Winning Well

A Manager's Guide to Getting Results---Without Losing Your Soul

Karin Hurt, David Dye

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780814437261
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

To succeed in today’s hypercompetitive economy, managers must master creating a productive work environment for employees while still making numbers.

Tense, overextended workplaces force managers to choose between results and relationships. Executives set aggressive goals, so managers drive their teams to deliver, resulting in burnout. Or, employees seek connection and support, so managers focus on relationships and fail to make the numbers. However, managers need to achieve both.

In Winning Well, managers will learn how to:

• Stamp out the corrosive win-at-all-costs mentality
• Focus on the game, not just the score
• Reinforce behaviors that produce results
• Sustain energy and momentum
• Be the leader people want to work for

To prevent burnout and disengagement, while still achieving the necessary success for the company, managers must learn how to get their employees productive while creating an environment that makes them want to produce even more.

Winning Well offers a quick, practical action plan for making the workplace productive, rewarding, and even fun.

SECTION 1

The World of Winning Well

Welcome to a new way to manage: the world of Winning Well. Throughout this book we give you the tools to thrive, achieve lasting business results, and enjoy your work. In this section we introduce the very real challenges that confront every manager, explain what exactly we mean by Winning Well, and give you the fundamental principles you can use to succeed in every management scenario you encounter. You’ll also meet three types of managers who either aren’t winning or are winning poorly and losing their soul in the process. Finally, we’ll share how to manage effectively in the age of constant data. These tools are your foundation to win well and get results without losing your soul.

CHAPTER 1

Winning Well

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“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.”

–HELEN KELLER

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Too often, managers try to win at all costs, when they should be focused on Winning Well. The hypercompetitive postrecession global economy puts frontline and middle-level managers in a difficult position—expected to win, to “move the needle,” to get the highest ratings, rankings, and results. Many managers become hell-bent on winning no matter what it takes, and they treat people like objects—in short, they lose their soul.

This exacts a high price from managers as they work longer hours to try to keep up. Those unwilling to make this trade-off either leave for a less-competitive environment or try to stave off the performance demands by “being nice” to their team. After years of trying to win while sandwiched between the employees who do the heavy lifting and leaders above them piling on more, they give up and try to get along. Inevitably, after prolonged stress and declining performance, they surrender to apathy, disengage, or get fired.

Don’t think this is happening where you work? Research says otherwise. According to Gallup, nearly two-thirds of American workers and managers are disengaged.¹ We don’t believe that’s a coincidence. No one wins in environments like that.

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“You can’t be in last place!” Joe shouted, and immediately winced as he saw Ann’s exhausted eyes begin to tear up.

Later in his office, Joe admitted: “She didn’t deserve that. She’s a newly promoted center director working long hours in a fast rampup. The problem is, we’re out of time. The business plan called for this center to be profitable in six months, and it’s been over a year, and we’re not even close. My VP keeps calling for updates every few hours, and that just wastes everyone’s time.”

Joe squeezed his temples. “My people need me to coach and support them, but if we don’t improve in the next 90 days, none of us will be here next year. Maybe I need to go.”

Joe leads a 600-person call center. The company stack ranks employees, meaning that every representative is assessed on a balanced scorecard of quality, productivity, and financials and ranked in order from highest to lowest. The managers and centers are ranked in the same way, and Joe’s center is dead last. The vice president of operations keeps a close eye on those numbers and constantly calls Joe to ask what he’s doing about the ranking. Joe spends most of his time putting out fires, answering customer complaints, and crunching numbers in a desperate attempt to move his team up the stack rank.

Whether your organization stack ranks or not, can you identify with Joe’s frustration? He’s been asked to win a game that feels rigged. He can’t possibly do everything he needs to. The company keeps score, and Joe is losing. Every time he tries to win, he ends up hurting people—people he knows are trying as hard as he is.

At this point, he’s not sure he can win, but if he can, it seems that victory will cost him dearly. He can feel his soul slipping away every time he loses his temper. It gets results—but at what cost?

WINNING

Winning doesn’t mean you reach some imaginary state of perfection. Winning means that you and your people succeed at doing what you’re there to do. The real competition isn’t the department across the building or the organization across town. Your competition is mediocrity.

Whether you manage a group of engineers with a government contract to build the next interplanetary satellite, or you supervise a nonprofit team working to save an endangered shrew, or you manage a team of property tax assessors in a large city, or you’re a surgeon working with an anesthesiologist and operating room nurses you’ve never met before to save a patient’s life, or you manage a 24-hour convenience store, winning means you achieve excellence. When you win, we have better customer service, better products, better care, better experiences, and a better world. When you win, life is better for everyone.

