First, Break All the Rules

"I’m a sucker for books and I always buy management books when I get on planes. There I am at Heathrow Airport going on a business trip, and I think, ‘I’ve got to read this stuff!’ And normally I pick a book up, read the first few pages, then find I can’t face it and end up leaving it in a hotel room. But this book, I picked it up, started to read it and I thought, ‘Hallelujah! Here is a book that makes sense at last.’ And that was just so refreshing. I don’t even have a copy at the moment, because I have given about ten of them away to people saying, ‘You have just got to read this!’ The main messages of the book are: first of all, as a manager, focus on what a person is really good at. Don’t insist on stuffing into people what they haven’t got; just try and claw out the best of what’s there. And that is a very positive message. Secondly, don’t promote people to their own level of incompetence. Make them feel that they can excel as an individual contributor, that they can be doing good things without becoming a manager. Thirdly, the book is very keen on setting outcomes: tell people what to do, don’t tell them how. And the fourth point is to spend time with your best people. And those four pieces of advice are seared on my brain – I can never forget them. You should spend time encouraging your top performers. Because if someone is a star, performing at 95 per cent, if you get five per cent more from them, that’ll get you a hell of a lot more than an additional ten per cent from your 30 per cent performer. So it’s about getting the really good people to do even more. And actually that’s not what most managers do. They spend all their time trying to nurture their weakest players. I hadn’t twigged that myself, but when I read it I thought, how marvellous to spend half an hour with a person who is doing a really great job, and show them some appreciation and recognition and be curious about what they’re doing, rather than spending four hours with someone who is not doing very well. It’s based on Gallup research. They interviewed 80,000 of the best leaders. They didn’t tell leaders to nominate themselves, they told teams to nominate leaders. So this was research done the other way around, because normally you go into an organisation and say to the executive team, ‘Who are your best leaders?’ And they pick the people. And they are not the same people that everybody else would pick. This is common-sense stuff, but of course common sense isn’t very common."