First, Break All the Rules

by Marcus Buckingham

  Conventional wisdom has led us all astray. Yes, today’s business pressures are more intense, the changes neck-snappingly fast. Yes, companies need self-reliant employees and aggressive leaders. But all this does not diminish the importance of managers. On the contrary, in turbulent times the manager is more important than ever.

  Why? Because managers play a vital and distinct role, a role that charismatic leaders and self-directed teams are incapable of playing. The manager role is to reach inside each employee and release his unique talents into performance. This role is best played one employee at a time: one manager asking questions of, listening to, and working with one employee. Multiplied a thousandfold, this one-by-one-by-one role is the company’s power supply. In times of great change it is this role that makes the company robust — robust enough to stay focused when needed, yet robust enough to flex without breaking.

  In this sense, the manager role is the “catalyst” role. As with all catalysts, the manager’s function is to speed up the reaction between two substances, thus creating the desired end product. Specifically the manager creates performance in each employee by speeding up the reaction between the employee’s talents and the company’s goals, and between the employee’s talents and the customers’ needs. When hundreds of managers play this role well, the company becomes strong, one employee at a time.

  No doubt, in today’s slimmed-down business world, most of these managers also shoulder other responsibilities: they are expected to be subject matter experts, individual superstars, and sometimes leaders in their own right. These are important roles, which great managers execute with varying styles and degrees of success. But when it comes to the manager aspect of their responsibilities, great managers all excel at this “catalyst” role.

  Think back to the six questions measuring Base Camp and Camp 1.

  Do I know what is expected of me at work?

  Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?

  At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?

  In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?

  Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?

  Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

  These questions provide the detail for the catalyst role. To warrant positive answers to these questions from his employees, a manager must be able to do four activities extremely well: select a person, set expectations, motivate the person, develop the person. These four activities are the manager’s most important responsibilities. You might have all the vision, charisma, and intelligence in the world, but if you cannot perform these four activities well, you will never excel as a manager.

  I. To secure “Strongly Agree” responses to the question “At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?” you must know how to select a person. This sounds straightforward, but to do it well demands clearheadedness. Most important, you must know how much of a person you can change. You must know the difference between talent, skills, and knowledge. You must know which of these can be taught and which can only be hired in. You must know how to ask the kinds of questions that can cut through a candidate’s desire to impress and so reveal his true talents. If you don’t know how to do these things, you will always struggle as a manager. Cursed with poorly cast employees, all your efforts to motivate and develop will be diminished.

  II. If you want “Strongly Agree” responses to the questions “Do I know what is expected of me at work?” and “Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?” you must be able to set accurate performance expectations. This activity encompasses more than simple goal setting. You must be able to keep the person focused on performance today, no matter how tempting it is to stare at the changes massing over the horizon. You must know on which parts of a job you will enforce conformity and on which parts you will encourage your employee to exercise her own style. You must be able to balance today’s need for standardization and efficiency with a similarly pressing need for flair and originality. If you don’t know how to set these kinds of performance expectations, you will always be off balance, lurching haphazardly between enforcing too many rules and enduring too much chaos.

  III. “Strongly Agree” responses to the questions “In the last seven days, have I received recognition and praise for good work?” and “Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me?” are driven by your ability to motivate each employee. As a manager, you have only one thing to invest: your time. Whom you spend it with, and how you spend it with him, determines your success as a manager. So should you spend more time with your best people or your strugglers? Should you help a person fix his weaknesses, or should you focus on his strengths? Can you ever give someone too much praise? If so, when? If not, why not? You must be able to answer these questions if you are to excel at helping each employee excel.

  IV. “Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me?” is also driven by your ability to develop the employee, as is the question “Is there someone at work who encourages my development?” When an employee comes up to you and asks the inevitable “Where do I go from here? Can you help me grow?” you need to know what to say. Should you help each person get promoted? If you tell her to attend some training classes and pay her dues, is that the right thing to say? Perhaps you feel as though you are too close to your people. Can you ever get too close to them? What happens if you have to terminate someone you have come to care about? What do you owe your people, anyway? Your answers to all of these questions will guide you as you try to set up each person for success, both in the current role and beyond.

  Select a person, set expectations, motivate the person, and develop the person: these are the four core activities of the “catalyst” role. If a company’s managers are unable to play this role well, then no matter how sophisticated its systems or how inspirational its leaders, the company will slowly start to disintegrate.

