First, Break all the Rules

This is the first of a series of at least three books based on research by the Gallup organization. All three books leverage the idea that people perform best if they are working from their natural strengths, and organizations perform best the more of their people are working from their natural strengths.

The second book in the series, Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton takes a deeper look at the 34 strengths Gallup identified, and provides access to an online assessment tool allowing the reader to identify their top five strengths.

The third in the series, Follow This Path by Curt Coffman and Gabriel Gonzalez Molina takes the idea of strengths, and explains how organizations can "drive growth by unleashing human potential."

This book is the first in the series. It springs from research Gallup had done on retaing excellent employees. They discovered that the most important variable in retaining excellent employees was great managers. This book takes a look at how great managers behave.

Below are a few of the passages I highlighted as I read this book.

From the Introduction:

"Before they [great managers] do anything else, they first break all the rules of conventional wisdom. They do not believe that a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They do not try to help a person overcome his weaknesses."

"What do the most talented employees need from their workplace? ...Talented employees need great managers."

"Gallup: What is your approach to firing an employee?
Great Manager: Do it fast, the faster the better."

Chapter 1: The Measuring Stick

"When the dust finally settled, we made a discovery: Measuring the strength of a workplace can be simplified to twelve questions. These twelve questions don't capture everything you may want to know about your workplace, but they do capture the most information and the most important information. They measure the core elements needed to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees.

Here they are:

  1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
  2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
  3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
  4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
  5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
  6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
  7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
  8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
  9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
  10. Do I have a best friend at work?
  11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
  12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

"If you can create the kind of environment where employees answer positively to all twelve questions, then you will have built a great place to work."

"...we now know that the [first six questions] are the most powerful questions."

"An employee may join [a company] because she is lured by their generous benefits package and their reputation for valuing employees. But it is her relationship with her immediate manager that will determine how long she stays and how productive she is while she is there."

Chapter 2: The Wisdom of Great Managers

People don't change that much.
Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out [of the person].
Try to draw out what was left in [talent].
That is hard enough.

"...a manager must be able to do four activities extremely well:

"The difference between a manager and a leader is much more profound than most people think... The most important difference between a great manager and a great leader is one of focus. Great managers look inward...Great leaders, by contrast, look outward."

"Great managers are not mini executives waiting for leadership to be thrust upon them. Great leaders are not simply managers who have developed sophistication. The core activities of a manager and a leader are simply different."

Chapter 3: The First Key: Select for Talent

"Great managers...define a talent as 'a recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior that can be productively applied."

"Every role, performed at excellence, requires talent, because every role, performed at excellence, requires certain recurring patterns of thought, feeling or behavior."

"...great managers know that excellence is impossible without talent."

"...you cannot teach talent."

"Great managers are not troubled by the fact that there is a limit to how much they can rewire someone's brain."

"First, you can help them [employees] discover their hidden talents."

"Second, a manager can teach her employees new skills and new knowledge...Skills, knowledge, and talents are distinct elements of a person's performance."

"You cannot teach talent. You can only select for talent."

"The best way to help an employee cultivate his talents is to find him a role that plays to those talents."

Chapter 4: The Second Key: Define the Right Outcomes

"So this is their dilemma: The manager must retain control and focus people on performance. But she is bound by her belief that she cannot force everyone to perform the same way.

The solution is as elegant as it is efficient: Define the right outcomes and then let each person find his own route toward those outcomes."

"A manager's basic responsibility is to turn talent into performance."

Chapter 5: The Third Key: Focus on Strengths

"One of the signs of a great manager is the ability to describe, in detail, the unique talents of each of his or her people - what drives each one, how each one thinks, how each builds relationships."

"Because if the focus of your life is to turn your nontalents...into talents, then it will be a crushingly frustrating life."

"...persistence directed primarily toward your non talents is self-destructive -- no amount of determination or good intentions will ever enable you to carve out a brand-new set of [talents].

"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."

"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 spent with them," the most time on 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?"

"Investing in your strugglers appears shrewd, yet the most effective managers do the opposite."

"First, the [great managers] don't use average performance as the barometer against which each person's performance is judged. They use excellence. From their perspective, average is irrelevant to excellence.

Second, they know that the only people who are ever going to reach excellence are those employees who are already above average... Counter intuitively, employees who are already performing above average have the greatest room for growth."

"A non talent is a mental wasteland. It is a behavior that always seems to be a struggle. It is a thrill that is never felt. It is an insight recurrently missed. In isolation, non talents are harmless.

A non talent becomes a weakness when you find yourself in a role where success depends on your excelling in an area that is a non talent"

Chapter 6: The Fourth Key: Find the Right Fit

"In most cases, no matter what it is, if you measure it and reward it, people will try to excel at it."

"...great managers made a point of giving their feedback in private, one on one."

"What level of performance is unacceptable? [Great managers] reply, Any level that hovers around average with no trend upward."

Chapter 7: Turning the Keys: A Practical Guide

"This is the cardinal sin of interviewing. Regardless of the detail the candidate eventually provided, if she needed two or three probes to describe a specific example, then the chances are that the behavior in question is not a recurring part of her life."

"Rapid learning is an important clue to a person's talent. Ask the candidate what kinds of roles she has been able to learn quickly. Ask her what activities come easily to her now."