Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Alan Murray
Started reading
December 26, 2018
After the killing was done, he called for a new approach that empowered people, encouraged debate, delegated responsibility, and demanded excellence.
“Becoming a manager is not about becoming a boss; it’s about becoming a hostage,” one recently promoted manager told Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill.
It enables us to harness the efforts and skills and knowledge of dozens or hundreds or even thousands of people and keep them focused on a greater goal. Good management is a noble endeavor—it enables us to be part of something much larger than ourselves.
“One does not ‘manage’ people,” Drucker concluded from his observations. “The task is to lead them.” The manager of people has to be a motivator of people. It is not enough to give employees directions. Managers must give their employees more—they must give them purpose.
This ability to go back and forth between the little details and the big picture is also evident in the behavior of some of the leaders I admire most,”
he bypassed business books and instead cited James Flexner’s four-volume biography of George Washington. Russell Fradin, CEO of Hewitt Associates, cited Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals.
great leaders exhibit a paradoxical mix of arrogance and humility. Leaders must be arrogant enough to believe they are worth following, but humble enough to know that others may have a better sense of the direction they should take. They must be confident enough to inspire confidence in others, yet always open to the questions and doubts that will inevitably come their way. They must believe in themselves, but be willing to put the organization’s needs above their own.
Jim Collins’s Good to Great,
or the “subtle accumulation of nuances, a hundred things done a little better,” as Henry Kissinger once put it.
“Leadership over human beings is exercised when persons with certain motives and purposes mobilize, in competition or conflict with others, institutional, political, psychological and other resources so as to arouse, engage and satisfy the motives of followers.” Unlike “naked power wielding,” he writes, “leadership is thus inseparable from followers’ needs and goals.”
work must give meaning. As a manager, you are the maker of meanings. You need to make sure your team is personally committed to the goals of the organization,
That’s the magic of managing talented people—making them feel they are participating in something valuable, something unique, something out of the ordinary. The manager’s job is to get his team to make a commitment—to one another, to the goals of the group, to a cause that is greater than themselves. That commitment, it turns out, is worth more than gold.
“Great vision without great people,” Collins concluded, “is irrelevant.”
Welch certainly shares that view. In his book Winning, he says he starts the hiring process with three acid tests: for integrity, intelligence, and maturity. “People with integrity tell the truth and they keep their word,” he writes. “They take responsibility for past actions, admit mistakes, and fix them.” On intelligence, Welch makes clear he’s not necessarily looking for education, but rather “a strong dose of intellectual curiosity, with a breadth of knowledge to work with or lead other smart people in today’s complex world.” As for maturity, Welch says it has nothing to do with age;
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He looks to hire people who can make things happen.
Motivating knowledge workers to do their best for the organization ultimately comes down to making work meaningful. That may be the manager’s most important and yet most challenging task. It’s easier said than done.
Still, it’s frustrating. And here’s the most frustrating part: there’s a good chance the most difficult people will be among your most valuable and talented people.
First of all, recognize that, as strange as it may seem to you, your A player’s misbehavior likely arises from insecurity. Even though you may think he or she already gets an inordinate amount of praise and reinforcement, give more. You may resent having to spend the extra time providing reassurance to someone who, in your view, doesn’t need it, but do it anyway.
But to be a good manager, you cannot get bogged down in what you can’t do. Your job as a manager is to focus on what you can and should do, and how to get it done.
In Stephen Covey’s bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, habit number one is “be proactive.” Proactivity, Covey writes, “is a word you won’t find in most dictionaries. It means more than merely taking initiative. It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.”
Blue Ocean Strategy, published by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne in 2005. While avoiding use of Porter’s name, Kim and Mauborgne nevertheless attack him head-on, arguing that the “five forces” analysis is a formula for remaining in “red oceans,” where the sharks compete mercilessly for the action. The key to exceptional business success, they say, is to redefine the terms of competition and move into the “blue ocean,” where you have the water to yourself. The goal of these strategies is not to beat the competition, but to make the competition irrelevant.
things that aren’t measured tend not to be managed.
Interestingly, it’s not always the actions of the lead manager in the meeting room that signal the nature of the culture. If a manager sits silently through a long and uncritical and unquestioned presentation, he or she is probably failing to do the job. The same goes for a manager who raises questions or suggests goals that seem a total surprise to others in the room. But if a manager sits silently as the presenter does a hard-headed critique; as others freely weigh in; and as everyone leaves with a clear sense of goals, timelines, and next steps, then the manager is doing the job. He or she
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(1) a culture of action, and (2) culture of candor.
A corollary of that physics property is this: it’s usually easier to stop things from happening than it is to make them happen.
That’s why a key step in creating a successful culture of execution is creating a bias toward action. People who make things happen need to be praised and rewarded. People who don’t should be coached to change, or weeded out. Failure cannot be unduly punished. Unless people feel free to make mistakes, they will not feel free to take bold actions.
There’s no simple answer here. As a manager, you need to trust your subordinates to do the job you’ve asked them to do. If they feel you are breathing over their shoulders all the time, they’ll inevitably become discouraged and disempowered and will perform poorly. It’s hard to exercise judgment or initiative if you find yourself being second-guessed by your boss at every turn.
but also from their ability to make work meaningful; and that the ultimate success of managers depends not just on telling workers what to do, but also on making them want to do it.