  In the early nineties one of the leading hospitality companies began experimenting with self-managed work teams as a replacement for the traditional manager role. It was the brainchild of a top industry executive whose flood of new ideas was matched only by his passion in presenting them. He envisioned a hotel of teams. Each team would comprise a balanced roster of housekeepers, front-desk clerks, bellhops, maintenance staff, and table servers. The employees on each team would manage themselves, setting schedules, assigning duties, and disciplining colleagues. To encourage mutual support, all praise and recognition would be meted out at the team level. To encourage individual growth, each employee would be able to increase his pay only by learning how to play each of the other roles on the team — the more roles he learned, the more he would earn. All of this would be monitored by a couple of managers whose chief responsibility was not to manage the people, but to ensure the smooth running of the new team structure. It was an inspired plan, with only one flaw:

  It didn’t work.

  The employees liked the idea of supporting one another, as all great hotel employees do, but the team structure threw them into confusion. The best housekeepers didn’t want to become front-desk clerks. They liked housekeeping. Front-desk clerks didn’t like table serving, and the table servers, looking up from their own troubles behind the reception desk, didn’t appreciate the mess the front-desk clerks were making of their precious restaurant. Each employee came to feel as though he were in the wrong role. He no longer knew clearly what was expected of him. He no longer felt competent, and with the focus on team rather than individual excellence, he no longer felt important. Arguments broke out, guests complained, and the few remaining managers, forced to support novices in every role, dashed around and about, fighting fires, spinning plates.

  It was a mess. The chief designer kept trying to rally the troops, but the slide continued. In the end the hotel was forced to r
evert back to the traditional system, and its parent company was sold to an even larger hotel conglomerate.

  This company paid a hefty price for substituting an elaborate team structure for the elegant power of great managers.

  Unfortunately, many other companies seem to be heading for a similar fate, albeit down a slightly different path. These companies have decided to hand off the “catalyst” role to other departments, like human resources or training. These departments then devise sophisticated selection systems or skills development classes and leave the manager to concentrate on “getting the job done.” The thinking seems to be that managers have enough to do without having to worry about things like selecting the right people or developing them.

  This thinking is laced with good intentions; but, in fact, taking these activities away from managers actually starts to bleed the life out of the company. Healthy companies need strong bonds to develop between each manager and each employee. If the manager has not had a say in selecting his people and if he is not invested in their current success and future growth, then those bonds wither.

  This doesn’t mean that human resources or training departments should not give managers access to tools, systems, and classes. They should. But the chief focus should be on educating managers on how to use these tools, not on substituting the tools, or the department, for the manager. The core of the manager role consists of those four activities: selecting a person, setting expectations, motivating him, and developing him. You cannot centralize activities that can be done well only one to one, individual manager to individual employee.

  MANAGERS ARE NOT JUST LEADERS-IN-WAITING

  “Managers do things right. Leaders do the right things.” Conventional wisdom is proud of maxims like this. As we mentioned earlier, it uses them to encourage managers to label themselves “leaders.” It casts the manager as the dependable plodder, while the leader is the sophisticated executive, scanning the horizon, strategizing. Since most people would rather be a sophisticated executive than a dependable plodder, this advice seems positive and developmental. It isn’t: it demeans the manager role but doesn’t succeed in doing much else. The difference between a manager and a leader is much more profound than most people think. The company that overlooks this difference will suffer for it.

  The most important difference between a great manager and a great leader is one of focus. Great managers look inward. They look inside the company, into each individual, into the differences in style, goals, needs, and motivation of each person. These differences are small, subtle, but great managers need to pay attention to them. These subtle differences guide them toward the right way to release each person’s unique talents into performance.

  Great leaders, by contrast, look outward. They look out at the competition, out at the future, out at alternative routes forward. They focus on broad patterns, finding connections, cracks, and then press home their advantage where the resistance is weakest. They must be visionaries, strategic thinkers, activators. When played well, this is, without doubt, a critical role. But it doesn’t have much to do with the challenge of turning one individual’s talents into performance.

  Great managers are not miniexecutives 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. It is entirely possible for a person to be a brilliant manager and a terrible leader. But it is just as possible for a person to excel as a leader and fail as a manager. And, of course, a few exceptionally talented individuals excel at both.

  If companies confuse the two roles by expecting every manager to be a leader, or if they define “leader” as simply a more advanced form of “manager,” then the all-important “catalyst” role will soon be undervalued, poorly understood, and poorly played. Gradually the company will fall apart.

