Second, there’s the message that if you keep working away on your nontalents, your persistence will pay off in the end. On the surface this is a solid, if clichéd, morsel of advice: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Yet the most effective managers reject it. Why? Because if the focus of your life is to turn your nontalents, such as empathy or strategic thinking or persuasiveness, into talents, then it will be a crushingly frustrating life.
Persistence is useful if you are trying to learn a new skill or to acquire particular knowledge. Persistence can even be appropriate if you are trying to cut a thin path through some of your mental wastelands, so that, for example, your nontalent for empathy doesn’t permanently undermine your talents in other areas. But persistence directed primarily toward your nontalents is self-destructive — no amount of determination or good intentions will ever enable you to carve out a brand-new set of four-lane mental highways. You will reprimand yourself, berate yourself, and put yourself through all manner of contortions in an attempt to achieve the impossible.
From the vantage point of great managers, conventional wisdom’s story, no matter how optimistic it may appear on the surface, is actually about fruitless self-denial and wasted persistence.
Third, this story describes a doomed relationship. The conventional manager genuinely wants to bring out the best in the employee, but she chooses to do so by focusing on fixing the employee’s weaknesses. The employee probably possesses many strengths, but the manager ends up characterizing him by those few areas where he struggles. This is the same dynamic that often proves the undoing of other failed relationships.
Have you ever suffered through a bad relationship, the kind of relationship where the pressures of each day sapped your energy and made you a stranger to yourself? If you can stand to, think back to how you felt during that relationship and remember: A bad relationship is rarely one where your partner didn’t know you very well. Most often, a bad relationship is one where your partner came to know you very well indeed … and wished you weren’t that way. Perhaps your partner wanted to perfect you. Perhaps you were simply incompatible and your weaknesses grated on each other. Perhaps your partner was a person who simply enjoyed pointing out other people’s failings. Whatever the cause, you ended up feeling as though you were being defined by those things you did not do rather than those things you did. And that felt awful.
This is the same feeling that many managers unwittingly create in their employees. Even when working with their most productive employees, they still spend most of their time talking about each person’s few areas of nontalent and how to eradicate them. No matter how well-intended, relationships preoccupied with weakness never end well.
Finally, at the heart of this story lurks its bleakest theme: The victim is to blame. Less effective managers cast themselves in the mentor role. Blind to the distinction between skills and knowledge — both of which can be acquired — and talents — which cannot — these managers relentlessly point out each employee’s nontalents in the belief that he can fix them and become well-rounded. “You can become more persuasive, more strategic, or more empathic if you just work at it,” or so their story goes. Their implicit message is that you, the employee, can control the outcome by “working at it.” You can take classes, modify your reactions, censor yourself. The responsibility is yours. Therefore when you fail to achieve the impossible, to turn your nontalents into talents, the invisible finger of blame is left pointing at you. You weren’t persistent enough. You didn’t apply yourself. The fault is yours.
By telling you that you can transform nontalents into talents, these less effective managers are not only setting you up to fail, they are intrinsically blaming you for your inevitable failure. This is perverse.
For all of these reasons, great managers reject conventional wisdom’s story. Their rejection does not mean that they think all persistence is wasted. It simply means that persistence focused primarily on nontalents is wasted. Nor does their rejection mean that they ignore a person’s weaknesses. Each employee has areas where she struggles, and these areas must be dealt with — we will describe in more detail how great managers deal with a person’s weaknesses later in this chapter.
But it does mean that great managers are aggressive in trying to identify each person’s talents and help her to cultivate those talents.
This is how they do it: They believe that casting is everything. They manage by exception. And they spend the most time with their best people.
Casting Is Everything
“How do great managers cultivate excellent performance so consistently?”
As we have noted, everyone has talents — recurring patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that can be applied productively. Simply put, everyone can probably do at least one thing better than ten thousand other people. However, each person is not necessarily in a position to use her talents. Even though she might initially have been selected for her talents, after a couple of reshuffles and lateral moves, she may now be miscast.
If you want to turn talent into performance, you have to position each person so that you are paying her to do what she is naturally wired to do. You have to cast her in the right role.
In sports this is relatively straightforward. Given his physical strength and combative personality, it’s obvious that Rodman should be paid to crash the boards, not run the floor. In the performing arts, it is almost as clear cut. The original casting of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had Paul Newman playing Sundance and Robert Redford as Butch. After a few rehearsals it became apparent that the roles did not elicit the actors’ strengths. The switch was made, and almost immediately both characters materialized. Newman reveled in the glib, self-confident persona of Butch Cassidy, while Redford captured perfectly the more brooding, almost deferential Sundance Kid. The strength of these performances gave this classic film an appeal it might otherwise have lacked.
In the working world casting becomes a little more challenging. First, what matters is what is inside the person, not physical prowess or appearance. Some managers find it hard to see beyond the physical to each person’s true talents. Second, managers are often preoccupied with the person’s skills or knowledge. Thus people with marketing degrees are inevitably cast into the marketing department and people with accounting backgrounds are siphoned off into the finance department. There is nothing wrong with including a person’s skills and knowledge on your casting checklist. But if you do not place a person’s talent at the top of that list, you will always run the risk of mediocre performance.
Casting for talent is one of the unwritten secrets to the success of great managers. On occasion it can be as simple as knowing that your aggressive, ego-driven salesperson should take on the territory that requires a fire to be lit beneath it. And, by contrast, your patient, relationship-building salesperson should be offered the territory that requires careful nurturing. However, most of the time casting for talent demands a subtler eye.
For example, imagine you have just been promoted to manage a team of people. You have no idea whether these people have talent or not. You didn’t select them. But they have now been handed to you. Their performance is your responsibility. Some managers quickly split the team members into two groups: “losers” and “keepers.” They keep the “keepers,” clear the house of “losers,” and recruit their “own people” to fill the gaps.
The best managers are more deliberate. They talk with each individual, asking about strengths, weaknesses, goals, and dreams. They work closely with each employee, taking note of the choices each makes, the way they all interact, who supports who, and why. They notice things. They take their time, because they know that the surest way to identify each person’s talents is to watch his or her behavior over time.
And then, yes, they separate the team into those who should stay and those who should be encouraged to find other roles. But, significantly, they add a third category: “
movers.” These are individuals who have revealed some valuable talents but who, for whatever reason, are not in a position to use them. They are miscast. By repositioning each in a redesigned role, great managers are able to focus on each person’s strengths and turn talent into performance.
Mandy M., the manager of the design team whom we met earlier, tells this story. Recently promoted to head up her company’s design division, Mandy inherited an employee called John. He was positioned in a strategic role where he was being paid to offer conceptual advice to the client. The environment was intense and individualistic, with associates competing with each other to devise the cleverest solution for the client. And John was struggling. Everyone knew that John was smart enough to do the job. But the performance just wasn’t there. He was emotionally disengaged and, according to most company sources, on his way out the door. If he didn’t jump, he would soon be pushed.
But Mandy had seen something in John. A couple of months before being promoted, she had noticed that the only time he really blossomed was when he was working for a supervisor who paid attention to him. They developed a relationship, these two, and John began to shine. But then the supervisor moved on to a new role, and John’s light dimmed.
Guided by that one glimpse, Mandy put John into the “movers” category. She guessed that he was a person who needed connections the way some people need recognition. So she took his thirst for relationships and applied it where it could be of great value to the company: business development.
John became a sales machine. He was naturally wired to reach out to people, to learn their names, to remember special things about them. He built genuine relationships with hundreds of individuals scattered among his company’s clients and prospects. Bonded by these relationships, the clients stayed clients, and the prospects soon joined them. John was in his element, using his natural strengths to everyone’s advantage.
When Mandy tells this story you can hear a little catch in her throat. Like many fine managers, she is overjoyed at the thought of someone using his talents to the fullest. She knows that it is a rare thing to be able to find a role that gives you a chance to express the specialness inside you, a role where what makes you You is also what makes you good. It is rare, not because there aren’t enough interesting roles — virtually every role performed at excellence has the potential to interest somebody — but because so few individuals ever come to know their true talent and so many managers fail to notice the clues. Mandy knows that on another day, in another company, she might have missed that brief glimpse of John’s talent. He would have failed, and he would have had little to learn from his failure.
But she didn’t miss it. She noticed the sign of a latent strength. And through careful recasting she was able to focus on that strength and so turn John’s talents into performance.
Everyone has the talent to be exceptional at something. The trick is to find that “something.” The trick is in the casting.
Manage by Exception
“Why do great managers break the Golden Rule?”
“Everyone is exceptional” has a second meaning: Everyone should be treated as an exception. Each employee has his own filter, his own way of interpreting the world around him, and therefore each employee will demand different things of you, his manager.
Some want you to leave them alone from almost the first moment they are hired. Others feel slighted if you don’t check in with them every day. Some want to be recognized by you, “the boss.” Others see their peers as the truest source of recognition. Some crave their praise on a public stage. Others shun the glare of publicity, valuing only that quiet, private word of thanks. Each employee breathes different psychological oxygen.