WINNING WELL

Winning Well means that you sustain excellent performance over time, because you refuse to succumb to harsh, stress-inducing shortcuts that temporarily scare people into “performing.” You need energized, motivated people all working together. Your strategy is only as strong as the ability of your people to execute at the front line, and if they’re too scared or tired to think, they won’t. You can have all the great plans, six sigma quality programs, and brilliant competitive positioning in the universe, but if the human beings doing the real work lack the competence, confidence, and creativity to pull it off, you’re finished.

In fact, in today’s connected world, people increasingly expect a positive work environment. When you don’t provide it, they can easily go across the street to your competitor or go into business for themselves as freelancers or independent contractors. Now everyone else but you benefits from the time and training you invested.

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Winning Well means that you sustain excellent performance over time.

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The stories and best practices in this book come from our experience working with thousands of managers across private, public, and nonprofit industries who have something in common: They must motivate their people to achieve results that often feel impossible. Winning Well doesn’t mean you’ll be a pushover. It means you’ll be a manager known for getting results, whom people respect, and whom people want to work with. You can win—and you can win without losing your soul.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

In Winning Well, we share proven, practical tools you can use to inspire your people and achieve excellent results over time. These are the same tools we used in our own careers and we share with all the managers we train and coach. This isn’t a book about management theory; we give you enough context so you can understand why something works and how to adapt it for your needs, but our goal is to give you resources you can use right away not just to win—but to win well.

Winning Well is written so you can quickly find the answers you need. We recommend that you read it through and answer the action plan questions at the end of each chapter. You can also use the book as a real-world reference guide for challenges you face. Have a team member who feels left out or needs more challenge? Turn to Chapter 17 or Chapter 19 and solve your problem. Do delegated tasks slip through your fingers? Check out Chapter 9. If you’re looking for a quick activity to energize your team or build better relationships, flip through Section 3 and you’ll find several that meet your needs.

Every chapter includes real-life examples taken from our experiences or those of the many managers we’ve worked with. At the conclusion of every chapter is Your Winning Well Action Plan. The questions and activities in these sections are designed to help you apply what you’ve learned and see changes as soon as possible. Each section ends with a summary of the Winning Well practices essential to your success.

In the next chapter, we’ll share the management mindset that is the core of Winning Well. You can take this model with you into any scenario you’ll ever encounter and win well. Section 1 concludes with recommendations on how to use data without letting it distract you from what’s ultimately important.

In Section 2, Chapters 4 to 11, we give you tools that allow you to win—to achieve meaningful results. These are practical tips, techniques, and tactics you can apply immediately to address performance-related issues, including how to get your people focused on results, how to make business decisions everyone gets behind, and how to quickly hold your people accountable for commitments and results.

In the third section of the book, Chapters 12 to 21 provide you the keys to win well—to motivate, inspire, and energize your team. You will dive into the fundamental needs all employee have and explore practical methods for supporting them in ways that sustain and improve results.

In the final section, Chapters 22 to 25 address challenges you’ll encounter on your Winning Well journey. Section 4 gives you specific ways to overcome bosses who don’t care if you win well, employees who don’t care if they win at all, and perhaps the most difficult challenge—you.

YOUR WINNING WELL ACTION PLAN

In addition to the tools in the book, we’ve included a wealth of additional resources, appendixes, activities, and handouts in the Winning Well Tool Kit available online at www.WinningWellBook.com. We recommend you download the tool kit and keep it nearby as you read.

NOTES

1. Nikki Blacksmith and Jim Harter, “Majority of American Workers Not Engaged in Their Jobs,” Gallup Poll, October 28, 2011, accessed October 15, 2014, http://www.gallup.com/poll/150383/Majority-American-Workers-Not-Engaged-Jobs.aspx; “State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders,” Gallup report, October 28, 2011, accessed January 11, 2015, http://www.gallup.com/services/182138/state-american-manager.aspx.

2. Intuit’s research predicts that by 2020, 40 percent of the American workforce will be freelancers. Intuit, “Intuit 2020 Report,” October 2010, accessed April 3, 2015, http://http-download.intuit.com/http.intuit/CMO/intuit/futureofsmallbusiness/intuit_2020_report.pdf.

CHAPTER 2

How to Win Well in Every Situation

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“‘Think simple’ as my old master used to say—
meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the
simplest terms, getting back to first principles.”

–FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

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In this chapter we share four foundational Winning Well principles: confidence, humility, results, and relationships. In the Action Plan at the end of this chapter you can complete a Winning Well assessment to id...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword
• Section 1 The World of Winning Well
• Section 2 Winning—Achieve Results, Get Things Done, and Move to the Top
• Section 3 Winning Well—Motivate, Inspire, and Energize Your Team
• Section 4 It’s Time to Win Well
• Index
• About the Authors
• Free Sample Chapter from the Optimistic Workplace
• Copyright