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His particular ability—to get more out of people than they knew they had to give—fascinated me.
the role of leader has shifted, too—moving away from a model where the manager knows, directs, and tells and toward one where the leader sees, provokes, asks, and unleashes the capabilities of others.
Multipliers not only access people’s current capability, they stretch it. They get more from people than they knew they had to give.
Carol Dweck of Stanford University has conducted groundbreaking research showing that children given a series of progressively harder puzzles and praised for their intelligence stagnate for fear of reaching the limit of their intelligence. Children given the same series of puzzles but then praised for their hard work actually increased their ability to reason and to solve problems.
The Diminisher’s view of intelligence is based on elitism and scarcity. Diminishers appear to believe that really intelligent people are a rare breed and that they are of that rare breed. From this assumption they conclude that they are so special, other people will never figure things out without them.
While Diminishers set a direction, Multipliers ensure that a direction gets set. The Diminisher is a Know-It-All who gives directives. The Multiplier is a Challenger who defines opportunities.
Multipliers operate as Debate Makers, driving sound decisions through rigorous debate.
Multipliers engage people in debating the issues up front, which leads to decisions that people understand and can execute efficiently. In contrast, Diminishers operate as Decision Makers who seem to make decisions efficiently within a small inner circle, but they leave the broader organization in the dark to debate the soundness of the leader’s decisions, and with none of the satisfaction of helping to fine-tune and execute them.
The Diminisher is a Micromanager who jumps in and out. The Multiplier is an Investor who gives others ownership and full accountability.
Multipliers is how hard-edged these managers are. They expect great things from their people and drive them to achieve extraordinary results. They are beyond results-driven; they are tough and exacting.
the humor of the Multiplier—it’s a self-deprecating wit and an ability to put others at ease, allowing people to be themselves.
Multipliers have access to the best talent, not because they are necessarily great recruiters but because people flock to work for them.
Shackleton, with the wisdom of an experienced captain, staffed his crew with men of a certain orientation—men who were attracted to adventure and recognition but were also realistically prepared for the hardship they would face.
They didn’t box people into jobs and limit their contribution. They let people work where they had ideas and energy and where they could best contribute. They let talent flow, like an ameba, to the right opportunities.
In 1904, a test of intelligence that later evolved into the IQ test was developed by French researcher Alfred Binet as a tool for assessing the learning progress of French schoolchildren. His assumption was that lower intelligence signaled, not an inability to learn, but a need for more and different teaching.
A Talent Magnet knows that genius comes in many forms. Some minds excel at quantitative analysis or verbal reasoning—capabilities measured through IQ, SAT, and other tests of traditional cognitive intelligence. Other minds offer creative genius, innovating through fresh thinking and bold ideas. Some minds are critical, spotting every problem or landmine lurking within a plan; the genius of some others is to find a way to tunnel around these landmines.
A native genius or talent is something that people do, not only exceptionally well, but absolutely naturally. They do it easily (without extra effort) and freely (without condition).
What do they do better than anything else they do? What do they do better than the people around them? What do they do without effort? What do they do without being asked? What do they do readily without being paid?
Marguerite then makes it clear to each person why she has been selected for that role. She not only notices their talent; she labels it for them. One camp leader said, “She tells me the talent she sees in me and why it matters. She tells me why girls’ camp will be better because of me and my work.” But Marguerite doesn’t stop there. She lets everyone else know, too.
At first look, it would appear costly to remove one supersmart player, even if she has a diminishing effect on a team. But one needs only to do the math to see the high cost of destructive genius.
“Nothing grows under a banyan tree.” It provides shade and is comfortable, but it allows no sun in for growth. Many leaders are banyan trees; they protect their people, but nothing grows under them.
Multipliers operate from a belief that talent exists everywhere and they can use it at its highest if they can simply identify the genius in people. Diminishers think People need to report to me in order to get them to do anything.
One manager was known for making key decisions one-on-one rather than with his team. This fostered a covert and high-stakes game among his lieutenants. Each of them would vie for the coveted one-on-one meeting time—the last meeting on a Friday afternoon. Why? Because everyone knew that he made his decisions by himself over the weekend and announced them in his staff meeting on Monday.
One Diminisher we studied was notorious for draining his organization through his inaction. People said, “He and his management team never made decisions. They didn’t make waves, they just kept analyzing.”
Instead of asking, “Is this person smart?” try asking, “In what way is this person smart?”
