Kindle Notes & Highlights
retention most often comes from ensuring that high-performing staff members feel valued, have opportunities to grow, and have a manager who helps them focus on meeting ambitious, meaningful, and challenging goals.
If you’re seeing milestones along the way that let you mark your progress, you’re going to stay focused on reaching the top; you’re not going to be thinking about hiking a different mountain!
“On days when workers have the sense they’re making headway in their jobs, or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles, their emotions are most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak. On days when they feel they are spinning their wheels or encountering roadblocks to meaningful accomplishment, their moods and motivation are lowest.
Making progress in one’s work—even incremental progress—is more frequently associated with positive emotions and high motivation than any other workday event.”
Your best staff members are probably not motivated by money, but they’re probably not blind to it either.
If one high performer will get better results than several mediocre performers combined, paying your best staff members quite well can actually be an extremely economical move.
salaries should not be a reason people leave.
Jerry had a staff member he desperately wanted to retain but who was considering graduate school. He knew that a small salary increase would not change her mind. Instead, he offered her a 50 percent increase, which amounted to tens of thousands of dollars. She stayed, and the dramatically higher-than-expected salary increase changed her entire way of thinking about her position and future with the organization. She is still there as one of the top leaders of the organization, and the investment in her salary continues to pay enormous dividends.
Titles cost nothing and can be an effective way to recognize employees’ development.
Because a manager has such a pervasive impact on the day-to-day work environment, an employee’s relationship with her direct supervisor is one of the factors that most strongly influences job satisfaction.
But it is her relationship with her immediate manager that will determine how long she stays and how productive she is while she is there. . . . Managers trump companies.”
If you’re too passive and shy away from using your authority, you’ll end up a wimp.
The best managers we’ve seen aren’t wimps or tyrants but are simply normal, assertive people.
Wimpiness can be fatal to the success of an organization because problems go unresolved and difficult decisions go unmade, which means the organization can’t make nearly as much progress as it could if those obstacles were removed.
Ironically, while many wimpy managers are just trying to be liked, over time the opposite happens: as problems go unresolved and difficult decisions go unmade, staff members grow frustrated and complain, and the best among them leave.
a conflict-averse manager may hesitate to insist on necessary course corrections midway through a project because she thinks doing so will upset her team.
Wimpy managers often present requirements as mere suggestions.
Sometimes consensual processes place enormous demands on time and energy and sometimes result in compromises that are lower quality than following any single vision.
a manager who gets a reputation as difficult to work for finds it incredibly tough to attract the level of new talent the organization needs.
they directly lay out expectations and hold people to them; operate in a fair, positive, and straightforward manner; and back up their words with action.
Assertive managers say what needs to be said in a direct and straightforward way. They don’t shy away from difficult or awkward conversations,
Here’s what you don’t want to do: Shy away from making decisions at all. (wimp) Let consensus rule every time. (wimp)
with a steady flow of demands coming at you, it’s easy to lose sight of the most important ways for you to spend your time.
If you don’t put the big rocks in first, you’ll never get them in at all.
If you sweat the little stuff (the gravel, the sand) then you’ll fill your life with little things you worry about that don’t really matter, and you’ll never have the real quality time you need to spend on the big, important stuff (the big rocks).
while you might do a great job of drafting newsletter articles or proofreading documents, if that will keep you from reaching out to major funders or cultivating a highly promising prospect for your team, then it’s not the right use of your time.
Don’t feel silly or awkward about focusing intensely on the areas where you bring the most value and not spending time on the areas where you don’t.
if you can delegate it, you should delegate it.
work should flow downward to the lowest-level person who can do it well enough. That’s right: we said “well enough,” not “perfectly.
If you ever look at the number of e-mails you get while you’re on vacation, you’ll notice that the total (apart from spam) decreases significantly with each passing day.
Recognize that anything in your in-box more than a week old is almost certainly forgotten. Create a folder that says, “Older stuff,” and drag everything in your in-box older than a week into there.
If you have frustrations about your boss, you’re far from alone. Most people do, even when that boss is a good manager.
Rather than stewing over an aspect of your boss that you can’t change, it’s far more productive to understand that her working style may not change dramatically and to find ways to work effectively within that context.
Proactively discuss what decisions of yours your boss wants to be kept informed about, what sorts of things she’d like to be consulted on, and what she wants final approval over.
another way to get good results with your boss is to make things as easy as possible for her.
Ask yes/no questions, keep e-mails short, and suggest solutions so your boss can respond quickly with a yes or no.
You make it easier for both of you if you say, “I’ve been wrestling with what to do about X. I’ve thought about A, B, and C, and I think we should do C because . . . Does that sound okay to you?”
We often work with clients who are emotionally intelligent in how they approach the people who work for them but fail to apply the same skill in working with their own manager.
Don’t Forget Your Boss Is Human
There may be times when your boss is grouchy, frustrated, or frazzled, or times when she would appreciate hearing that she handled something well.
The most effective managees tend to see the responsibility for making the relationship work smoothly as theirs.
a number two’s role is to ensure that the organization hits its goals, with all that that entails, including managing people, checking in on progress, and overseeing organization-wide systems.
The number one’s job is to make sure the goals are right in the first place by overseeing strategy, to engage internally on high-priority tactical issues, and often to do significant amounts of external relations.
Just as effective parents show a united front to their kids, you and your boss should generally try to do your aligning in private—and in advance when possible.
As the second in command, you’ll be intimately steeped in the day-to-day details of your organization in a way that your executive director won’t (and shouldn’t) be. It’s key to avoid feeling as if you’re the one who “really” knows what’s going on; that’s a toxic path that will keep your executive director disengaged and eventually frustrated
Instead, use your detailed knowledge to spot and point out to her areas where she should engage, whether it’s weighing in on how to frame a sensitive issue in a press release or congratulating an employee for an achievement.
Fundamentally, a great manager is someone who cares passionately about getting results.
If you are truly determined to get results, it becomes the fire that fuels everything you do—overriding ego, the discomfort of having hard conversations, and even the desire to be liked.
When they run into roadblocks that might deter the average person, great managers persist until they find a way past the obstacle.
Although they may never be entirely comfortable having difficult conversations, great managers put aside their personal discomfort and have them anyway.
