Management and Leadership

The modern corporation is constantly on the lookout for the best leadership tactics. With the corporate world becoming more difficult and new obstacles developing in the workplace, it is only necessary for managers to be armed with current knowledge of such issues and how to deal with them. This paper summarizes the book First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Best Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. Managers all across the world have a tendency to break the rules without hesitation. Several themes emerge from the book such as management and leadership, Creative employee engagement, identification of talent, best management practices and employee well-being. These issues get in-depth coverage in the summary of the book presented in this paper.

The Measuring Stick

The book starts with a story of an admiral who miscalculates geo-positions of the warships he is leading and this small mistake leads some three other boats on the coast of Scilly Isles rocks, taking away over 2000 lives as a result. Likewise, most companies lack ways to determine their position (performance), and if there is no solution soon, Coffman (2014) maintain that they could be “headed for the rocks.” The authors suggest that regardless of the type of business one runs, the only way to maintain consistently high performance and profits is to foster a work environment that draws and keeps talented employees through focusing on certain aspects of their job. The book states that businesses need a way to measure specific intangibles within the work environment, intangibles such as employee and customer satisfaction.

To establish these facts, Gallup did a 25 years study where they did interviews with a million employees and analyzed the responses. Out of this, they found 12 questions deemed appropriate to measure the strength of a workplace. Some of these are: (1) Do I know my expectations at work? (2) Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my job right? (3) At work, do I get the opportunity to do what I do best every day? (Buckingham & Coffman, 2014) (4) Have I been recognized for doing good work over the last week? (5) Is there someone at work who encourages development? (6) Does my manager consider me as an individual? And (7) do my opinions seems to count? (Buckingham & Coffman, 2014). In page 26, they give an example of Lankford-Sysco company which has focused on improving intangible factors. As a result, there is an all-time low absenteeism, no shrinkage and has maintained single digit turnover.

The Wisdom of Great Managers

In this chapter, Gallup Interviewed 80000 people, all in different leadership positions in some organizations, to draw useful tip and skills and this data is analyzed. Based on the responses given, one truth that commonly stood out among most managers was that managers believed that people don’t change that much. Thus, great manager firmly held that they do not think everyone had unlimited potential and so they do not try to fix weaknesses, they objectively ’play favorites’ (Buckingham & Coffman, 2014). These findings are clearly controversial, especially when managerial ethics come into play. If a task is to take place, researchers suggest that the great manager first selects a person to work with, sets clear expectations with them, motivate them and from time to time, drive them. Buckingham and Coffman maintain that great managers are not just “leaders in waiting.” (Buckingham & Coffman, 2014) They focus on the inside for personal goals, motivations, fears and needs as well the outward for alternatives, competition and the future of the company.

The First Key: Select for Talent

The researchers define talent as “a recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior that can be productively applied” (Buckingham & Coffman, 2014). They also affirm that while it is impossible to achieve excellence when natural talent lacks, natural talent cannot get taught to employees. Good managers also appreciate how much little of a person’s abilities they can change or improve due to neutral limitations. As such, leaders can help their juniors discover and realize their natural talent, teach them new, emerging skills and also understand and appreciate the lines that demarcate factual from experiential knowledge. Furthermore, the book attributes managers’ ability to identify the right talent for four reasons. Firstly, many people do not know their natural talent, and so they can subject themselves to a guiding routine that a good manager offers through training and experience. Good managers know what they are looking for and also they can identify talent and develop it from a very early stage during recruitment.

The Second Key: Define the Right Outcomes

Since it is tough to “remotely control” employees when undertaking tasks, the book suggests identifying the real results and giving liberty for each person to find their way to the destination. It is so because defining the target is proven to prevent the leader from again defining that standard path and secondly, the best way to draw someone’s talent into important performance is to let them find their means to the destination that offers “least resistance” (Buckingham & Coffman, 2014). Supervisors try to control employees because often they feel that they know the best path to the desired outcome (the perfect plan), not realizing that each has their unique talents. Also, the book stresses that “Every rule takes away a choice. The choice is the fuel for learning” (Buckingham & Coffman, 2014). In a bid to avert the possibility of defining paths, the books suggest that the manager explains what talents are necessary for the role and that recruitment relies on this criterion.

Without specifying the right outcomes, a manager tends to focus on the standard methods of conducting a task and in the process imposes many regulations in an attempt to prevent the employees’ ’inevitable misdeeds.’ This very habit ultimately takes away creativity, responsiveness, and flexibility as employees are overwhelmed with all the rules they have to comply. Related studies by Blanchard and Johnson (2015) in their book The One Minute Manager agree with this view where they emphasize the importance of ’setting the destination to guide the navigation.’ so to say. However, this does not mean that employees should be left to go about solving problems in any manner, a certain degree of regulation to ascertain the safety, security, timeliness and availability for the customer, must be adhered.

