Walt Mossberg: And are people willing to tell you that you are wrong? Steve Jobs: Uh, yeah. Walt Mossberg: I mean other than snarky journalists. I mean people that work for you? Steve Jobs: Oh Yeah! No we have wonderful arguments. Walt Mossberg: And do you win them all? Steve Jobs: Oh no. I wish I did. See you can't. If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to be run by ideas. Not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win. Otherwise good people don't stay.
Excellent performance begins with clear expectations. As you set expectations with individuals or groups, make sure you not only include what the desired results are, but also get agreement about how you will talk about issues or problems that come up. Talk about the process of accountability and about how you define management vs. micromanagement—from both sides.
As a leader, it’s important to explain to your employees what their role is. Often, you want the employees’ input or recommendation, but you will decide. They need to know that asking for their ideas doesn’t give them veto power.
It sounds as if you may be encountering some ambiguity over these decision rights, or the person might be feeling unheard. My own approach is to begin by getting as many facts on the table as possible—by exploring the benefits and the costs—and to explain how the decision rights will work. After the decision has been made, I reiterate the pluses and minuses I’ve heard from them—in part to prove I was listening. I explain the decision, and give it my support. Then I ask them to help me make the decision a success. Once the decision has been made, I want their commitment rather than more questioning.
Great bosses play chess not checkers. Think about the difference. In checkers, all the pieces are basically the same. That’s a poor model for leadership because nobody wants to feel like a faceless cog in the proverbial wheel. In chess, on the other hand, each piece has a unique role, unique abilities, and unique limitations.
So, that is what I really, really want — for work to get done in a productive manner under conditions in which employees thrive. Our friend and colleague Rich Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations, would sum this up more succinctly: "I want to create joy in the workplace." The benefit of getting clear on this is that it allows you to put into perspective all the things that don’t matter. If work is getting done productively and people are taking joy home to their families, why does it matter if someone leaves early? Why would I feel taken advantage of if someone assumes they can work from home? It only matters if I think my role as a manager is to make sure people are in their offices from 9 to 5 each day. That is not the role I choose as a manager.
When you do give a reward of some kind, make sure to link it to a specific behavior or achievement. This is different than just giving someone a perk—it is frequent, specific, and timely. It requires a manger to have a great deal of insight into what is important to an employee and how best to recognize someone. And it is not recognition for recognition’s sake. It is not saying, “Good job for showing up to work today.” Managers should link recognition to specific behaviors...
For a manager, the right answer to the question “What is the single most important thing you do at work?” is hiring.
Bad managers can be weeded out, but that often takes a performance review that includes peer reviews from other managers, as well as feedback from employees who are protected from retaliation.
Nine women can’t make a baby in one month.
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
But business these days changes too fast and has too many variables for any manager to ever have the sustained sense of security most of us yearn for. Indeed, part of being a leader today is being able to live with an uh-oh feeling in your stomach all the time.
Managers sometimes attempt to capture the benefits of teamwork by simply declaring that some set of people (often everyone who reports to the same supervisor) is now a team and that members should henceforth behave accordingly. Real teams cannot be created that way.
The exercise of authority creates anxiety, especially when one must balance between assigning a team authority for some parts of the work and withholding it for other parts. Because both managers and team members tend to be uncomfortable in such situations, they may implicitly collude to “clarify” who is really in charge of the work. Sometimes the result is the assignment of virtually all authority to the team—which can result in anarchy or in a team heading off in an inappropriate direction. Other times, managers retain all authority for themselves, dictating work procedures in detail to team members and, in the process, losing many of the advantages that can accrue from team work.
Our research suggests that team effectiveness is enhanced when managers are unapologetic and insistent about exercising their own legitimate authority about direction, the end states the team is to pursue. Authority about the means by which those ends are accomplished, however, should rest squarely with the team itself.
Having clear direction helps align team efforts with the objectives of the parent organization, provides members with a criterion to use in choosing among various means for pursuing those objectives, and fosters the motivational engagement of team members. When direction is absent or unclear, members may wallow in uncertainty about what they should be doing and may even have difficulty generating the motivation to do much of anything.
It is a near impossibility for members to learn how to interact well within a flawed or underspecified team structure.
Once a team has been formed and given its task, managers sometimes assume their work is done. A strict hands-off stance, however, can limit a team’s effectiveness when members are not already skilled and experienced in teamwork—a not uncommon state of affairs in cultures where individualism is a dominant value.
Effective coaching interventions address issues that are naturally alive for the group at the particular time when they are made. Those that ask members to consider matters that are not salient for them at the time may do little other than distract the team from getting on with its work.
As an IT Manager I think one of, if not the biggest, challenge facing employee productivity in corporate America is the almost complete lack of basic people management skills among managers, let alone Leadership Skills. More often than not, new managers are run through a 1 week class on how not to run afoul of HR and how to keep their direct-reports from tarring-and-feathering them on company time, and that's if there's any training at all.
Any competent manager should be meeting regularly with all of her direct reports, and should make sure that each employee knows clearly where they stand and how they are performing. Continuous and timely feedback is vastly superior to annual reviews. If a manager provides continuous and timely feedback, then the performance review process should be a complete waste of time. Companies should foster a culture in which the standing and progress of every employee are transparent, making performance reviews an unnecessary exercise in redundancy. Managers who have direct reports who are not totally clear about where they stand should themselves be told that they are not performing up to snuff.
The days of the 'intuitive' manager are numbered.
A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.
The better a man is, the more mistakes will he make - for the more new things he will try. I would never promote a man into a top level job who had not made mistakes, and big ones at that. Otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.
It does not follow from the separation of planning and doing in the analysis of work that the planner and the doer should be two different people. It does not follow that the industrial world should be divided into two classes of people: a few who decide what is to be done, design the job, set the pace, rhythm and motions, and order others about; and the many who do what and as they are told.
Management has authority only as long as it performs.
It has been said, and only half in jest, that a tough, professionally led union is a great force for improving management performance. It forces the manager to think about what he is doing and to be able to explain his actions and behavior.
The manager is a servant. His master is the institution he manages and his first responsibility must therefore be to it.
The worker's effectiveness is determined largely by the way he is being managed.
To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.
A superior who works on his own development sets an almost irresistible example.
I would hope that American managers - indeed, managers worldwide - continue to appreciate what I have been saying almost from day one: that management is so much more than exercising rank and privilege, that it is much more than "making deals." Management affects people and their lives.
Managing people well is hard and takes a lot of effort. Managing mediocre-performing employees is harder and more time consuming. By keeping our organization small and our teams lean, each manager has fewer people to manage and can therefore do a better job at it.
It can be hard to begin your climb up the greasy pole without making some effort: the trick is to be brimming over with clever ideas for other people to execute. But when you become a manager your problems are solved: you can simply delegate all your work to other people while you spend your days attending international conferences or “cultivating relationships with investors”.
Your ability as a manager is measured by what your employees do.
Walt Mossberg: And are people willing to tell you that you are wrong?
Steve Jobs: Uh, yeah.
Walt Mossberg: I mean other than snarky journalists. I mean people that work for you?
Steve Jobs: Oh Yeah! No we have wonderful arguments.
Walt Mossberg: And do you win them all?
Steve Jobs: Oh no. I wish I did. See you can't. If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to be run by ideas. Not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win. Otherwise good people don't stay.
Missing Reference