More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Isn't that sad? Most managers are terrible at the most important thing they're supposed to be doing: getting top performances out of the people they are managing.
Success at work is about what you do—you are your behaviors. Almost nothing else matters.
Your first responsibility is NOT to your team of directs. It's NOT to your people. You should NOT worry about them first. Your first responsibility is to deliver whatever results your organization expects from you.
About the only way to really feel good about what your responsibilities are is to have quantified goals, in numbers and percentages:
The problem with not having clearly delineated responsibilities is that you can't make intelligent choices about where to focus. You begin to feel that “everything is important.” You begin to “try to get everything done.” Of course, you can't, and you probably know that already, because you're working long hours and never get everything done. You're not alone.
A focus only on results far too often leads to abuse of workers.
Your Second Responsibility as a Manager Is to Retain Your People
The Definition of an Effective Manager Is One Who Gets Results and Keeps Her People
The four critical behaviors that an effective manager engages in to produce results and retain team members are the following: Get to Know Your People. Communicate about Performance. Ask for More. Push Work Down.
All of our data over the years show that the single most important (and efficient) thing that you can do as a manager to improve your performance and increase retention is to spend time getting to know the strengths and weaknesses of your direct reports.
Every person on the earth expects and deserves to be treated as an individual. Sadly, what most of us as managers do (I know I did early in my career) is manage others the way we would like to be managed. This is sort of the Golden Rule of nonexperienced managers. You do to your directs what would make sense if you were one of those directs.
People and their behaviors are what deliver results to your organization. (Not systems, not processes, not computers, not machines.)
Let me share a realization I've come to over the years after working with hundreds of thousands of managers. Your directs don't see you as a nice person. I'm not saying you're not a nice person—I believe you are, and your directs probably believe so, too. But that's not how your directs see you. They see you as their boss. It's a hard truth, but one worth remembering. Because of the power of your role, your directs don't see you the way you see yourself.
Psychologists tell us that building trust starts with communication. When you communicate with others, they evaluate your communications with them in two ways: quantity and quality. Quantity is the frequency of your communications. You communicate more with those whom you consider friends and trusted colleagues, and less with those with whom you have less of a relationship. The quality of our communications is judged by whether or not what we talk about is of interest or benefit to them.
[As a general rule, whatever you're thinking you'd like from your boss, it's likely that your directs want the same thing from you.
Performance communication accounts for 30 percent of the total value created by engaging in the four critical behaviors.
The effective manager is always, in one fashion or another, asking for more. To be an effective manager means encouraging and inspiring all of your directs to higher performance even when they say they don't want to—because you know the organization needs that to stay competitive. Asking for more accounts for roughly 15 percent of the total value created by engaging in the four critical behaviors.
What this means for us managers is that we have to learn to share our work (that which we can share, which is probably most of it) with our directs.
Pushing work down accounts for roughly 15 percent of the total value created by engaging in the four critical behaviors.
The way an effective manager manages is visible to others and is teachable to others. And the effective manager can repeat the core behaviors in any situation, nearly anywhere.
So, when we talk about One On Ones, you'll note that the direct goes first.
Manager Tools recommends that you hold One On Ones with each of your directs. What is a Manager Tools One On One? It is a meeting That is scheduled That is held weekly That lasts for 30 minutes That is held with each of your directs In which the direct's issues are primary In which the manager takes notes
Scheduling your O3s is actually more important than having them weekly. That's why it's first on our list. It is more important to schedule your One On Ones than to have One On Ones almost every week that are unscheduled. The value of having One On Ones is that by doing this you are saying to your directs, “You're always going to have time with me. I'm always going to be investing in the relationship.” If you don't schedule your One On Ones, you're saying to your directs, “This might be important in a given week. You might be important, and the time with me might be valuable to me. I don't
...more
When you stop by their desks to chat, you do some chit-chat, and then you discuss whatever you stopped by for. Directs know this, and they don't assume that your stopping by randomly means it is an open forum to bring up ideas, issues, or concerns.
It is best to conduct your One On Ones on a weekly basis. The simplest reason for this is that you probably think about your work life in weekly increments. (According to research, it's roughly a three- to five-day window). You think about deadlines that are coming up this week. You tend to put off things that are due next week, even if they will take you several hours of work. You probably know what your schedule is this week, and maybe you know a bit of what your schedule is next week, but for the week after next, you have little sense of what your week will be like, in most cases.
If you're going to do O3s, you've got to do them with all of your directs.
