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Great Managers Understand Their
People
Average managers treat all their
employees the same. Great managers discover each individual's unique
talents and bring these to the surface so everyone wins. An excerpt
from Harvard Business Review.
by Marcus Buckingham
"The best boss I ever had." That's a phrase most of us have said or
heard at some point, but what does it mean? What sets the great boss
apart from the average boss? The literature is rife with provocative
writing about the qualities of managers and leaders and whether the
two differ, but little has been said about what happens in the
thousands of daily interactions and decisions that allows managers to
get the best out of their people and win their devotion. What do great
managers actually do?
In my research, beginning with a survey of 80,000 managers conducted
by the Gallup Organization and continuing during the past two years
with in-depth studies of a few top performers, I've found that while
there are as many styles of managers, there is one quality that sets
truly great managers apart from the rest: They discover what is unique
about each person and then capitalize on it. Average managers play
checkers, while great managers play chess. The difference? In
checkers, all the pieces are uniform and move in the same way; they
are interchangeable. You need to plan and coordinate their movements,
certainly, but they all move at the same pace, on parallel paths. In
chess, each type of piece moves in a different way, and you can't play
if you don't know how each piece moves. More important, you won't win
if you don't think carefully about how you move the pieces. Great
managers know and value the unique abilities and even the
eccentricities of their employees, and they learn how best to
integrate them into a coordinated plan of attack.
This is the exact opposite of what great leaders do. Great leaders
discover what is universal and capitalize on it. Their job is to rally
people toward a better future. Leaders can succeed in this only when
they can cut through differences of race, sex, age, nationality, and
personality and, using stories and celebrating heroes, tap into those
very few needs we all share. The job of a manager, meanwhile, is to
turn one person's particular talent into performance. Managers will
succeed only when they can identify and deploy the differences among
people, challenging each employee to excel in his or her own way. This
doesn't mean a leader can't be a manager or vice versa. But to excel
at one or both, you must be aware of the very different skills each
role requires. [...]
Managers will succeed only when they can identify and deploy the
differences among people. Make the most of strengths. It takes time
and effort to gain a full appreciation of an employee's strengths and
weaknesses. The great manager spends a good deal of time outside the
office walking around, watching each person's reactions to events,
listening, and taking mental notes about what each individual is drawn
to and what each person struggles with. There's no substitute for this
kind of observation, but you can obtain a lot of information about a
person by asking a few simple, open-ended questions and listening
carefully to the answers. Two queries in particular have proven most
revealing when it comes to identifying strengths and weaknesses, and I
recommend asking them of all new hires—and revisiting the questions
periodically.
To identify a person's strengths, first ask, "What was the best day at
work you've had in the past three months?" Find out what the person
was doing and why he enjoyed it so much. Remember: A strength is not
merely something you are good at. In fact, it might be something you
aren't good at yet. It might be just a predilection, something you
find so intrinsically satisfying that you look forward to doing it
again and again and getting better at it over time. This question will
prompt your employee to start thinking about his interests and
abilities from this perspective.
To identify a person's weakness, just invert the question: "What was
the worst day you've had at work in the past three months?" And then
probe for details about what he was doing and why it grated on him so
much. As with a strength, a weakness is not merely something you are
bad at (in fact, you might be quite competent at it). It is something
that drains you of energy, an activity that you never look forward to
doing and that when you are doing it, all you can think about is
stopping.
Although you're keeping an eye out for both the strengths and
weaknesses of your employees, your focus should be on their strengths.
Conventional wisdom holds that self-awareness is a good thing and that
it's the job of the manager to identify weaknesses and create a plan
for overcoming them. But research by Albert Bandura, the father of
social learning theory, has shown that self-assurance (labeled
"self-efficacy" by cognitive psychologists), not self-awareness, is
the strongest predictor of a person's ability to set high goals, to
persist in the face of obstacles, to bounce back when reversals occur,
and, ultimately, to achieve the goals they set. By contrast,
self-awareness has not been shown to be a predictor of any of these
outcomes, and in some cases, it appears to retard them.
