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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
The how-to guide for exceptional management from the bottom up The Effective Manager is a hands-on practical guide to great management at every level. Written by the man behind Manager Tools, the world's number-one business podcast, this book distills the author's 25 years of management training expertise into clear, actionable steps to start taking today. First, you'll identify what "effective management" actually looks like: can you get the job done at a high level? Do you attract and retain top talent without burning them out? Then you'll dig into the four critical behaviors that make a manager great, and learn how to adjust your own behavior to be the leader your team needs. You'll learn the four major tools that should be a part of every manager's repertoire, how to use them, and even how to introduce them to the team in a productive, non-disruptive way. Most management books are written for CEOs and geared toward improving corporate management, but this book is expressly aimed at managers of any level--with a behavioral framework designed to be tailored to your team's specific needs. * Understand your team's strengths, weaknesses, and goals in a meaningful way * Stop limiting feedback to when something goes wrong * Motivate your people to continuous improvement * Spread the work around and let people stretch their skills Effective managers are good at the job and "good at people." The key is combining those skills to foster your team's development, get better and better results, and maintain a culture of positive productivity. The Effective Manager shows you how to turn good into great with clear, actionable, expert guidance.
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Seitenzahl: 286
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction Who This Book Is for, What It's about, and Why
About Manager Tools
A Note about Data
A Note about Gender
Chapter 1: What Is an Effective Manager?
Your First Responsibility as a Manager Is to Achieve Results
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
Chapter 2: The Four Critical Behaviors
The First Critical Behavior: Get to Know Your People
The Second Critical Behavior: Communicate about Performance
The Third Critical Behavior: Ask for More
The Fourth Critical Behavior: Push Work Down
Chapter 3: Teachable and Sustainable Tools
Chapter 4: Know Your People—One On Ones
Scheduled
Weekly
30-Minute Meeting
With Each of Your Directs
The Manager Takes Notes
Where to Conduct One On Ones
Chapter 5: Common Questions and Resistance to One On Ones
The Most Common Forms of One-On-One Pushback
Talking Too Much and Talking Too Little
Pushback on Note Taking
Can I Do One On Ones over the Phone?
Can I Be Friends with My Directs?
Can I Do One On Ones as a Project Manager?
Chapter 6: How to Start Doing One On Ones
Choose Times from Your Calendar
Send Out a One-On-One E-mail Invitation
Allow for Possible Changes in the Near Future
Review Intent, Ground Rules, and O3 Agenda in Your Staff Meeting
Answer Questions
Conduct One On Ones Only for 12 Weeks
Don't Rush to Get to Feedback!
Don't Rush to Get to Negative Feedback
Chapter 7: Talk about Performance—Feedback
Encourage Effective Future Behavior
When Should I Give Feedback?
Chapter 8: Common Questions and Resistance to Feedback
How Does It Sound?
The Capstone: Systemic Feedback
Chapter 9: How to Start Delivering Feedback
Announce Your Intention in Your Weekly Staff Meeting
Schedule 30 Minutes for Your Briefing
Use Our Materials
Cover the Purpose of Feedback
Walk Them through Each Step of the Feedback Model
Give Only Positive Feedback for Eight Weeks
Add in Negative Feedback after Eight Weeks
Stay as Positive as You Can
Chapter 10: Ask for More—Coaching
Step 1: Collaborate to Set a Goal
Step 2: Collaborate to Brainstorm Resources
Step 3: Collaborate to Create a Plan
Step 4: The Direct Acts and Reports on the Plan
Chapter 11: How to Start Coaching
Chapter 12: Push Work Down—Delegation
Why Delegation Is the Solution—The Delegation Cascade
How to Delegate—The Manager Tools Delegation Model
Chapter 13: Common Questions and Resistance to Delegation
What Should You Delegate?
What If a Direct Repeatedly Says No to Delegation Requests?
Chapter 14: How to Start Delegating
Afterword
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Table 3.1
Table 4.1
Table 10.1
List of Illustrations
Figure 7.1
Figure 10.1
Figure 12.1
Figure 12.2
Figure 12.3
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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The Effective Manager
Mark Horstman
Cofounder, Manager Tools
Cover image: © LPETTET/ iStock.com
Cover design: Wiley
Copyright © 2016 by Manager Tools Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
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ISBN 978-1-119-24460-8 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-119-28611-0 (ePDF); ISBN 978-1-119-28612-7 (ePub)
Dedication
This is what I tell my friends
Dedicated to my wife Rhonda and our wonderful children:Kate, Travis, Ashley, Courtney, Drake, Christopher, and Jaggars
On behalf of Mike Auzenne, my Manager Tools cofounderand our great team of professionals at Manager Tools
IntroductionWho This Book Is for, What It's about, and Why
If you're a manager, this book was written for you. If you've ever struggled to lead your team or wondered how to handle a difficult situation, this book is for you. If you find the people side of management (and that's all this book is about) difficult at times, this book is definitely for you.