You should not hold One On Ones with anyone other than your direct reports. This means that you don't do One On Ones with people who report to your directs. (A caveat: you can do peer One On Ones with, say, other managers who report to your boss and with whom you need to maintain a strong relationship.)
Doing One On Ones with your “skips” is a very bad idea. (“Skips” is a large organization's term for someone who reports to one of your directs. “Directs” are the people who report directly to you. And “skip level” is used if you have to skip a level in the organizational chart to get to them.)
What this means is that you won't be able to have the same relationship with people who are two or more levels down from you. You won't, but it's okay, because you're not supposed to. Efforts to do so are a waste of your most precious resource as a manager: your time. Build an organization of effective managers under you. This is how organizations stay healthy and effective as they grow.
Directs have told us in every study we've ever done that their manager taking notes actually elevates the conversation, making it more important. Managers who just chatted but didn't take notes about possible follow-up were deemed to be less engaged, less interested, and less likely to take action on topics that came up.
The problem with a One On One in which the manager does not take notes isn't the lack of note taking; it's the lack of accountability that no note taking implies.
Please, don't go to the direct's office. Don't go from your office to the direct's cubicle, because one person going to 6 or 7 or 10 different places doesn't make any sense.
Directs do not need total privacy behind closed doors to develop a great professional relationship with you.
Never tolerate from your directs what you would not do to your boss.
The direct who believes that a 30-minute meeting once a week is burdensome and means that you are overbearing is telling you either that he is afraid of oversight, which legally is scary, or that he is above it, which is a level of arrogance that could tear apart your team.
When your directs tell you they're too busy, they're talking about how busy they are right now. It's true in a lot of organizations (though in many organizations, it's claimed to be true but actually isn't). But, if we allowed every new idea to be compared to everyone's current schedule, almost no one would introduce new ideas to change or improve performance, behavior, quality, quantity, or efficiency.
That's why, when we announce that we're going to start doing One On Ones, we announce that they won't start for three weeks. Part of that is to allow for the scheduling to take place. It takes a day or two for directs to pick their times. Another part of that is to allow time to answer questions.
If it helps, another approach you can take to combat the “busy” pushback is that, if your directs are all so busy that they don't have time for anything more, they better get their priorities straight. They may well be so busy that they're not making time for the truly critical issues and opportunities. They need to be aligned, and what better way than a regular check-in?
When a direct says he doesn't have time to attend One On Ones, it's a sign that he is fully busy, with work he's not getting done. But if this is a defense against a new obligation, then you're never going to get that direct to ever do anything new.
The agenda is simple: first, 10 minutes for your direct to speak, then 10 minutes for you to speak, and then 10 minutes to talk about the future. The most important item on the agenda is “first”: the key to the agenda is letting your directs go first.
The direct goes first and talks about whatever the direct wants to talk about. There is no agenda other than the three 10-minute segments.
Whatever you do, don't ask a question you expect a real or detailed answer to.
What types of things might your directs want to talk about? On one level: who knows? That's part of the value of the meeting. If you're going to build a relationship with someone whom you're going to trust to do high-quality work without micromanaging that person, you're going to have to respect that the person is different from you. Your directs have different joys and pains, different issues and successes at home, and different ways of thinking about their work than you do. If you never give those differences the opportunity to be voiced, you're not really trying to create a relationship.
If it's important to my team member, it's important to me. That's how you build relationships.
Also, it's not a good idea to send a direct a list of topics that you're going to talk about. In theory, this makes good sense: the direct will be prepared, and the meeting will be more efficient. What actually happens in far too many cases is that the direct will actually spend time in their portion of the agenda addressing your list. You can tell us it's not so, you really only mean to talk about your list during your time. But that's not what our years of research have shown. It has been our experience that managers who share a list of topics in advance step on the direct's agenda, reducing
...more
A typical O3 direct's portion includes updates about ongoing work, questions about problems they're having, project status reports, requests for assistance with budgets or communications, requests for guidance about next steps or about approaching a problem, verification of rumors they've heard, clarification of what you want or how you want something done, notifications of tasks they've finished, follow-up on pending actions, reminders of information or materials they need from you, and so on.
From your direct's perspective, the reason it's a valuable “work” discussion is because it's about their work during their portion of the agenda—not what they do for your work and your agenda (though clearly they're related), but their work.
During your 10 minutes, you, too, get to talk about whatever you want.
So, probably you will ask for updates on ongoing work, assign new work, ask about problems with existing work, plan for upcoming work, and share ideas for potential new work. That makes you normal.
As a general rule, if there's any information that you need to get out to your entire team, we recommend that it go out in what we would call a “waterfall meeting,” not in your One On Ones.