Try sizing someone’s job the way you shop for shoes for a young child. How does the wise parent decide what size to buy? They start by measuring the child’s foot, and then they buy a pair that’s a size too big.
Is there someone on your team who needs a bigger challenge but won’t continue to grow unless you let them go?
When offering his opinion, he distinguishes “hard opinions” from “soft opinions.” Soft opinions signal to his team: Here are some ideas for you to consider in your own thinking. Hard opinions are reserved for times when he holds a very strong view.
Corporate environments and modern organizations are the perfect setup for diminishing leadership and have a certain built-in tyranny. The org charts, the hierarchy, the titles, the approval matrixes skew power toward the top and create incentives for people to shut down and comply.
An off-the-cuff remark could be translated as a strong opinion and turned into policy for her division.
“He’s hard on the issues but easy on people. You believe that he has your back so when you inevitably make a mistake, he’ll help you fix it first and not lash out at you. There’s an aura that we’re in this together, which means the stress is distributed among the larger group so one person doesn’t disproportionally feel it.”
Diminishers create a stress-filled environment because they don’t give people control over their own performance.
They appear to hold two ostensibly opposing positions with equal fervor. They create both comfort and pressure in the environment. In the eyes of the Liberator, it is a just exchange: I give you space; you give me back your best work.
Another fair trade: I give you permission to make mistakes; you have an obligation to learn from the mistakes and not repeat them.
A longtime colleague of Ray remarked, “He’ll often be quiet for long stretches of an important meeting. He listens to what others are saying. And when he does speak, everyone listens.”
define a space for experimentation. We rapidly laid out their various work scenarios into two buckets: in one, failure was okay; in the other, success had to be assured. The group debated each until they agreed on every scenario.
The newer manager looked surprised that a senior executive would consult with a junior employee: “Talk to him? Don’t we just decide what he’s going to do? It’s not a democracy.” When he heard about this, Mark clarified, “Well, ViaSat kind of is a democracy. We don’t just tell people what their jobs are. We give people choice about what they work on, as long as they perform at the level their co-workers expect.”
As a manager you know when someone is below his or her usual performance. What is harder to know is whether people are giving everything they have. Asking whether people are offering their best gives them the opportunity to push themselves beyond previous limits.
Requiring people’s best work is different from insisting on desired outcomes. Stress is created when people are expected to produce outcomes that are beyond their control. But they feel positive pressure when they are held to their best work.
It was a classic management dilemma. If you take the obvious path, the climate will become tense and your people may become risk averse. But if you lessen the pressure by softening the goals, then your organization becomes complacent.
The hallmark of a Tyrant is their temperamental and unpredictable behavior. People don’t know what will set them off, but it is almost certain that the mood will change when they are around.
I gave him five poker chips, each worth a number of seconds of talk time. One was worth 120 seconds, the next three worth 90 seconds, and one was worth just 30. I suggested he limit his contribution in the meeting to five comments, represented by each of the chips. He could spend them whenever he wished, but he only had five.
One executive described his first week as the newly appointed president of a large company. People came at him from all directions to ask him their pent-up questions. He was new and wanted to be helpful, so he would offer a casual opinion. To his amazement, weeks later he found that his opinions had become a set of disjointed policies. As he unraveled the mess, he learned to carefully label the difference between a random musing, an opinion, and a policy decision.
There is no easier way to invite experimentation and learning than to share stories about your own mistakes.
GO PUBLIC: Instead of talking about mistakes behind closed doors or just one-on-one, bring them out in the open where the person making a mistake can clear the air and where everyone can learn. Try making it part of your management ritual.
This delineation acts like a ship’s waterline (as described by management author Jim Collins): above the “waterline,” people can experiment and take risks and still recover; however, mistakes below the waterline are like cannonballs that may cause catastrophic failure and “sink the ship.” Creating a clear “waterline” for your team will give them confidence to experiment
Multipliers don’t tell people what to think; they tell them what to think about.
He then threw out “Mission Impossible”—a net income of $1.00. He asked each member of his management team this question: “What would be your Mission Impossible?” As the management team caught the enthusiasm of this high-bar approach, they began to ask the entire organization to do the same.
By setting the bar high, he gave people permission to rethink the business. By asking them to create their personal Mission Impossible, he allowed them to embrace and step into the challenge themselves. And by acknowledging the impossible nature of the mission, he gave people permission to try without fear of failure.
He uses his intellect and energy on two things: first, asking the bold questions, and second, parsing the challenge into reasonable increments so the team can build intellectual muscle and the confidence that comes from clearing progressively higher bars.
