by Aaron Levy
If you want others to lead, you need to prioritize leading yourself, or put someone else in place to lead so you can contribute to the company in other ways. What this looks like is taking the time to have one-on-ones with your people, making sure you check in periodically, and asking your team how you can help serve them. It also means letting your team make mistakes so they can learn from them instead of having you jump in as the savior to fix their errors at the eleventh hour.
Establishing the right performance metrics
It takes time to lead. Depending on how many people you have reporting to you, managing people should take between 20% and 30% of your time. That’s at least one day a week, whether you plan it or not. If you don’t plan ahead, you’ll end up losing that time and more. If you are unable to effectively lead, your reports are left to fend for themselves, which brings about fires. You’ll have to stop what you are doing to jump in and help or fix a situation that could have likely been prevented. If you plan ahead and are strategic in your approach, you can get ahead of those major fires.
Does your organization incentivize new leaders to spend time with their direct reports? Or do leaders only get recognized (or paid) when they deliver work? It’s crucial to get your performance metrics and incentive structure aligned properly.
Even if your newly hired manager wants to lead others, if they are expected to do the same amount of work or even more while also managing a team of people, something’s going to give. Where do you think they’ll decide to prioritize their time? On what their bonus compensation is tied to? Or with their team? The answer is obvious: They’ll focus on what helps them get their full bonus, not on their team. What gets measured matters.
Tip: Including one or two measures of team performance in your leader’s individual performance metrics is a surefire way to make sure you align priorities.
A great example of this comes from Frank Riordan, the president of DMC, a rapidly growing engineering consultancy with offices all across the country. Frank has a wonderful dashboard he uses to assess each of his employee’s performance. He looks at three elements: billable hours, projects proposed, and project dollars managed. Each element is scaled as if the employee were only performing one of them, and then a composite score is created to get a weekly snapshot of performance. Frank knows each element is critical to the success of his organization; he recognizes the importance of intentionally taking time to lead and manage his team, and so he assesses his team accordingly.
Tip: Avoid putting more than eight people under one manager. I’ve found that any number larger than this is simply too many people for one manager to be able to handle well.
It’s imperative to set up success measures for your managers. The happiness and well-being of people in your company—and, ultimately, the performance of your company—are tied to the ability of your managers to connect effectively with their direct reports. When you sit down to assess your leaders at the end of the quarter or year, one element of their performance should measure how well their team is performing and how well they lead.
By including performance metrics around people management, your leaders will be able to clearly see where your priorities lie and will motivate them to spend more time focused on developing the skills it takes to be a great leader.
Do they have the skills to lead others?
This might seem to be the first question you should ask when determining whether someone is ready to lead. The order here may seem counterintuitive, but in my view, skills and tools should be the last element to review on your checklist of whether to hire or promote someone. Even if your manager is equipped with the right tools, if they don’t want to lead or don’t have the right incentive to lead, you’ve set them up to fail. Tools and skills can be provided and developed, but they’ll work only if the manager wants to grow and already has the structural support to do so.
If your managers don’t have the tools and skills for effective management, there’s a simple solution: Invest in their development. You can start small and focused. The four most important skills any leader can develop are these: to listen with intention and attention; to ask powerful questions; to be open, honest, and direct in their communication; and to hold critical conversations. Managers who practice these skills daily can motivate, evaluate, and lead their teams successfully.
To set your managers up for success, make sure they have the bandwidth to not only do the work you’re asking of them but also time to manage a team of people and work on themselves as leaders.
WHAT’S THE POINT?
Finding the right manager for your growing team is crucial to supporting the growth of your organization. To really get it right, this requires exploring the manager’s desires, taking a serious look at your incentives and performance metrics, and then assessing their leadership tools and skills.
Since you’ve made it this far and are still reading, you are likely one of those leaders who is willing to do the work it takes to build a truly great team. Congratulations! You are already in rare company; most organizations don’t take the time to be so thoughtful and deliberate about choosing and developing the right people to lead. By doing so, your company has a better chance of success and of being the type of place where people want to work.
TOP TAKEAWAYS
• Choosing the right manager can make or break the success of the team and your company, so it’s critical to get this step right.
• Avoid simply promoting a top performer into a management role. You’ll end up losing a top performer and creating a team of employees frustrated with their lack of quality leadership.
• When hiring or promoting a manager, first check: Do they want to lead? Do you have the right metrics in place? Do they have the skills to lead others?
• The desire to manage people is the single biggest factor in whether a potential hire will develop into a good leader or not.
• Include at least one team-leadership metric into your assessment of a manager’s performance to ensure they are incentivized to manage their people and not just accomplish their other work tasks.
• Invest in helping your people develop the skills to be better leaders.
ACTION ITEMS
• Use the “Three Questions for Hiring Right” checklist on page 22 to determine your next management hire or promotion.
• Complete the “Identify your individual contributors” activity from page 24.
REFLECTION
• What structures or processes do you need to change to better support your managers?
Chapter 2
WHAT MAKES A LEADER GREAT
“A leader isn’t good because they’re right; they’re good because they’re willing to learn.”
—General Stanley McChrystal, US Army four-star general
Intention: Understand the key actions that make a leader great.
If most managers suck, what can you do to make your managers not suck? What are the qualities and habits that make a manager a great leader? To explore this question, I looked back to leaders I’d worked for and admired, to famous leaders throughout history, and to lessons shared by other great leaders, including John Wooden, arguably the most successful coach in college basketball history, and Dale Carnegie, author of the best-selling How to Win Friends and Influence People. I also looked for common themes and cross-referenced these themes against the thousands of leaders I’d worked with. What I found was a clear picture, a set of four consistent traits great leaders almost always shared.
THE ACTIONS OF A LEADER
A great leader inspires their team to take action. They strategically and thoughtfully assess those people and their teams and are able to adapt to any situation. They clearly and honestly communicate with their teams and recognize that leadership is an act of service, not an excuse to be served. A great leader understands that without others to help them, they can’t get to where they want to go. These factors boil down to four traits crucial in any great manager:
• Mot
ivation
• Evaluation
• Communication
• Service
At first, these traits did not strike me as particularly magical or insightful. But I soon recognized something interesting: It isn’t just the traits that we should focus on or even the outcomes these traits help produce. No manager goes to work on a Monday and says, “I’m going to motivate today.” That wouldn’t make sense, because motivating is not an action; it’s not something you do. Rather, it’s a by-product of the actions you take and how you treat others.
I’ve also come to realize that outcomes are not very helpful for leaders wanting to learn what it takes to be a better manager of people. As human beings, we spend so much of our time, energy, and attention on outcomes. We might, for example, be focused on closing a million dollars in sales in the next month, which—don’t get me wrong—is important. But in order to close the deal, there are key actions that reliably lead to meeting the sales goal you desire; those actions, rather than the outcomes themselves, are the important part.
The same is true for leading. Instead of spending our time focused solely on the outcomes great leaders produce, we need to put more energy into the actions that drive the outcomes. If we can figure out these actions, we’ll have a better understanding of the steps needed to develop powerful leaders on our own teams.
So what actions drive leaders to be seen as master motivators, powerful evaluators, expert communicators, and servant leaders? In focusing my attention on the actions great leaders took, I noticed each action was simple but not easy to do. And the great leaders were consistent in taking these actions; they repeated them over and over again, almost as if the actions were a natural part of their daily life. They weren’t something the leaders did to produce a one-time outcome; they were habits.
THE HABITS OF A LEADER
Underneath each of the four traits of successful leaders, I identified four essential habits they practice:
• They listen with intention and attention.
• They ask powerful questions.
• They communicate openly, honestly, and directly.
• They hold critical conversations.
Listening with intention and attention
To be a master at inspiring others to take action, you must first listen. When you take the time to have a real conversation with an employee, to show an interest in their work and life, you help them feel seen and heard as a human being. In this, you gain valuable insights into their needs. It gives you the opportunity to support their growth in ways beyond simply providing a raise or job promotion. You motivate them.
Asking powerful questions
Instead of assuming they already know the only correct answer to a question, the best leaders recognize their own minds are naturally biased. To be a powerful evaluator of people, situations, and teams, a leader must be open to new ideas and curious about what they don’t know. They challenge their own assumptions by asking questions of themselves, of their people, and of the situation at hand. These powerful questions evoke clarity for the leader, create greater possibility, reveal new learning, and generate action for themselves or their team—all of which help a leader make better, more strategic business decisions.