Great managers seem to understand this instinctively. They know that
their job is not to arm each employee with a dispassionately accurate
understanding of the limits of her strengths and the liabilities of
her weaknesses but to reinforce her self-assurance. That's why great
managers focus on strengths. When a person succeeds, the great manager
doesn't praise her hard work. Even if there is some exaggeration in
the statement, he tells her that she succeeded because she has become
so good at deploying her specific strengths. This, the manager knows,
will strengthen the employee's self-assurance and make her more
optimistic and more resilient in the face of challenges to come.
You can obtain a lot of information about a person by asking a few
simple, open-ended questions. The focus-on-strengths approach might
create in the employee a modicum of overconfidence, but great managers
mitigate this by emphasizing the size and the difficulty of the
employee's goals. They know that their primary objective is to create
in each employee a specific state of mind: one that includes a
realistic assessment of the difficulty of the obstacle ahead but an
unrealistically optimistic belief in her ability to overcome it.
And what if the employee fails? Assuming the failure is not
attributable to factors beyond her control, always explain failure as
a lack of effort, even if this is only partially accurate. This will
obscure self-doubt and give her something to work on as she faces up
to the next challenge.
Repeated failure, of course, may indicate weakness where a role
requires strength. In such cases, there are four approaches for
overcoming weaknesses. If the problem amounts to lack of skill or
knowledge, that's easy to solve: Simply offer the relevant training,
allow some time for the employee to incorporate the new skills, and
look for signs of improvement. If her performance doesn't get better,
you'll know that the reason she's struggling is because she is missing
certain talents, a deficit no amount of skill or knowledge training is
likely to fix. You'll have to find a way to manage around this
weakness and neutralize it.
Which brings us to the second strategy for overcoming an employee
weakness. Can you find her a partner, someone whose talents are strong
in precisely the areas where hers are weak? Here's how this strategy
can look in action. As vice president of merchandising for the women's
clothing retailer Ann Taylor, Judi Langley found that tensions were
rising between her and one of her merchandising managers, Claudia (not
her real name), whose analytical mind and intense nature created an
overpowering "need to know." If Claudia learned of something before
Judi had a chance to review it with her, she would become deeply
frustrated. Given the speed with which decisions were made, and given
Judy's busy schedule, this happened frequently. Judi was concerned
that Claudia's irritation was unsettling to the whole product team,
not to mention earning the employee a reputation as a malcontent.
Always explain failure as a lack of effort, even if this is only
partially accurate.
An average manager might have identified this behavior as a weakness
and lectured Claudia on how to control her need for information. Judi,
however, realized that this "weakness" was an aspect of Claudia's
greatest strength: her analytical mind. Claudia would never be able to
rein it in, at least not for long. So Judi looked for a strategy that
would honor and support Claudia's need to know, while channeling it
more productively. Judi decided to act as Claudia's information
partner, and she committed to leaving Claudia a voice mail at the end
of each day with a brief update. To make sure nothing fell through the
cracks, they set up two live "touch base" conversations per week. This
solution managed Claudia's expectations and assured her that she would
get the information she needed, if not exactly when she wanted it,
then at least at frequent and predictable intervals. Giving Claudia a
partner neutralized the negative manifestations of her strength,
allowing her to focus her analytical mind on her work. (Of course, in
most cases, the partner would need to be someone other than a
manager.)
Should the perfect partner prove hard to find, try this third
strategy: Insert into the employee's world a technique that helps
accomplish through discipline what the person can't accomplish through
instinct. I met one very successful screenwriter and director who had
struggled with telling other professionals, such as composers and
directors of photography, that their work was not up to snuff. So he
devised a mental trick: He now imagines what the "god of art" would
want and uses this imaginary entity as a source of strength. In his
mind, he no longer imposes his own opinion on his colleagues but
rather tells himself (and them) that an authoritative third party has
weighed in.
If training produces no improvement, if complementary partnering
proves impractical, and if no nifty discipline technique can be found,
you are going to have to try the fourth and final strategy, which is
to rearrange the employee's working world to render his weakness
irrelevant. This strategy will require of you, first, the creativity
to envision a more effective arrangement and, second, the courage to
make that arrangement work. But the payoff that may come in the form
of increased employee productivity and engagement is well worth it.
Excerpted with permission from "What Great Managers Do," Harvard
Business Review, Vol. 83, No. 3, March 2005.
Marcus Buckingham (info@onethinginc.com) is a consultant and speaker
on leadership and management practices.
Ajit Chouhan
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