More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
June 22, 2019
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, by Kerry Patterson, et al.
(think of Amazon’s “two-pizza rule” — no team should be so big that it can’t be fed with two pizzas).
Each cell within the organization must have someone clearly accountable for it. This doesn’t mean the person is boss and/or gets to make all the decisions. In fact, it’s important to delineate the differences between accountability, responsibility, and authority.
Accountability: This belongs to the ONE person who has the “ability to count” — who is tracking the progress and giving voice (screaming loudly) when issues arise within a defined task, team, function, or division.
The rule: If more than one person is accountable, then no one is accountable, and that’s when things fall through the cracks.
Responsibility: This falls to anyone with the “ability to respond” proactively to support the team. It includes all the people who
touch a particular proces...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Authority: This belongs to the person or team with the final de...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
For help in selecting
KPIs appropriate for your industry and/or function, visit KPILibrary.com. For more general KPIs, we recommend the book Key Performance Indicators: The 75 Measures Every Manager Needs to Know, by Bernard Marr.
Topgrading’s Job Scorecards,
Jim Collins, in his book How the Mighty Fall, And Why Some Companies Never Give In
Completing Your Process Accountability Chart (PACe)
pproach customers with a personalized warm welcome. • Probe politely to understand all the customers’ needs. • Present a solution for the customers to take home. • Listen for and resolve any issues or concerns. • End with a fond farewell and an invitation to return.
Before starting your search for a key executive or frontline associate, create a Job Scorecard (vs. the standard job description). A Job Scorecard details a person’s purpose for the job, the desired outcomes of this individual’s work, and the competencies — technical and cultural — required to execute it.
While a job description tends to list what people will be doing (e.g., coaching sales reps, building client relationships), a Job Score-card describes the outcomes you want from such activities ($8 million in revenue, seven new S&P 500 clients, a 100% contract renewal rate among the customers the trash collector serves).
Another central element is the list of candidate competencies that align with your culture and strategy. As experienced leaders discover, it’s more important to hire for this kind of fit than for specific skills, so long as a person has the capacity to learn and grow (though it’s best if you can find someone who’s a match in both cultural values and skill set).
cultures are like immune systems and will spit out very capable people who don’t align with its norms (Core Values).
In addition to seeking culture fit, it is critical to hire people who can deliver on the Brand Promises and activities underpinning your strategy (see “The 7 Strata of Strategy” chapter).
First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
Teams need to be well-rounded, but their individual members don’t have to be.
We have a tendency to hire people most like ourselves and end up with a company of look-alikes vs. tapping the diversity of talent, backgrounds, and personalities needed to drive the fruitful debate, innovation, and differentiation that powers growth.
Change to Strange: Create a Great Organization by Building a Strange Workforce
These gatekeeper questions, along with various online tests we recommend — Assess Systems’ wide range of pre-employment tests and OMG’s Sales Assessments among them — are very helpful in narrowing your long list to the final five or 10 candidates.
Top-grading. For an excellent overview, read Geoff Smart and Randy Street’s book Who: The A Method for Hiring; to learn the details of the process, read Bradford D. Smart’s book Topgrading: The Proven Hiring and Promoting Method That Turbocharges Company Performance
The Great Game of Business: The Only Sensible Way to Run a Company, calls
Many managers struggle with defining adequate and measurable targets for their people. Gazelles’ execution planning methodology and the One-Page Strategic Plan (OPSP), detailed in the “Strategy” and “Execution” sections of the book, will help.
Donald O. Clifton, Now, Discover Your Strengths
The One Thing You Need to Know … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success
In order to keep your company competitive and your people loyal, you must grow them through education and coaching.
And this investment in people is the biggest single predictor of a company’s ability to beat its direct competitors and the overall market, based on exhaustive research done by Laurie Bassi, co-author of Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era.
Famous sales coach and dear friend Jack Daly suggests, “Why don’t you throw people a party when they start, instead of when they leave?” Sydney-based software firm Atlassian sends each new employee, whatever his or her position, to a resort spa the weekend before the start date as a way to celebrate the new job. The spouse or a guest gets to go along — making both new employees and their spouses raving Atlassian fans.
Onboarding needs to be a celebration, not paperwork. It should create emotional connections between the new recruit and a maximum number of team members.
Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business
The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor for
The Weekly Coaching Conversation: A Business Fable About Taking Your Game and Your Team to the Next Level by Brian Souza.
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg.
Leadership and the One Minute Manager: Increasing Effectiveness Through Situational Leadership, by Ken Blanchard, Patricia Zigarmi, and Drea Zigarmi,
Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni’s book Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want
Brian Souza’s book The Weekly Coaching Conversation
read Chapters 5 and 6 in Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman’s First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently to learn more about strengths-based management and coaching.
People are not resources that you consume. So rethink the name of the department that takes care of them. Call it Talent Development, Human Relations, People Support, or whatever fits your culture — anything but Human Resources.
So how do you know when you have an industry-dominating, competitor-crushing strategy? Sustainable top-line revenue growth and increasing gross margin dollars (the true top line for many firms, as we’ll discuss in “The Accounting” chapter) are the two key financial indicators. Customers beating a path to your door, dragging along everyone they know, is another! In turn, if you don’t have a killer strategy, your company will face continuous price pressures as the market commoditizes your products and services.
Harvard Business Review article titled “Building Your Company’s Vision,” by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras.
Ezypay, Australia’s largest direct-debit service provider, has taken this a step further and created an avatar and a supporting video for each Core Value. The avatars show up everywhere — in Quarterly Themes, on the walls of the company’s situation room, in documents, etc. Go to ezypay.com/about-us/our-values/ to view the avatars.
This central word or idea is then expanded into a phrase or two, but is most easily remembered and acted upon when it has a single word or idea at its core. To discern this Purpose, gather a team together and start with the question, “What do we do?” (You might answer: “We’re a school.” “We sell overpriced coffee.” “We host a CRM system.”) Then ask “Why?” several times (a technique known as the five whys). Why does this matter, or what difference can we make? Keep asking until you get to your version of “Save the world,” and then back up one step.
Mission, Vision, Values
Gary Hamel and the late C.K. Prahalad labeled them Core Competencies in their groundbreaking May 1990 Harvard Business Review article titled “The Core Competence of the Corporation.
As Ratliff grew the business, ultimately acquiring 24 companies in less than nine years, his leadership team determined a distinct set of seven Core Values: • Integrity matters • Think like a customer • Spirited fun • Be quick, but don’t hurry (borrowed from legendary basketball coach John Wooden) • Employees are critical • Small details are huge • Take care of each other
For those familiar with the One-Page Strategic Plan (OPSP), think about the 7 Strata framework as the “page behind the page” — a worksheet drilling down into the details of your Sandbox (WHAT you sell to WHOM and WHERE), Brand Promises, and the Profit per X and Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG®), which are highlighted in columns 2 and 3 of the OPSP.
