Management Notes

J.C. Staehle did an analysis of workers in America and found that the number one cause of dissatisfaction among employees was their superiors ''failure to give them credit."

If better is possible, then good is not enough.

"Techniques don't produce quality products or pick up the garbage on time; people do, people who care, people who are treated as creatively contributing adults."

John Craig remarked, "No matter how much work you can do, no matter how engaging your personality may be, you will not advance far in business if you cannot work through others."

J. Paul Getty asserted, "It doesn't make much difference how much other knowledge or experience an executive possesses; if he is unable to achieve results through people, he is worthless as an executive."

Even people with knowledge, skill, and desire need to know what's expected of them, and the best way to inform them is to show them.

Many people are willing to give others responsibility. They gladly delegate tasks to them. But empowering others is more than sharing your workload. Its sharing you power and ability to get things done.

Peter Drucker said, "No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective." People become strong and effective only when they are given the opportunity to make decisions, initiate action, solve problems, and meet challenges.

A good rule of thumb is that if someone else can do a job 80 percent as well as you do, delegate it.

There is a particularly tantalizing aspect to the building industry's strategy for getting
things right in complex situations: it's that it gives people power. In response to risk,
most authorities tend to centralize power and decision making. That's usually what
checklists are about - dictating instructions to the workers below to ensure they do
things the way we want.

In the face of an extraordinarily complex problem, power needed to be pushed out of the
center as far as possible.

The real lesson is that under conditions of true complexity - where the knowledge
required exceeds that of any individual and unpredictably reigns - efforts to dictate every
step from the center will fail.

No, the more familiar and widely dangerous issue is a kind of silent disengagement,
the consequence of specialized technicians sticking narrowly to their domains. "That's
not my problem" is possibly the worst thing people can think, whether they are starting at
an operating table, taxiing an airplane full of passengers down a runway, or building a
thousand-foot-tall skyscraper.

But the evidence suggests we need them to see their job not just as performing their
isolated set of tasks well but also as helping the group get the best possible returns.

We teach our players, in response to any situation they face, to press pause and ask: What does this situation require of me?

These are the command-and-control leaders who try to micromanage everything. They
are heavy-handed and harsh in the way they deal with players. Often, they create a
culture of fear. As a result, they disconnect, discourage, and demotivate players.

When a leader exerts too little energy, too little gravitational pull, the players spin off in
all kinds of directions. These are the laissez-faire leaders. They don't demand enough.
Their standards are not clear, and they don't hold their players accountable. They are
lenient and soft. They want to be buddies or friends with players. They allow an
undisciplined culture.

When things aren't going right, the most important thing you can do is slow down, go
deep, and figure out why.

If we could execute with a monumental effort just to reach an immediate goal that
everyone could see, we could then continue to the next visually attainable goal and then the next.

Create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible.

Human behavior follows the Law of Least Effort. We will naturally gravitate toward the
option that requires the least amount of work.

Reduce the friction associated with good behaviors. When friction is low, habits are
easy.

Increase the friction associated with bad behaviors. When friction is high, habits are
difficult.

Prime your environment to make future actions easier.

Evidence of the Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is rewarded is repeated. What
is punished is avoided.

The first three laws of behavior change - make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it
easy - increase the odds that a behavior will be performed this time. The fourth law of
behavior change - make it satisfying - increases the odds that a behavior will be
repeated next time. It completes the habit loop.

If you're going to rely on punishment to change behavior, then the strength of the
punishment must match the relative strength of the behavior it is trying to correct.

Behavior only shifts if the punishment is painful enough and reliably enforced.

The work that hurts you less than it hurts others is the work you were made to do.

The core idea of the Goldilocks Rule remains: working on challenges of just
manageable difficulty - something on the perimeter of your ability - seems crucial for
maintaining motivation.​

Every manager lives with the fantasy that their team can read their mind. But in reality,
you have to make your expectations clear.

A daily, thirty-minute meeting is where a collection of individuals becomes a team.

Communicating consistent standards, with lots of repetition, was important; a good
manager makes sure everyone knows what they have to do, then makes sure they've
done it - that's the black-and-white part of being a leader. But a huge part of leadership
is taking the time to tell your team why they're doing what they're doing, and I used premeal
to get into that why.

Ultimately, this is one of a manager's biggest responsibilities: to make sure people who
are trying and working hard have what they need to succeed.

He discovered that when he gave the teams responsibility, they became more
responsible; elevated by his trust in them, they stepped up into that role.

These weren't line items lost on a manager's to-do list, crowded with a thousand other
things, but minor, inexpensive fixes implemented by a young person paying close
attention.

Refusing to delegate because it might take too long to train someone will only get in the
way of your own growth.

Often, the perfect moment to give someone more responsibility is before they're ready.

Once they'd turned over some of these responsibilities, they'd have more time to make
their own contributions.

Managing staff boils down to two things: how you praise people, and how you criticize
them

Do less, and do it well.

When you lose the viewpoint of the people you're responsible for managing, you also
tend to lose your empathy for them.

Discussion and input are wonderful, but somebody needs to be on site to make
decisions. If there's nobody to make the call, problems pile up: forward progress stalls
completely, or random people step into the breach, take responsibility for a decision,
and then face resentment from their peers.​

Moreover, I recognized that managers who do not understand people's different thinking
styles cannot understand how the people working for them will handle different
situations, which is like a foreman not understanding how his equipment will behave.​

So I began making "Baseball Cards" for employees that listed their "stats." The idea was
that they could be passed around and referred to when assigning responsibilities. Just
as you wouldn't have a great fielder with a .160 batting average bat third, you wouldn't
assign a big-picture person a task that requires attention to details.

To me, the greatest success you can have as the person in charge is to orchestrate
others to do things well without you.

Tolerating a problem has the same consequences as failing to identify it.

You need to develop a fierce intolerance of badness of any kind, regardless of its
severity.

Strategic thinking requires both diagnosis and design. A good diagnosis typically takes
between fifteen minutes and an hour, depending on how well it's done and how complex
the issue is.

You can only truly solve your problems by removing their root causes, and to do that,
you must distinguish the symptoms from the disease.

Think of your plan as being like a movie script in that you visualize who will do what
through time.

The real-world issues of costs, time, and personnel will undoubtedly surface as you do
this, and that will lead you to further refine your design until all the gears in the machine
are meshing smoothly.

Identifying and not tolerating problems requires you to be perceptive and good at
synthesis and maintaining high standards.

Diagnosis requires you to be logical, able to see multiple possibilities, and willing to
have hard conversations with others.

Designing requires visualization and practicality.

The person in charge is the shaper-conductor who doesn't "do" (doesn't play an
instrument, though he or she knows a lot about instruments) as much as visualize the
outcome and sees to it that each member of the orchestra helps achieve it.

Your ability to get what you want when working with others who want the same things is
much greater than your ability to get these things by yourself

A manager's ability to recognize when outcomes are inconsistent with goals and then
modify designs and assemble people to rectify them makes all the difference in the
world. The more often and more effectively a manager does this, the steeper the upward
trajectory.