  KEEP IT SIMPLE

  Mike K., a senior trader for a large merchant bank, was stunned. The thirty traders under him were having their best year ever. The atmosphere on the desks was positive and supportive. His boss had given him a very generous bonus. Yet he had just been told by Human Resources that he was the worst manager in the firm. They had come right out and said it, just like that. “You’re the worst manager in the firm.”

  “What on earth gave you that idea?” Mike had shot back.

  “This 360-degree survey,” they had replied. “Your direct reports rated you on these twenty-five different competencies, and although you scored very well on some of them, by our calculations your overall average was the lowest in the firm. Over the next few months you need to work on all of these low areas because this time next year we’re going to send this survey out again.” It wasn’t a threat — not quite — but Mike knew he was going to be in for a long year.

  Mike is the unfortunate victim of good intentions. Some companies, not wanting to fall into the trap of overlooking the importance of the manager, have rushed to the other extreme. They have tried to define the manager role in so much detail that they have ended up overburdening the poor manager with a frighteningly long list of “behavioral competencies.” Here, for example, is a sampling of manager competencies used by a number of Fortune 50 companies:

  Manage change

  Self-knowledge

  Establish plans

  Compelling vision

  Inspiration

  Strategic agility

  Troop rallying

  Risk taking

  Take charge

  Business practices and controls

  Results orientation

  Manages diversity

  Broad perspective

  Calm under fire

  Interpersonally sensitive

  Managers like Mike are rated on these competencies by their supervisor, direct reports, and sometimes their peers. Areas where they are doing well are given a cursory once-over. Areas where they score poorly are labeled “areas of opportunity” and become the focus for next year’s “individual development plan.”

  You can just imagine how all this is received by managers on the front line: “How can I have a ‘compelling vision’ yet also maintain a ‘broad perspective’!? How can I ‘take charge’ and be ‘interpersonally sensitive’ at the same time!?” These are bizarre, backbreaking contortions. Creating supermanager may seem like a good idea at the time, but as with Dr. Frankenstein’s plan, the results always end up looking faintly ridiculous and a little scary.

  In the end, however well-intentioned, this kind of overdefinition is unnecessary. A company should not force every manager to manage his people in exactly the same way. Each manager will, and should, employ his own style. What a company can, and should, do is keep every manager focused on the four core activities of the catalyst role: select a person, set expectations, motivate the person, and develop the person. No matter how many different styles are used, when managers play this role well, the foundations are laid. As far as is humanly possible, every single employee’s talent is being released into performance. The company becomes strong.

  The Four Keys

  “How do great managers play these roles?”

  The catalyst role describes what great managers do. It tells us nothing about how they do it.

  So how do they do it? How do great managers release the potential energy of their people? How do they select a person, set expectations, and then motivate and develop each and every one of their employees?

  There is a scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where a frustrated Indiana Jones is trying to discover where to start digging for the Ark of the Covenant. His adversaries, the Nazis, have already begun their excavations, and he is desperate to beat them to the prize. The location of the Ark is inscribed on an archaic ornamental headpiece, and a gnarled Egyptian fakir is turning it over in his hands, translating the Sanskrit symbols, slowly, exactly. Suddenly Indy stops his pacing.
Hearing the translation, he realizes that the Nazis have misunderstood the ancient text. Their calculations are flawed. Their measuring stick is too short. He turns to his partner and grins. “They’re digging in the wrong place.”

  When it comes to a manager’s four core activities, conventional wisdom is “digging in the wrong place.” Its advice is close, very close. But when you look through the eyes of great managers you realize that each element ever so slightly, but so significantly, misses the mark. Conventional wisdom encourages you to

  select a person … based on his experience, intelligence, and determination.

  set expectations … by defining the right steps.

  motivate the person … by helping him identify and overcome his weaknesses.

  develop the person … by helping him learn and get promoted.

  On the surface there seems to be nothing wrong with this advice. In fact, many managers and many companies follow it devoutly. But all of it misses. You cannot build a great team simply by selecting people based on their experience, intelligence, and determination. Defining the right steps and fixing people’s weaknesses are not the most effective ways to generate sustained performance. And preparing someone for the next rung on the ladder completely misses the essence of “development.”

  Remember the revolutionary insight common to great managers:

  People don’t change that much.

  Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out.

  Try to draw out what was left in.

  That is hard enough.

  If you apply their insight to the core activities of the catalyst role, this is what you see: