Everyone Deserves a Great Manager

The 6 Critical Practices for Leading a Team

Scott Jeffrey Miller, Todd Davis, Victoria Roos Olsson

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781982112097
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Verwaltung

Learn how to become a great manager in this Wall Street Journal bestseller from the leadership experts at FranklinCovey. The essential guide when you make the challenging yet rewarding leap to manager. Based on nearly a decade of research on what makes managers successful, Everyone Deserves a Great Manager includes field-tested tips, techniques, and the top advice from hundreds of thousands of managers all over the world.Organized by the four main roles every manager fills, this must-read guide focuses on how to lead yourself, people, teams, and change to success. No matter what your current problem or time constraint, pick up a helpful tip in ten minutes or glean an entire skillset by developing people skills and clarity through straightforward advice.Dive into common managerial tasks like one-on-ones, giving feedback, delegating, hiring, building team culture, and leading remote teams, with useful worksheets and a list of questions for your next interview. An approachable, engaging style using real-world stories, Everyone Deserves a Great Manager provides the blueprint for becoming the great manager every team deserves.

PRACTICE 1

DEVELOP A LEADER’S MINDSET

I was raised in a stable middle-class family in central Florida. My brother and I rode our bikes to school, went to church on Sundays, and were tucked in bed by 7:30 p.m. sharp. We led a routine, predictable life, and I grew up thinking everyone lived this way. I was also taught to believe some specific things about life, most memorably that certain people always tell the truth and are always right: parents, police, and priests.

Uh-oh.

Do parents always tell the truth? Nope. Do police officers? Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. Are all priests trustworthy? Horrifyingly not.

This was a limited paradigm, or mindset. Paradigms are the lenses through which we view the world, based on how we were raised, indoctrinated, and trained to see everything in front of us. We all wear these metaphorical pairs of glasses, and they vary in accuracy. They might be the right prescription or slightly off. In some cases, you might have a metaphorical cataract.

Mostly our mindsets are unconscious or subconscious. None of us (hopefully) set out in the morning to have biases or prejudices, but every one of us has them deeply ingrained in us from our experiences while we were raised. We often aren’t even aware of them or their ongoing impact—negative and positive.

With the “parents, police, and priests” paradigm, I fortunately didn’t have to put it to the test. I was generally surrounded by good examples of all three, but if I hadn’t been so lucky, this paradigm could have caused serious damage. As it was, I didn’t realize that parents were actually real people with flaws and weaknesses until my mid-twenties.

And it wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I understood that leaders are people too—that they don’t make all the right decisions or have all the right answers.

Your job as a leader is to continually assess your paradigms for accuracy and ensure they reflect reality. So ask yourself what you believe about leadership, your team, and yourself. Maybe you believe that the colleagues who think like you are “high potentials” and those who challenge you aren’t. Perhaps you believe you’re not really leadership material and someday everyone will find out.

TRY IT OUT

Assess Your Paradigms

List the members of your team. Write down your beliefs about each of them. Step back and ask, “What has happened that’s made me think she’s always late, he’s sloppy, he’s a know-it-all, or she’s a genius?”

Are you giving them a fair shake? How much of your own fear, insecurity, jealousies, last interaction, or series of very valid encounters makes your assessment of them true or incomplete?

Now do the same for your paradigms about yourself. Do you have any strongly held beliefs that, if challenged or corrected, could increase your potential? Ask yourself, “Is this belief true? If not, how can I change it?”

Name:___________________________ Beliefs:___________________________

Name:___________________________ Beliefs:___________________________

Name:___________________________ Beliefs:___________________________

—TODD

THE SEE-DO-GET CYCLE

I once went skiing with a good friend at Snowbird, a popular resort in Utah. Although she’d never skied down anything steeper than a bunny slope, I somehow convinced her that she could handle the Black Diamond run. “Come on, come on, come on!” I urged her. “No problem. Black Diamond! Woo-hoo!” And after luring her to the top, I gave her an encouraging shove.

She was taken down on a stretcher.

Horrified, I recently realized that I do this in my leadership role too. (And don’t worry, my friend wasn’t seriously injured and bounced back, no worse for the wear, although she’s never skied again, at least with me.) While many leaders lack confidence in their people and tamp them down, I’m the opposite: I believe anyone can do anything if I just provide enough encouragement. I paint the vision and create excitement—whatever it takes to inspire them to my degree of confidence in them. My intention is to help people achieve their full potential… and who cares if they agree?

This paradigm sometimes works. But sometimes I accidentally lure people into terrible Black Diamond experiences instead. “No, you actually can do this. It’s easy. It’s only a speech to two thousand people. You’ll do just fine.”

When I’m putting people into jobs, assigning them to new territories or countries, putting them on stages in front of two thousand people, and contracting high-paying consulting gigs for them, the stakes are high. At worst, this paradigm can destroy people’s confidences, reputations, and even careers, if we’re not aligned.

I often need to rethink my approach and remember something we teach at FranklinCovey: the See-Do-Get Cycle. It’s the root of real behavior change. When you challenge your mindset (tough work, by the way) you can make lasting changes to your actions and your results.

To best understand this cycle, let’s start with our desired result, the “Get” part of the cycle. We all have different outcomes we’re trying to achieve: improved health, meaningful relationships, financial stability, influence in our communities and careers—as well as short-term results we want from our day, meeting, or project.

What drives those results (Get) are our behaviors, the “Do” in this cycle. It’s how we act. If we want to complete a report by the deadline, then we have to behave in a certain way throughout the day: check with the finance department about last quarter’s profit and loss statement, resist distractions, etc. If we want to build rapport with our co-workers, we can invite them out to lunch. If we want to nail our presentation, we practice it over and over. You get the point.

Most people see that behavior and results are interconnected: what we do drives what we get. That is not an epiphany.

Here’s what I think most people don’t appreciate: the first crucial step, “See.” This means that beyond our behavior, our results are affected by our mindset.

How we see things affects our behavior, which in turn affects our results.

Paradigm. Behavior. Result.

See. Do. Get.

If you want to get short-term results, change your behavior. You’ll stop smoking—until a tense day at work. You’ll wake up at 5 a.m. through sheer willpower—once, then hit snooze the rest of the week. You’ll stop swearing—until you get cut off in traffic. Behavior changes will only net you a temporary fix.

As Dr. Stephen R. Covey taught, if you want to fundamentally change your results, if you want long-term sustainable impact, you have to challenge your mindset.

Having identified my “Black Diamond” paradigm, I wasn’t happy with it. Sometimes it works, but not often enough—and my friend hanging up her skis made me rethink it. I reevaluated my paradigm about setting people up for success (See). Instead of relying on woo-hoos and enthusiasm, I help my team members develop their skills… after giving them a chance to opt out of my grand plans (Do). As a result, I’ve learned to grow people who are actually willing and ready (Get), and fortunately decreased the number of people I push down ski slopes.

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Imagine a leader who has been assigned an important project to manage. If she closes this project success...