American culture is CEO obsessed. We celebrate the hard-charging heroes and mythologize the iconoclastic visionaries. Those people are important.
The corporate world is appallingly bad at capitalizing on the strengths of its people.
MICHAEL: Maybe just this: A manager has got to remember that he is on stage every day. His people are watching him. Everything he does, everything he says, and the way he says it, sends off clues to his employees. These clues affect performance. So never forget you are on that stage.
The hardest thing about being a manager is realizing that your people will not do things the way that you would. But get used to it. Because if you try to force them to, then two things happen. They become resentful – they don’t want to do it. And they become dependent – they can’t do it. Neither of these is terribly productive for the long haul.
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.
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.
Even more than the rest, these five questions are most directly influenced by the employee’s immediate manager. What does this tell us? It tells us that people leave managers, not companies.
As a manager your job is not to teach people talent. Your job is to help them earn the accolade “talented” by matching their talent to the role. To do this well, like all great managers, you have to pay close attention to the subtle but significant differences between roles.
How can we all grow?
The Four Keys, select for talent, define the right outcomes, focus on strengths, find the right fit, reveal how they attack this goal.
Any recurring patterns of behavior that can be productively applied are talents.
Whereas cascaded goals are a control mechanism, cascaded meaning is a release mechanism. It brings to life the context within which everyone works, but it leaves the locus of control – for choosing, deciding, prioritizing, goal setting – where it truly resides, and where understanding of the world and the ability to do something about it intersect: with the team member.
And what of the notion that “trust must be earned”? Sensible though it may sound, great managers reject it. They know that if, fundamentally, you don’t trust people, then there is no line, no point in time, beyond which people suddenly become trustworthy.
This is the same feeling that many managers unwittingly create in their employees. Even when working with their most productive employees, they still spend most of their time talking about each person’s few areas of nontalent and how to eradicate them. No matter how well-intended, relationships preoccupied with weakness never end well.
These four characteristics – simplicity, frequent interaction, focus on the future, and self-tracking – are the foundation for a successful “performance management” routine.
This company didn’t have one culture. It had as many cultures as it did managers. No.
Focus on each person’s strengths and manage around his weaknesses. Don’t try to fix the weaknesses. Don’t try to perfect each person. Instead do everything you can to help each person cultivate his talents. Help each person become more of who he already is.
This thinking is well-intended but overly simplistic, reminiscent perhaps of the four-year-old who proudly presents his mother with a red truck for her birthday because that is the present he wants. So the best managers reject the Golden Rule. Instead, they say, treat each person as he would like to be treated, bearing in mind who he is.
But the best managers have the solution: Ask. 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?
Define the outcomes you want from your team and its members, and then look for each person’s strength signs to figure out how each person can reach those outcomes most efficiently, most amazingly, most creatively, and most joyfully. The moment you realize you’re in the outcomes business is the moment you turn each person’s uniqueness from a bug into a feature.
Actually, the data reveals that checking in with your team members once a month is literally worse than useless. While team leaders who check in once a week see, on average, a 13 percent increase in team engagement, those who check in only once a month see a 5 percent decrease in engagement.