The Third Key: Focus on Strengths

In this section, the basic idea is to urge managers to concentrate on improving the talent already available in the organization, make it stronger and help through problems. The researchers focus on the need for managers not to generalize needs and the need to seek to build on the strengths of employees as individuals. It’s, of course, a risk to contradict what research has been able to identify as micromanagement, which according to Hudson-Searl (2017) may as well shut down communication lines between top level management and junior employees. Worse still, research by White (2010) suggests that such practices eventually narrow down to a situation where management essentially becomes a nuisance in the organization as the micromanager has to guess every decision second that subordinate reaches.

Buckingham and Coffman, however, maintain that the reason why great managers still continue to ’break the rules’ is that they understand that not every employee wants to get treated. The same way as the manager does and so one has to go out of the office to establish these preferences if they are to relate well with subordinates. As such, great managers understand that to manage a weakness in an individual; they have to clearly identify what they have to deal with, consider possible courses of action and their likely effect on the employee’s performance. Additionally, effective leaders are obliged to devise a customized support system for the individual, get them an equal partner ( an example of Bill Gates and Paul Allen) or assign another role to the person if they determine that the weakness is not with the person’s behavior.

The Fourth Key: Find the Right Fit

In this chapter, the author undertakes to help the manager answer a common question from employees, “What is the next step?” the employee is presumed to feel underutilized in his current role, probably bored, wants a pay rise and greater responsibility. The book points out that there is no right answer and whatever respond the manager gives will depend on the worker’s situation. Unfortunately, most current managers get it wrong when they hold the popular belief that the solution is to keep promoting people to their level of incompetence. As such, this might involve a promotion, maintenance within the current role, a demotion and it might as well be a termination. The point is that the role of the manager is to help the employee find the right fit, steer them towards positions where the employee gets the greatest odds for success. Managers just have to learn to take the bitter pill. It might involve giving the employee a kind of a safety net by providing a free trial on the new job position so the employee can take part in deciding whether their talent matches the role of the new level.

Turning the Keys: A practical guide

This section provides a practical application to the four keys presented before. In the search for talent (during recruitment), the book offers great insight into interview habits for managers. The interviewer should be sure to make the talent search stand alone. Open-ended questions should be used subjectively to verify that the candidate reveals as much about themselves as possible. It is so as to determine if their feelings, patterns of thought and behavior match the position’s needs. To turn the last three keys with their employees, great managers followed the performance management routine which was first of all, simple. The routine is in the form of questions that seek to establish satisfaction levels, what the employee thought were their strengths and weaknesses and additionally the goals they have. Other qualities about the routine are that it forces that there be constant interaction between manager and employee, is focused on the future and the responsibility to keep track of the employee performance solely lies on the employee.

Furthermore, the actionable plan entails performance planning meetings on the employee level besides career discovery questions on the specific ways in which the employee finds their current role, challenges, what they love most about it and what, in their opinion, they think would be a perfect role for them. This plan relies on the proven fact that if you measure and reward performance, according to some defined criteria, people will improve their performance even if not because of the reward. Broad-banding should get consideration in determining pay levels. If implemented the right way, it would ultimately create the impression that one doesn’t have to get promoted to increase their pay (Mathis, Jackson, & Valentine, 2015). The researchers conclude by providing some practical steps that a company can take to create a friendly environment for great managers. The company can foster an organizational culture that encourages all to focus on the desired outcome and value world-class performance. Moreover, the book also helps organizations to study the best managers by creating a private university where they develop leadership through an experiential approach.

Conclusion

It is not easy to provide the ideal management and that organizational leadership has to be at its best which might just be far from ideal. It is, therefore necessary that such strategy is implemented a day at a time, an employee at a go. Contemporary management can hope that the modern organization’s search for value and its employee’s search for identity will eventually transform the corporate landscape for the better. Emerging issues within the organizational leadership and management context are the development of software tools such as LogMeIn software which can be useful for managers to provide virtual leadership in an organization. There are limitations to the use of technology, and therefore, it is mostly through collaboration and employing a holistic approach to management, where we combine effort, that then can we foster a culture of excellence within the organization.

References

Blanchard, K., & Johnson, S. (2015). The New One Minute Manager. HarperCollins: New York.

Buckingham, M., & Coffman, C. (2014). First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently. Washington, DC: Gallup Press.

Hudson-Searle, G. (2017). Meaningful Conversations. Leicester: Troubador Publishing Ltd.

Mathis, R. L., Jackson, J. H., & Valentine, S. R. (2015). Human Resource Management: Essential Perspectives. Boston: Cengage Learning.

White, R. (2010). The Micromanagement Disease: Symptoms, Diagnosis, and Cure. Public Personnel Management, 71-75.