of.” There are two kinds of knowledge: factual knowledge — things you know; and experiential knowledge — understandings you have picked up along the way.

Talents are different phenomena altogether. Talents are the four-lane highways in your mind, those that carve your recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior.

we have found a way to simplify these diverse talents into three basic categories: striving talents, thinking talents, and relating talents.

Striving talents explain the why of a person. They explain why he gets out of bed every day, why he is motivated to push and push just that little bit harder.

Thinking talents explain the how of a person. They explain how he thinks, how he weighs up alternatives, how he comes to his decisions.

Relating talents explain the who of a person. They explain whom he trusts, whom he builds relationships with, whom he confronts, and whom he ignores.

A manager can never breathe motivational life into someone else. All she can do is try to identify each employee’s striving four-lane highways and then, as far as is possible, cultivate these.

In the minds of great managers, every role performed at excellence deserves respect. Every role has its own nobility.

Selecting for talent is the manager’s first and most important responsibility.

talent is only potential. This potential cannot be turned into performance in a vacuum. Great talents need great managers if they are to be turned into performance.

So this is their dilemma: The manager must retain control and focus people on performance. But she is bound by her belief that she cannot force everyone to perform in the same way. The solution is as elegant as it is efficient: Define the right outcomes and then let each person find his own route toward those outcomes.

Any attempt to impose the “one best way” is doomed to fail. First, it is inefficient — the “one best way” has to fight against the unique, grooved four-lane highways possessed by each individual. Second, it is demeaning — by providing all the answers, it prevents each individual from perfecting and taking responsibility for her own style. Third, it kills learning — every time you make a rule you take away a choice, and choice, with all of its illuminating repercussions, is the fuel for learning.

Bran Ferren, executive vice president of research and development at Walt Disney Imagineering, describes it: “Vibrant companies must put together five-year plans. But they must be willing to change these five-year plans every single year. It’s the only way to stay alive.”

that persistence focused primarily on nontalents is wasted.

But it does mean that great managers are aggressive in trying to identify each person’s talents and help her to cultivate those talents. This is how they do it: They believe that casting is everything. They manage by exception. And they spend the most time with their best people.

The best managers are more deliberate. They talk with each individual, asking about strengths, weaknesses, goals, and dreams. They work closely with each employee, taking note of the choices each makes, the way they all interact, who supports who, and why. They notice things. They take their time, because they know that the surest way to identify each person’s talents is to watch his or her behavior over time.

Ask your employee about her goals: What are you shooting for in your current role? Where do you see your career heading? What personal goals would you feel comfortable sharing with me? How often do you want to meet to talk about your progress?

Feel her out about her taste in praise: does she seem to like public recognition or private? Written or verbal? Who is her best audience? It can be very effective to ask her to tell you about the most meaningful recognition she has ever received. Find out what made it so memorable. Also ask her about her relationship with you. Can she tell you how she learns? You might inquire whether she has ever had any mentors or partners who have helped her. How did they help?

they are not fixing or correcting or instructing. Instead they are racking their brains, trying to figure out better and better ways to unleash that employee’s distinct talents:

They strive to carve out a unique set of expectations that will stretch and focus each particular individual;

They try to highlight and perfect each person’s unique style. They draw his attention to it. They help him understand why it works for him and how to perfect it. That’s

And they plot how they, the manager, can run interference for each employee, so that each can exercise his or her talents even more freely.

You cannot learn very much about excellence from studying failure.

The point of this time and attention is not to evaluate or monitor. The point is, as one sales manager put it, “to run a tape recorder in my head, so that back in my office I can replay it, dissect it, understand what happened and why it worked.” Like other great managers, you need to keep that tape recorder running.

Don’t use average to estimate the limits of excellence.

top performers, like Jean P., have the most potential for growth.

The most straightforward causes of an employee’s poor performance are the “mechanical” causes — perhaps the company is not providing him with the tools or the information he needs; and the “personal” causes — perhaps she is still grieving from a recent death in the family. As a manager, if you are confronted with poor performance, look first to these two causes. Both

The great manager begins by asking two questions. First, is the poor performance trainable?

The second question great managers ask is this: Is the nonperformance caused by the manager himself tripping the wrong trigger?

Great managers don’t. As soon as they realize that a weakness is causing the poor performance, they switch their approach. They know that there are only three possible routes to helping the person succeed. Devise a support system. Find a complementary partner. Or find an alternative role. Great managers quickly bear down, weigh these options, and choose the best route.

Her weakness is irrelevant; it is now a nontalent.

conventional wisdom views individual specialization as the antithesis of teamwork, great managers see it as the founding principle.

You will have to manage around the weaknesses of each and every employee. But if, with one particular employee, you find yourself spending most of your time managing around weaknesses, then know that you have made a casting error. At this point it is time to fix the casting error and to stop trying to fix the person.

In 1969, in his book, The Peter Principle, Laurence Peter warned us that if we followed this path without question, we would wind up promoting each person to his level of incompetence.

Some roles performed excellently are more valuable than roles higher up the ladder performed averagely. An excellent flight attendant is probably more valuable

management, which, to be frank, he struggled at. So together we decided to create a new position: master engineer. Michael would be a roving genius, getting involved in only the most complex projects. He would also be the main resource, and the last word, on all engineering problems any of the other teams faced. And he would be freed from any manager responsibilities at all. I decreed that this was a vice president-level job, got the okay from personnel, and then promoted him. I can’t think of when I’ve made an employee happier.”

