ESSENTIALS OF EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP
What makes for a GREAT Leader?
Lessons from research by Harvard and personal experiences
This is a summary and a snapshot of a great article by Marcus Buckingham — What great managers do — published in HBR in 2015. The article is a great read and can help you identify not only your management style but also assess management at your current company.
One thing I noticed recently was that everyone has something to say when it comes to their managers. The role of a manager bears many similarities with a sports team captain. The entire team’s performance relies on how you conduct yourself and the team, however, if you win it's because of them and if you lose it's because of you. Recently I started tweaking the usual complaining conversation and started turning the conversation to a more positive one.
Whenever someone started complaining about it, I asked them what would their ideal manager do in the same situation. This got many to pause and think a bit harder.
Difference between a Good and a GREAT manager!
1. Great Managers don’t change your style but rely on challenging your style
The biggest asset of a great manager is that they don’t try to change your style but instead rely on challenging them. This helps you grow and gain a bigger sense of purpose in your daily work. Great managers know that their employees will differ in how they think, how they build relationships, how altruistic they are, how patient they can be, how much of an expert they need to be, how prepared they need to feel, what drives them, what challenges them, and what their goals are. These differences of trait and talent are like blood types: They cut across the superficial variations of race, sex, and age and capture the essential uniqueness of each individual.
This is easier said than done of course. Since these are intrinsic motivators and characteristics, sending out a survey and asking employees to describe what drives them is not the way to go. However I believe, keeping these questions in your mind and to observe how your employees react is the best way to go about identifying what drives them, what challenges them, and what their goals are.
2. Average managers play checkers and great managers play chess.
This could be the most essential piece of advice I have ever seen. The difference between checkers and chess? In checkers all the pieces are uniform and behave exactly the same, however, in chess you need to pick your piece, understand how they behave and play accordingly. Great managers never try to push a knight to move in the same way as a bishop.
Finding your fit — find places who reward its people, uses its people how you would like to be used and rewarded.
If a company praises someone with the highest sales but you are not motivated by that, you’re better off avoiding that company. Similarly, if you enjoy working in an environment where people are praised for their efforts but not strictly the numbers, look for such signs in a company. In my personal experiences, I have often forgotten to look for such traits when I start a position but in hindsight, this point is such an important factor in satisfaction. Recently, I asked my manager on how my performance would be assessed in terms of how would it look like if my performance was two times better off — this led me to understand how the work is perceived and what are the areas which stand out for someone managing me and my performance.
Is your manager noticing all your hard work?
It’s easy to think that sometimes your manager is overlooking your hard-work, however, the essential thing to look out for is if your manager is overlooking other's hard-work as well? In any job, for you to succeed, you need to definitely know from within that your improvement strides will be rewarded or at least acknowledged via intrinsic or extrinsic motivators.
Great Managers don’t stop at identifying your best but challenge you to find your best
when a manager identifies your strengths, they challenge you to improve on those strengths. As a result of the challenges, you personally can develop more responsibility and the team can become interdependent. Team members start appreciating each other’s strong suits and start acting in an interdependent manner.
As a Manager, how and what can you do to manage your reports to get the maximum out of them and help them get the maximum satisfaction of the job?
The article mentions three things you must know about someone to manage her well:
- Her strengths
- The triggers that activate those strengths
- How she learns.
How to identify your strengths
To identify a person’s strengths, first ask, “What was the best day at work you’ve had in the past three months?” Find out what you were doing and why you enjoyed it so much. Remember: A strength is not merely something you are good at. In fact, it might be something you aren’t good at yet. It might be just a predilection, something you find so intrinsically satisfying that you look forward to doing it again and again and getting better at it over time. This question will prompt you to start thinking about your interests and abilities from this perspective.
To identify a person’s weaknesses, just invert the question: “What was the worst day you’ve had at work in the past three months?” And then probe for details about what he was doing and why it grated on him so much. As with strength, weakness is not merely something you are bad at (in fact, you might be quite competent at it). It is something that drains you of energy, an activity that you never look forward to doing and that when you are doing it, all you can think about is stopping.
When a person succeeds, the great manager doesn’t praise her hard work. Even if there’s some exaggeration in the statement, he tells her that she succeeded because she has become so good at deploying her specific strengths. This, the manager knows, will strengthen the employee’s self-assurance and make her more optimistic and more resilient in the face of challenges to come.
Research by Albert Bandura, the father of social learning theory, has shown that self-assurance (labeled “self-efficacy” by cognitive psychologists), not self-awareness, is the strongest predictor of a person’s ability to set high goals, to persist in the face of obstacles, to bounce back when reversals occur, and, ultimately, to achieve the goals they set. By contrast, self-awareness has not been shown to be a predictor of any of these outcomes, and in some cases, it appears to retard them.
Insert into the employee’s world a technique that helps accomplish through discipline what the person can’t accomplish through instinct.
If training produces no improvement, if complementary partnering proves impractical, and if no nifty discipline technique can be found, you are going to have to try the fourth and final strategy, which is to rearrange the employee’s working world to render his weakness irrelevant.
Finding the trigger
One employee’s trigger might be tied to the time of day (he is a night owl, and his strengths only kick in after 3 pm). Another employee’s trigger might be tied to time with you, the boss (even though he’s worked with you for more than five years, he still needs you to check in with him every day, or he feels he’s being ignored). Another worker’s trigger might be just the opposite — independence (she’s only worked for you for six months, but if you check in with her even once a week, she feels micromanaged).
Tailor to learning styles
Although there are many learning styles, a careful review of adult learning theory reveals that three styles predominate. These three are not mutually exclusive; certain employees may rely on a combination of two or perhaps all three. Nonetheless, staying attuned to each employee’s style or styles will help focus your coaching.
- Analyzer — some people prefer to get as much information as they can to feel their contribution (I definitely fall into this category). The best way to teach an analyzer is to give her ample time in the classroom. Role-play with her. Do postmortem exercises with her. Break her performance down into its component parts so she can carefully build it back up. Always allow her time to prepare. The analyzer hates mistakes. A commonly held view is that mistakes fuel learning, but for the analyzer, this just isn’t true. In fact, the reason she prepares so diligently is to minimize the possibility of mistakes. So don’t expect to teach her much by throwing her into a new situation and telling her to wing it.
- Doers — These people love to do and try out something in order to feel their contribution. For these guys, the powerful stuff happens during the performance unlike prior to the performance as analyzers.
- Watchers — they learn from watching the performance. If you’re trying to teach a watcher, by far the most effective technique is to get her out of the classroom. Take her away from the manuals, and make her ride shotgun with one of your most experienced performers.
Always remember that great managing is about the release, not transformation. It’s about constantly tweaking your environment so that the unique contribution, the unique needs, and the unique style of each employee can be given free rein. Your success as a manager will depend almost entirely on your ability to do this.