Communicating openly, honestly, and directly
Being an expert communicator takes more than simply saying what you see. It requires the leader to create a foundation for their people, one built on psychological safety and clarity on where they’re going and how they work together to get there. Laying this foundation affords a manager the freedom to be open, honest, and direct with their people. In doing this, they create and cultivate a culture of learning—a place where, instead of worrying about company politics, the team focuses on moving toward a shared vision. This creates a natural effect in which the team and company move more efficiently and rapidly toward desired outcomes.
Holding critical conversations
Being a servant leader starts with the understanding that feedback is a gift. Until your managers truly believe this statement, serving others will be a challenge for them. They may be scared to tell their people the hard truths, afraid of how their team will react, and afraid the team member won’t recover or that they’ll present the feedback as criticism rather than an opportunity for learning and growth. I’ve chosen the word critical here for a reason: A critical conversation is both a conversation that is necessary and one that provides (constructive) feedback. How you deliver a critical conversation and the way you approach the situation can significantly affect the performance of an individual, group, or the entire company. To hold critical conversations where stakes are high and something must change requires tact and grace. By developing this habit, leaders enable their team to move quickly from a problem to productive action.
WHAT’S THE POINT?
Instead of looking at the outcomes leaders produce, we need to dig a layer deeper to look at the actions driving the outcomes. In doing this, we get a clearer picture of what it takes to be a powerful leader ourselves and the skills we need to empower in our managers.
Having said all this, know that it’s rare to find a leader who practices and follows all of these habits. In fact, Gallup’s 2017 State of the American Manager study shows that fewer than one out of every five managers exhibits the skills of great leaders.1 If these habits are what drive business success, why do only one in five leaders embody them? I would argue that it’s not due to a lack of knowledge. With thousands of leadership training programs and even more books on leadership available to us, the real gap lies in taking the knowledge and moving to action. This is where we will focus our energy for the rest of the book.
TOP TAKEAWAYS
• Great leaders are masterful motivators, powerful evaluators, and expert communicators. They understand that without others to help them, they can’t get to where they want to go.
• Instead of spending our time solely focused on the outcomes great leaders produce, we need to put more energy into the actions that drive the outcomes.
• To be a master at motivating others, you must first listen.
• To be a powerful evaluator of people, situations, and teams, a leader must be open to new ideas and curious about what they don’t know.
• Being an expert communicator requires the leader to create a foundation for their people, one built on psychological safety and clarity about where they’re going and how they work together to get there.
• Being a servant leader starts with the understanding that feedback is a gift.
ACTION ITEMS
• Look at your team of managers. How many of them have mastered all four traits of good leaders? How many of them are lacking in one or two of these traits? List what you can do to help them enhance each of the four habits.
REFLECTION
• How does identifying the four habits of a great leader affect the way you will support your team?
Chapter 3
HOW HABIT FORMATION WORKS
“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure”
—Colin Powell, retired US Army four-star general and politician
Intention: Learn what it takes to move from knowledge to action.
Moving from knowledge to action is hard. Even when there’s a desire, an identified need, and the training to change, putting this change into action on a daily basis is challenging. Most of us want to succeed, so it’s hard to try something new; we generally know that, in trying something new, we will fail or at least stumble. It’s hard to feel as though we’re not succeeding or making headway and persist anyway and try doing it over and over again.
That’s exactly why moving from knowledge to consistent action—why habit formation—is so hard. It’s not sexy, and it doesn’t happen overnight. There is no magic pill or secret trick. And while the process is simple, it’s certainly not easy. Creating and incorporating new habits into our life require us to do the work and to be both
consistent and deliberate so that we can learn and improve from each of our mistakes and successes. Somewhere along the way, the habits start to take hold. I’ll show you how.
WHY MOST TRAINING PROGRAMS FAIL TO DRIVE ACTION
In traditional company training, you have one- or two-day-long workshops in which, if you’re engaged, you’ll increase your knowledge. You’ll learn several key insights and be excited to implement the five to ten new skills into your leadership toolkit immediately. Inevitably, though, you won’t be able to put all of these new items into action. After two or three weeks, you might remember the concept but not how to implement the idea, and you’ll be lucky if you retain even two of the ten key points from the session.
According to McKinsey & Company, “adults typically retain just 10% of what they hear in classroom lectures.”1 That’s just retention— keeping the knowledge in your brain. Imagine, then, the percentage of information that typical adults actually take action on. That’s likely only a very small percentage. Cramming all the key learning into one lengthy training session makes logistical sense, but it greatly restricts learning retention, not to mention implementation.