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An effective survey question to ask your employees is how many minutes a week they spend learning on their own, not mandated, not directed.
An organizational measure of improving health would be to increase that number. If you want engaged teams, don’t brief, certify!
How do you shift responsibility for performance from the briefer to the participants?
How much preparation do people do prior to an event or operation?
When was the last time you had a briefing on a project? Did listeners tu...
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What would it take to start certifying that your project teams know what the goals are and how th...
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Are you ready to assume more responsibility within the leader-leader model to identify what near-term events will be accomplished and t...
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CONTINUALLY AND CONSISTENTLY REPEAT THE MESSAGE is a mechanism for COMPETENCE.
Repeat the same message day after day, meeting after meeting, event after event. Sounds redundant, repetitive, and boring. But what’s the alternative? Changing the message?
discovered that what happens when you explain a change is that the crew hears what you say, but they are thinking, “Oh yeah, I know what he’s talking about. That’s like it was on the USS Ustafish.” They hear and think they know what you mean, but they don’t. They’ve never had a picture of what you are talking about. They can’t see in their imagination how it works. They are not being intentionally deceitful; they just are not picturing what you are picturing.
SPECIFYING GOALS, NOT METHODS is a mechanism for COMPETENCE.
SPECIFYING GOALS also served as a mechanism for CLARITY by focusing on achieving excellence rather than avoiding errors.
Provide your people with the objective and let them figure out the method.
Clarity means people at all levels of an organization clearly and completely understand what the organization is about.
Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors (this was introduced in chapter 7). Build trust and take care of your people. Use your legacy for inspiration. Use guiding principles for decision criteria. Use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviors. Begin with the end in mind.
Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience.
Empowerment: I intend to empower the crew to achieve their personal and professional goals through initiatives such as a focused effort to improve advancement exam performance, encouraging PACE [Program for Afloat College Education] and other independent study programs, and providing incentives for increased physical conditioning. I further intend to push authority and responsibility downward wherever practical to improve job satisfaction. This is a continuation of a theme I have already started to work on and I think we are having some success. I already have ten crewmen who have submitted
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There are several reasons why promotions are not unlimited. First, the number of jobs gets smaller as the ranks get higher.
command would then determine the cutoff score based on how many total openings we had for the next higher rank.
BUILDING TRUST AND TAKING CARE OF YOUR PEOPLE is a mechanism for CLARITY.
Taking care of your people does not mean protecting them from the consequences of their own behavior. That’s the path to irresponsibility. What it does mean is giving them every available tool and advantage to achieve their aims in life, beyond the specifics of the job.
What would you and your team like to accomplish?
How can you as a leader help your people accomplish it?
Are you doing everything you can to make tools available to your employees to achieve both prof...
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Are you unintentionally protecting people from the consequences o...
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USE YOUR LEGACY FOR INSPIRATION is a mechanism for CLARITY.
“No, I feel that my job as the commander is to tap into the existing energy of the command, discover the strengths, and remove barriers to further progress.”
USE GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR DECISION CRITERIA is a mechanism for CLARITY.
How can you simplify your guiding principles so that everyone in your organization understands them? How will you communicate your principles to others? Are your guiding principles referenced in evaluations and performance awards? Are your guiding principles useful to employees as decision-making criteria? Do your guiding principles serve as decision-making criteria for your people? Do you know your own guiding principles? Do others know them?
Do you recognize your staff’s achievements so long after the event that even they forget? We learned not to let admin get in the way.
Mechanism: Use Immediate Recognition to Reinforce Desired Behaviors
Gamification blog: www.gamification.co.
Here are some things you can do to “begin with the end in mind”: Hand out this chapter as reading material. Also consider Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, chapter 2, “Begin with the End in Mind.” Discuss the concepts and idea of “Begin with the end in mind.” With your leadership team, develop longer-term organizational goals for three to five years out. Go through the evaluations and look for statements that express achievement. In every case, ask “How would we know?” and ensure that you have measuring systems in place. Then have employees write their own evaluations
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First, identify where excellence is created in your company. There may be some internal processes that generate excellence and there may be some interface processes that generate excellence. Generally I find that interfaces with the customer and with the physical world are two key interfaces. Then, figure out what decisions the people responsible for the interfaces need to make in order to achieve excellence. Finally, understand what it would take to get those employees to be able to make those decisions. This typically requires an intersection of the right technical knowledge, a thorough
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First, empowerment by itself is not a complete leadership structure. Empowerment does not work without the attributes of competence and clarity. Second, empowerment still results from and is a manifestation of a top-down structure. At its core is the belief that the leader “empowers” the followers, that the leader has the power and ability to empower the followers.
What we need is release, or emancipation. Emancipation is fundamentally different from empowerment. With emancipation we are recognizing the inherent genius, energy, and creativity in all people, and allowing those talents to emerge. We realize that we don’t have the power to give these talents to others, or “empower” them to use them, only the power to prevent them from coming out. Emancipation results when teams have been given decision-making control and have the additional characteristics of competence and clarity. You know you have an emancipated team when you no longer need to empower
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Are you limiting your leadership to empowerment? What programs have you instituted to supplement control with competence and clarity? Have you divested yourself of the attitude that you, as a corporate leader, will empower your staff?
encourage you to visit my Web site (www.leader-leader.com) or contact me directly at david@turntheshiparound.com. On the Web site, I offer several tools for building a leader-leader structure, including the seven-step process for effective self-assessment that we developed on board Santa Fe.
John M. Gibbons, “I Can’t Get No . . . Job Satisfaction, That Is” (2009 Job Satisfaction Survey), The Conference Board, January 2010, http://www.conference-board.org/ publications/publicationdetail.cfm?publicationid=1727 (accessed April 3, 2012). 2. Mercer, “Inside Employees’ Minds: Navigating the New Rules of Engagement,” June 2011, http://inside-employees-mind.mercer.com/referencecontent.htm?idContent=1419320 (accessed November 17, 2011). 3. “Employee Engagement: A Leading Indicator of Financial Performance,” http://www.gallup.com/consulting/52/Employee-Engagement.aspx (accessed July 12,
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