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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Frances Frei
Read between
August 2 - August 21, 2022
Our starting point is that leadership, at its core, isn’t about you. Instead, it’s about how effective you are at empowering other people and unleashing their full potential.
Are your teammates and colleagues better off when you’re around?
Leaders of all backgrounds and tenures only sometimes succeed in creating conditions that allow other people to thrive, and few have full control over the levers of their success.
leadership is about empowering other people as a result of your presence—and making sure that impact continues into your absence.
Leaders must be intentional about distributing power and decision rights, and then take total, unqualified responsibility for the outcome.
Other people are making judgment calls all day, every day—and your job is to make sure that they’re getting it right, that their choices reflect the vision, values, and strategy of the organization.
a leader’s mission is to ensure that everyone on the team—wherever they may be—has a fighting chance at wild success.
to continuously improve the performance of the people around you.
It all starts, we believe, with trust.
leaders would teach their trainees not what to think, but how to think and make decisions
Most people can remember, even with the watery recall of a distant memory, what it felt like when a teacher or coach or friend made it clear that they saw something better inside us.
Only when you can imagine a better version of someone can you play a role in helping to unleash them.
Believing in someone sometimes means giving them space to stumble and learn along the way.
people tend to trust you when they think they are interacting with the real you (authenticity), when they have faith in your judgment and competence (logic), and when they believe that you care about them (empathy).
Under pressure, we often double down on behaviors that undermine trust.
Start with your headline and then offer reinforcing evidence to back it up.
Uber had underinvested in its people in a context of hypergrowth, leaving many managers underprepared for the increasing complexity of their jobs.
are you being honest with yourself about your true ambitions? Or are you hiding what really excites and inspires you behind whomever the world wants you to be?
If you don’t fully trust yourself, why should the rest of us?
To lead in justice means achieving a rare mix of strength and empathy, of white-hot, battle-ready ferocity blended with the cool, moderating forces of wisdom and grace.
Leaders are most effective in empowering other people when they create a context we describe as high standards and deep devotion.
When a leader’s expectations are high and clear, we tend to stretch to reach them.
Demanding 50 percent improvement, she believes, is too daunting (in ValMax’s language, too severe), and accepting the status quo is an unthinkably low bar. Pursuing a relentless 5 percent is exactly the right, justice-steeped balance.
If people feel supported but unmotivated around you, cozy but passive, then your path to justice involves raising the bar.
catch someone in the act of behaving exactly as you want them to behave, using sincere and specific praise. Describe the behavior in enough detail so that they can replicate it.
There’s still a time and place to correct negative behaviors, but we advise doing so sparingly, as it’s much less effective at spurring improvement.
for constructive advice to be credible, it must be layered on top of a foundation of trust.
(If someone only sees what’s wrong with us, then we tend to process what they say as judgment rather than as fuel for improvement.)
It’s positive reinforcement that gets the job done,
the right ratio of positive to constructive is at least 5:1.
Treat someone like their better, future self.
If they’re spending their time in ways that are indeed less than optimal, help them to prioritize better.
Starting with the recruitment of new employees, we then move on to creating spaces where everyone has an opportunity to thrive and advance, and then close with retaining great people.
if you want to attract different types of people, then start meeting them where they are,
“I’d like to get the team’s advice, and I want to hear from everyone.”
“Excellent! I never would have thought of that!”
ask yourself if you need to know the answer to treat this person with respect.
individual impact still mattered, but just as important was how much someone contributed to other people’s success.
if you made your organization better for women, then you were likely to make it better for everyone.
making sure that impact continues in your absence.
When you’re leading an organization, it turns out, then you’re actually somewhere else most of the time, at least from the perspective of your colleagues.
Strategy and culture are invisible forces that can shape organizations and empower other people—
“A” leaders create impact that endures days, years, and even decades after they’ve left the room.
Strategy embeds your own values and beliefs into your organization’s behavior.
Your first job as a strategist is to be better than your competitors at the things that matter most to your customers.
this means you’ll also have to be worse than your competitors at other things,
organizations that resist and try to be great at everything usually end up in a state of “exhausted mediocrity.”
Southwest became best-in-class on the attributes that mattered most to its customers precisely because it chose to be worst-in-class on the ones that mattered least.
They accept that they can only do some things well,