When told that an employee was consistently showing up late for work, the great managers gave this one reply, which sums up their attitude toward manager-employee relationships: “I would ask why.”

in answer to the question “What level of performance is unacceptable?” these managers reply, “Any level that hovers around average with no trend upward.”

In answer to the question “How long at that level is too long?” great managers reply, “Not very long.”

Casting errors are inevitable.

They use language like “This isn’t a fit for you, let’s talk about why” or “You need to find a role that plays more to your natural strengths. What do you think that role might be?” They use this language not because it is polite, not because it softens the bad news, but because it is true.

Gary, an enormously successful entrepreneur, six-time winner of the Queens Award for Industry, brought in one of his factory managers one evening and told him, “Come in, sit down, I love you; you’re fired; I still love you. Now, get a drink and let’s talk this through.”

questions like “Tell me about a time when you …” can serve you well.

These four characteristics — simplicity, frequent interaction, focus on the future, and self-tracking — are the foundation for a successful “performance management” routine.

The Strengths Interview At the beginning of each year, or a week or two after the person has been hired, spend about an hour with him asking the following ten questions: Q.1 What did you enjoy most about your previous work experience? What brought you here? (If an existing employee) What keeps you here? Q.2 What do you think your strengths are? (skills, knowledge, talent) Q.3 What about your weaknesses? Q.4 What are your goals for your current role? (Ask for scores and timelines) Q.5 How often do you like to meet with me to discuss your progress? Are you the kind of person who will tell me how you are feeling, or will I have to ask? Q.6 Do you have any personal goals or commitment you would like to tell me about? Q.7 What is the best praise you have ever received? What made it so good? Q.8 Have you had any really productive partnerships or mentors? Why do you think these relationships worked so well for you? Q.9 What are your future growth goals, your career goals? Are there any particular skills you want to learn? Are there some specific challenges you want to experience? How can I help? Q.10 Is there anything else you want to talk about that might help us work well together?

The Performance Planning Meetings To help him prepare, ask him to write down answers to these three questions before each meeting: A. What actions have you taken? These should be the details of his performance over the last three months. He should include scores, rankings, ratings, and timelines, if available. B. What discoveries have you made? These discoveries might be in the form of training classes he attended, or they might simply be new insights derived from an internal presentation he made, or a job-shadowing session in which he participated, or even a book that he read. Wherever they came from, encourage him to keep track of his own learning. C. What partnerships have you built? These partnerships are the relationships he has formed. They might be new relationships or the strengthening of existing relationships. They might be relationships with colleagues or clients, professional relationships or personal ones. It is up to him to decide. Whatever he decides, it is important that he take responsibility for building his constituency, inside and outside the company.

After about ten minutes direct the conversation toward the future, drawing on the following questions: D. What is your main focus? What is his primary goal(s) for the next three months? E. What new discoveries are you planning? What specific discoveries is he hoping to make over the next three months? F. What new partnerships are you hoping to build? How is he planning to grow his constituency over the next three months?

After another three months have elapsed, ask him to write down his answers to A, B, and C, and once again, at your second performance planning meeting, ask him these three questions and use his answers to spur discussion about his performance. Then quickly move into a discussion about the future and ask him D, E, and F — once again, it will be helpful if you and he write down

You can use these five career discovery questions, at different times, to prompt his thinking: Q.1 How would you describe success in your current role? Can you measure it? Here is what I think. (Add your own comments.) Q.2 What do you actually do that makes you as good as you are? What does this tell you about your skills, knowledge, and talents? Here is what I think. (Add your own comments.) Q.3 Which part of your current role do you enjoy the most? Why? Q.4 Which part of your current role are you struggling with? What does this tell you about your skills, knowledge, and talent? What can we do to manage around this? Training? Positioning? Support system? Partnering? Q.5 What would be the perfect role for you? Imagine you are in that role. It’s three p.m. on a Thursday. What are you doing? Why would you like it so much? Here is what I think. (Add your own comments.) These questions, scattered

This is what great managers expect of every talented employee: • Look in the mirror any chance you get. Use any feedback tools provided by the company to increase your understanding of who you are and how others perceive you. • Muse. Sit down for twenty or thirty minutes each month and play the last few weeks back in your mind. What did you accomplish? What did you learn? What did you hate? What did you love? What does all of this say about you and your talents? • Discover yourself. Over time, become more detailed in your description of your skills, knowledge, and talents. Use this increasingly deep understanding to volunteer for the right roles, to be a better partner, to guide your training and development choices. • Build your constituency. Over time, identify which kinds of relationships tend to work well for you. Seek them out. • Keep track. Build your own record of your learnings and discoveries. • Catch your peers doing something right. When you enter your place of work, you never leave it at zero. You either make it a little better or a little worse. Make it a little better.

As much as is possible, define every role using outcome terms. • Find a way to rate, rank, or count as many of those outcomes as possible. Measurement always improves performance. • The four most important emotional

Hold managers accountable for their employees’ responses to the twelve questions presented in chapter 1. These twelve questions are a very important outcome measure.

#First Break All the Rules #books

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