Kirk D., a sales manager for a pharmaceutical company, learned this quickly. He tells of one particular salesperson, Mike, who was always in the top ten of the company’s 150 salespeople, but who, Kirk felt, still had more to give.
“Initially I couldn’t figure him out. I’m real competitive, and since he was a professional football player for eight years, a running back, I naturally assumed he must be as competitive as me. I would try to rile him up by telling him how much some of the other salespeople had done that month. But when I told him he just looked bored. No fire, no burn. Just bored. It turned out that, despite his background, Mike wasn’t competitive at all. He was an achiever. He simply wanted to beat himself. He didn’t care about anybody else. In his mind, they were irrelevant. So I started asking him what he was going to do this month to better himself. As soon as I asked him this he couldn’t stop talking. Ideas poured out. And together we made them happen. He became the number one salesperson in the company for six straight years.”
Remember the Golden Rule? “Treat people as you would like to be treated.” The best managers break the Golden Rule every day. They would say don’t treat people as you would like to be treated. This presupposes that everyone breathes the same psychological oxygen as you. For example, if you are competitive, everyone must be similarly competitive. If you like to be praised in public, everyone else must, too. Everyone must share your hatred of micromanagement.
This thinking is well-intended but overly simplistic, reminiscent perhaps of the four-year-old who proudly presents his mother with a red truck for her birthday because that is the present he wants. So the best managers reject the Golden Rule. Instead, they say, treat each person as he would like to be treated, bearing in mind who he is. Of course, each employee must adhere to certain standards of behavior, certain rules. But within those rules, treat each one differently, each according to his needs.
Some managers will protest, “How can I possibly keep track of each employee’s unique needs?” And who can blame them? It’s hard to treat each employee differently, particularly since outward appearance offers few clues to an individual’s particular needs. It’s a little like being told to play chess without knowing how all the pieces move.
But the best managers have the solution: Ask. Ask your employee about her goals: What are you shooting for in your current role? Where do you see your career heading? What personal goals would you feel comfortable sharing with me? How often do you want to meet to talk about your progress?
Feel her out about her taste in praise: does she seem to like public recognition or private? Written or verbal? Who is her best audience? It can be very effective to ask her to tell you about the most meaningful recognition she has ever received. Find out what made it so memorable. Also ask her about her relationship with you. Can she tell you how she learns? You might inquire whether she has ever had any mentors or partners who have helped her. How did they help?
With such a bulk of information to remember about each employee, managers often find that it helps to jot it all down. Some design organized filing systems, where each employee has his own folder, flecked with ticklers that remind the manager when each employee’s check-in cycle has come full circle. Others just scribble the details down on scruffy little note cards and carry them around in their pocket — employee “cheat sheets,” they call them.
Obviously there is no right way to capture this information. Just capture it. Without it you are functionally blind, flailing around with stereotypes, generalizations, and misguided notions that “fairness” means “sameness.” But armed with it you are focused. You can focus on each person’s strengths and turn talents into performance. You can “manage by exception.”
Spend the Most Time With Your Best People
“Why do great managers play favorites?”
If you are a manager, you may want to try this exercise. On the left-hand side of a blank sheet of paper write down the names of the people who report to you in descending order of productivity, the most productive at the top, the least productive at the bottom. On the right-hand side, write down the same names, but this time in descending order of “time you spend with them,” the most time at the top, the least time at the bottom. Now draw straight lines
joining the names on the left with the appropriate names on the right.
Do your lines cross? They often do. Many managers find themselves spending the most time with their least productive people and the least time with their most productive people. On the surface this would appear to be an eminently safe way for a manager to invest his time. After all, your best employees can already do the job. They don’t need you. But those few employees who are struggling? They need all the help you can give them. Without your support they might not only fail as individuals, they might also drag down the entire team.
Investing in your strugglers appears shrewd, yet the most effective managers do the opposite. When they join the names, their lines are horizontal. They spend the most time with their most productive employees. They invest in their best. Why?
Because at heart they see their role very differently from the way most managers do. Most managers assume that the point of their role is either to control or to instruct. And, yes, if you see “control” as the core of the manager role, then it would certainly be productive to spend more time with your strugglers because they still need to be controlled. Likewise if you think “instructing” is the essence of management, investing most in your strugglers makes similarly good sense because they still have so much to learn.
But great managers do not place a premium on either control or instruction. Both have their place, particularly with novice employees, but they are not the core: they are too elementary, too static.
For great managers, the core of their role is the catalyst role: turning talent into performance. So when they spend time with an employee, they are not fixing or correcting or instructing. Instead they are racking their brains, trying to figure out better and better ways to unleash that employee’s distinct talents:
First, Break All the Rules Page 15