To be clear: this book isn't about “management” the way most business publications talk about it. To them, “management” means big organizational ideas like strategy, or finance, or organizational change. If you scan the Management section of The Wall Street Journal, you'll see articles about those topics. That's not what this book is about. Frankly, if you're just a frontline manager, or maybe even a director, you don't need to know a lot about that kind of “management” just yet. What you do need to know about is how to manage people. If that's you, this book is for you.
This book is about managing people. It's about getting the most out of your direct reports, for two reasons: because most managers are very bad at that part of their job,yet that's the most valuable thing they do as a manager.
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.
In a way, though, it's not surprising. Lots of folks think getting a Master of Business Administration (MBA) will make them managers. But MBA programs don't teach much about managing people. Part of the reason for that is that many of the professors have never managed a group of people with responsibility for their output. Also, people aren't easily placed into neat conceptualized models that can be analyzed and measured. People are messy.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of managers describe their “training” this way: I got promoted, and they didn't tell me anything about what I was supposed to do or how I was supposed to do it. They just gave me a team and wished me luck.
One new manager I worked with, years ago at a great firm, told me that the day he got promoted, his new boss handed him a stack of folders regarding his team members, pointed to a corner of the building, and said, “Your team sits over there, by the windows.”
This is mind-boggling. The upside of this, however, is that you're not alone. That feeling you have that others know what they're doing but you don't is wrong. Almost everyone else doesn't know either.
So, give yourself a break. Let yourself off the hook. You're doing a difficult job, and you haven't been given ample preparation. That's why I wrote The Effective Manager.
The Effective Manager will only concern itself with actionable guidance. Usually, I will not tell you “how to be” or “what to reflect on” or “what attitude to have.” There's a part of me, after 25 years of coaching managers, that doesn't really care what kind of attitude you have, because all the attitude in the world isn't going to change the results. The only thing that will change the results is to change what you DO.
Several years ago, a senior vice president asked me to coach one of his key team members, Paul. He said that his direct (someone who reported directly to him), who was a vice president, was brilliant and had almost everything it took to be a more senior manager. The problem was that he was a horrible presenter when compared with his peers, and he would never make it to higher levels because he would have to give presentations regularly. In addition, he was a nervous presenter, and it was excruciating to be in the audience when he talked.
I asked Paul to present something for me. Yes, he was extremely nervous. There was no way Paul would be going further in his career. I still remember being amazed that he had gotten as far as he had. (His boss had sheltered him, and, frankly, it was probably a good move, as bad off as Paul was.)
I suppose I could have engaged a hypnotist, or I could have impersonated a therapist and tried to “understand” Paul's emotional state. But, really, I didn't care very much how nervous Paul was. What I cared about was what he did that made the audience think he was nervous. If I could help him eliminate all the behaviors that audiences judged as “nervous,” he would be fine.
This probably surprises you a little. But let's do a little thought experiment. Suppose that Paul got up in front of the senior team the following week and presented brilliantly. There were no mistakes, no long embarrassing pauses, no stammering, no “deer in the headlights” moments, and not a single “ummm” or “ahhhhh…”
Paul's boss would surely think, “Success!” He might even say to Paul, “You beat it! You weren't nervous!”
But I can tell you what Paul would say: “No way. I was so nervous; I nearly threw up right before my presentation.”
Do you understand? An audience doesn't react to a speaker's nervousness. They react to the behaviors that they see and hear that they ascribe to nerves. If Paul is nervous but doesn't behave as if he is nervous, will his audience notice? Of course not. They'll think he's confident.
Suppose Paul is not nervous, but he engages in all the behaviors that a nervous person engages in. What is the audience going to think? That he's nervous and not confident. At the executive level, that's the kiss of death.
Success at work is about what you do—you are your behaviors. Almost nothing else matters. And that's what The Effective Manager is about.
About Manager Tools
My firm, which I co-own with my outstanding business partner Michael Auzenne, is a management consultant firm. We coach managers and executives at firms all around the world. We train managers at firms all over the world. In 2016, we will provide all-day training sessions to over 10,000 managers at our corporate clients worldwide. We also host training conferences all over the world, where individual managers can get trained. We will conduct over 100 of these training conferences in 2016.
However, if your company cannot afford to send you to training (we do offer a discount if you want to pay yourself), every bit of guidance in this book is available for free in our podcast, Manager Tools. You can find the podcast on iTunes and at www.manager-tools.com.
As of this writing, our podcasts are downloaded about a million times a month, in virtually every country in the world. We've won many Podcast Awards over the years, thanks to our loyal audience.
Our podcast is free because the mission of our firm is to make every manager in the world effective, and many of them can't afford to buy this book.
Periodically, I will encourage you to go to our website for more guidance. I can't put all the podcasts in here—there are, at the time of this publishing, close to 1,000 of them. You'll see many instances of There's a Cast for That™ throughout this book. There are links to additional free content in our podcasts on our website.
I encourage you to visit www.manager-tools.com and learn even more. Click on the “There's a Cast for That™” link near the top right of our home page for a full listing of all of the podcasts cited in the The Effective Manager.
A Note about Data
For the past 25 years, we've been testing various managerial behaviors and tools to see which work and which don't. I used to hate it when the manager training I received, or the books I read, basically were filled with someone's opinions, or they proffered an idea and then used a few anecdotes to support the person's position. We at Manager Tools like the aphorism, “The plural of anecdote is not data.”
We have tested and refined all of the four primary recommendations given in this book. We have tested or surveyed over 91,000 managers at various times, for various behaviors, responses, and outcomes.
In many tests, we track results and retention of managers in both a test group and an unchanged control group. This is especially true of the Four Most Effective Behaviors. We have also tested many of the phrases that we recommend you use. Our tests show a slight difference in responses, for instance, when using the phrases, “Would you please…?” and “Would you…?” We recommend using “Would you please…?”
That being said, no survey can completely predict how any one manager's results, retention, or relationships will be affected by the tools we recommend. Every situation is different. Often, that's what many managers say when they come to us for help and explain their situation: “My situation is special/different/unique.” Almost always, it's not different at all. But because there's a chance that a manager's situation is unique, we will tell you this: Our guidance is for 90 percent of managers, 90 percent of the time. It's possible that you're in a special situation, but I doubt it.
A Note about Gender
You'll notice that, throughout this book, I'll use different genders for managers—sometimes male and sometimes female. All of our content at Manager Tools—all of the audio guidance in podcasts and all the “show notes”—use a nearly perfect balance of male and female examples. (If you're a male, and it seems as if there are a lot of female examples, that says more about your biases than our examples.)
The reason for using different genders for managers throughout this book is that all of our data show that men and women make equally good managers and, for that matter, executives. If you're a female manager, we're glad you're reading this book, and we're here to help.
Now, let's find out what it takes to be a good manager and how to do it.
1What Is an Effective Manager?
There's a lot of talk about what good management is. When someone tells you they know how to manage or what it takes to manage, ask them, “How do you measure what a good manager is, or does?” If you don't get a crisp answer (like the one I outline below), don't take what they tell you very seriously.
I suspect you've known both good and bad managers. What makes them so? Is it what they do? How they think? Their personality? What they feel? Where they went to school?
Think about this for a minute: How do you know someone is a good manager? What is the definition of a good manager?
When we ask these questions at our Effective Manager Conferences, we get all kinds of answers, such as the following:
Their people like them.
They communicate a lot.
They're smart.
They CARE.
They listen well.
They are respected.
These are good efforts, but they're still incorrect.
Suppose a manager reported to you who did or embodied all of the above, and for the past three years, he had never achieved a single objective that the organization had set for him. Would you describe him as a good manager? Of course you wouldn't.
Your First Responsibility as a Manager Is to Achieve Results
This may be the most important concept related to being a manager. 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. Whether you're a sales manager, and you have to “meet your numbers,” or you're an accounting manager, and you have to “prepare the quarterlies,” or you're a project manager, and you have to “deliver, on time, on budget, in scope,” the thing that really matters is that you do what your company expects you to do.
For many managers, this creates a problem. You probably can't name your top five key results that you owe your organization this year. You most likely can't tick off on your fingers, with ease, the key things for which you're responsible. You may be able to say, “My boss wants me to focus in these areas,” but that's not enough. You can't quantify what is expected of you.
About the only way to really feel good about what your responsibilities are is to have quantified goals, in numbers and percentages: “Higher than 92 percent call quality each week”; “Achieve 1.6 MM in sales”; “Maintain gross margins above 38 percent”; “Reduce shipping losses by 2.7 percent cumulatively year over year.” (If not having these kinds of goals frustrates or worries you, perhaps you think that everyone else has clear goals. But don't worry. They probably don't either.)
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.
If you can't list your goals almost off the top of your head, make a note somewhere to go to your boss in the near future. Ask her: “What results do you expect of me?” “What are the measures you're going to compare me against?” “What are the objective standards?” “What subjective things do you look at to round out your evaluation of me?” (If you want to know more details about how to have this conversation, go to There's a Cast for That™.)
Take notes, and go back to your desk and figure out what actions you're going to take in order to deliver those results.
A lot of managers fear this conversation. The thinking goes, “If there are no measures, they can't use them against me.” But that type of thinking is shortsighted. There are always measures. If you don't know what they are, they may be being used against you. Your boss is privately and subjectively evaluating you.
Okay, so results come first. Managers who produce great results have more successful careers than those who produce average results. But even reading this statement probably bothers you a little, because you've likely met at least one manager who gets great results and does well whom you despise. There are managers who put results so far ahead of everything else that they justify all sorts of behaviors to achieve those results. There are even industries—Wall Street comes to mind—that are more likely to tolerate this kind of behavior from managers. When the ends justify the means for managers, bad things happen to the workers who report to them.
A focus only on results far too often leads to abuse of workers. The worldwide labor movement—unions—traces its beginnings to soon after the beginning of…management. Managers were told, “Just get results,” and they did so, at the expense of the health and safety of their employees. So, fairly soon, the workers joined forces.
Your Second Responsibility as a Manager Is to Retain Your People
Effectively managed modern organizations now measure retention in addition to results when they are evaluating a manager. It's intended to be a brake against an unrelenting results focus. They want to ensure that a manager's team members don't leave the organization.
Replacing employees is expensive. When someone leaves, there's the lost work that had been planned for, the cost of interviewing in both money and time, the likely higher salary that will be paid in the event of replacement, the time and expense of training the new employee, and the cost of less productivity by the new employee until that person can match the quality and quantity of work of the person who has left.
For today's manager, it's not enough to get results.
The Definition of an Effective Manager Is One Who Gets Results and Keeps Her People
In the best companies in the world, when executives get together to review the talent of their managers, the results and retention of managers are always at the heart of the discussion. When there's a discussion about who is best, who deserves a promotion, and who is “ready now” or going to be “ready next,” these two metrics come up over and over again: How well did this manager do her job, as shown in her results? Did she retain her people?
If you want to be an effective manager and if you want to maximize your job security (and, I would argue, your professional satisfaction), you've got to achieve these two metrics. You've got to know how your organization (for results, it's usually your boss) measures them, and you've got to choose to spend your time on things that achieve them.
What are the things that you can DO that are most likely to achieve them?
2The Four Critical Behaviors
[Author's Note: If you don't want to learn the fundamental principles that underlie my recommendations, and you think you're ready to dive right in to what to do and how to do it, you can skip this chapter and the next one, and go directly to Chapter 4, “Know Your People—One On Ones.” I don't recommend it, but if you're impatient to get going, go.]
When my Manager Tools cofounder Mike Auzenne and I started our management careers, we had been taught very little about managing others. We struggled to learn what to do and how to do it, probably just the way you have struggled, and are doing so now. We didn't know that there are basically four things that great managers do a lot better than average and poor managers do. Once we understood these four things, we decided to start Manager Tools so that managers wouldn't have to learn the hard way, as we did.
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.
Managers who get results and keep their people almost always do these four things much better than other managers do. (I say, “almost always” because there are exceptions. If you're incredibly smart—on the level of a Bill Gates, Andy Bechtolsheim, Warren Buffett, or Mike Morrisroe—you can probably get by just being smarter than everyone else. But, hey, you're probably not that smart. Mike and I sure aren't.)
The First Critical Behavior: Get to Know Your People
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. Managers who know how to get the most out of each individual member of the team achieve noticeably better results than managers who don't. The most efficient way to get to know your team is to spend time regularly communicating with them.
Despite the fact that your primary responsibility is getting results, the most important thing you can do isn't strategizing, task assignment, resource planning, or priority analysis. It's getting to know the people who have the skills and who are going to get the work done.
For the record, a manager can increase performance in the short term very effectively by using the power of his or her role as manager and threatening—and expecting—compliance. But if retention is thrown in as a required goal, that technique quickly sours.
Our data over the years suggest that, generally, a manager who knows his or her team members one standard deviation better than the average managerproduces results that are two standard deviations betterthan the average manager's results.
Why is this, do you think? Think about your own relationship with your manager for a second. Do you want your boss to “treat you like everyone else”? Then, maybe you don't need to learn about your directs. However, I would guess that's not what you want. If you're a top performer, how would it feel to know that you were being managed just like your boss's weakest team member? If you were a weak performer, would you want the extra assignments that the top performer received on top of normal duties? Probably not.
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.
The problem with this type of managing is that it only works (a little bit) with people a lot like you. Perhaps you're now a software development manager managing other developers. There's a pretty good chance that a good portion of your team is a lot like you. If you used to be a sales rep and are now a sales manager managing other sales reps, there's a lesser chance, but still a good one, that some members of your team are a lot like you. The problem with this is that it only works at the lowest levels and only for a little while. If you aspire to more, your Golden Rule is going to fail you.
People and their behaviors are what deliver results to your organization. (Not systems, not processes, not computers, not machines.) Results are your primary responsibility. We are all unique—every one of us. What makes any of us as managers think that one size could ever fit all? It might be easier, but it's not more effective. And, if you're worried that it takes a lot of work to be a good manager, this book will show you that it really doesn't.
If you're working for a boss who's different from you—he's outwardly passionate, and you're reserved and thoughtful, or she's smart and analytical, and you're a “people” person—your chances of success are diminished.
If you're going to manage people who are different from us—and you are, as team sizes continue to grow to save costs—we're going to have to learn to manage people who aren't like you. That means being willing to adjust depending on the person you're managing (just like you want your boss to do with you).
At this point, if you're like a good percentage of the hundreds of thousands of managers we've trained over the years, you're probably thinking one of two things:
I think I know my people very well, actually.
No need—I talk to my people all the time!
Let's take each of these ideas in turn. First, “I know my people very well.” Perhaps you do, but the vast majority of managers who claim to really don't. I'd guess you think you do, but I would bet that you don't.
Here's a thought experiment to judge your own knowledge of your team members. First, what's more important to you: your family or your work? For most of you, the answer is family, and rightfully so.
Now, ask yourself the same question about your directs. What's more important to them: their family or their work? Without much thought, you realize that the answer is family first for them as well. And you'd be right—we've asked.
So, for your directs, their family is more important than work. You say that you know your directs very well. Here's a test of that knowledge.
What Are the First Names of All of the Children of the People Who Report Directly to You?
If you're like roughly 95 percent of the managers we ask this question, you don't know all of their names. A fair portion—maybe 40 percent—don't even know how many children all of their directs have! We call this, by the way, The Direct Relationship Acid Test. [There's a Cast for That™.]
This isn't a conclusive exercise, of course. But most people agree it's a reasonable indicator—a fair proxy. Think about it from the perspective of your personal life: your close friends all know the names of all of your children. That's part of what makes them close friends. Your friends who are not as close know some of your children. And your acquaintances probably don't know whether you have children or not.
If you failed the test, consider this: what makes you think you can get the last full measure of devotion to work out of someone when you don't know the names of the people who are the most precious to them in the world? In our experience, you probably can't. If you're smart and you work hard, you can do okay, but you're missing the biggest leverage of all: a trusting relationship with those whom you manage.
If you're responding to this discussion by thinking, “I'm not sure I like all the familiarity. I don't want to be friends with my directs,” then you're not alone. A lot of managers do a lot of their work with their team by e-mail, or they see themselves as leaders rather than managers, or they say to themselves, “I didn't need to be ‘managed,’ and I don't want to have to manage my team; they should know what to do.” We'll have more to say on this, but for now, our first recommendation is this: spending 30 minutes a week with each of your directs isn't likely to result in your becoming “friends” with them.
Now let's look at the second item mentioned earlier: “No need—I talk to my people all the time!” Many managers say this to us when we recommend that they spend focused, scheduled time getting to know their directs. They're constantly in communication with their directs through e-mail, texts, and plenty of face-to-face conversations. In fact, they feel like they talk to their directs so much that they hardly have time for their own work.
Most managers, however, have no idea how one-sided their conversations are with their team members. They have no idea how little influence those brief conversations actually have on building relationships.
