First, Break All the Rules

by Marcus Buckingham

  They strive to carve out a unique set of expectations that will stretch and focus each particular individual; think back to the detail and the uniqueness of Rodman’s contract, and remember that every other Bulls player will demand a similarly detailed and similarly unique set of expectations.

  They try to highlight and perfect each person’s unique style. They draw his attention to it. They help him understand why it works for him and how to perfect it. That’s what Mandy was doing with John; it’s what she has to do for all of her direct reports.

  And they plot how they, the manager, can run interference for each employee, so that each can exercise his or her talents even more freely. As Robert T., a branch manager for a large brokerage house, explains: “My brokers don’t work for me. I work for them. If I can’t think up any new ideas to help my superstars, the least I can do is grease the administrative wheels so that nothing gets in their way.”

  If this is how you see your role, if this is what you are doing when you spend time with your people — setting unique expectations, highlighting and perfecting individual styles, running interference — you cannot help but be drawn toward your most talented employees. Talent is the multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield. The time you spend with your best is, quite simply, your most productive time.

  “NO NEWS” KILLS BEHAVIOR

  Conversely, time away from your best is alarmingly destructive. Graduates from the machismo school of management, with its steely-eyed motto “No news is good news,” would be surprised by just how destructive it is.

  At its simplest, a manager’s job is to encourage people to do more of certain productive behaviors and less of other, unproductive behaviors. Machismo managers have forgotten that their reactions can significantly affect which behaviors are multiplied and which gradually die out. They have forgotten that they are on stage every day and that, whether they like it or not, they are sending signals that every employee hears.

  Great managers haven’t forgotten. They remember that they are permanently center stage. In particular they remember that the less attention they pay to the productive behaviors of their superstars, the less of those behaviors they will get. Since human beings are wired to need attention of some kind, if they are not getting attention, they will tend, either subconsciously or consciously, to alter their behavior until they do.

  Therefore, as a manager, if you pay the most attention to your strugglers and ignore your stars, you can inadvertently alter the behaviors of your stars. Guided by your apparent indifference, your stars may start to do less of what made them stars in the first place and more of other kinds of behaviors that might net them some kind of reaction from you, good or bad. When you see your stars acting up, it is a sure sign that you have been paying attention to the wrong people and the wrong behaviors.

  So try to keep this in mind: You are always on stage. Your misplaced time and attention is not a neutral act. No news is never good news. No news kills the very behaviors you want to multiply.

  In practical terms, then, great managers invest in their best because it is extremely productive to do so and actively destructive to do otherwise. However, during our interviews great managers were happy to explain the benefits in more conceptual terms. They told us that investing in their best was, first, the fairest thing to do; second, the best way to learn; and, third, the only way to stay focused on excellence.

  INVESTING IN YOUR BEST IS … THE FAIREST THING TO DO

  Although great managers are committed to the concept of “fairness,” they define it rather differently from most people. In their mind “fairness” does not mean treating everyone the same. They would say that the only way to treat someone fairly is to treat them as they deserve to be treated, bearing in mind what they have accomplished. Jimmy Johnson, the coach who led the Dallas Cowboys to two Super Bowl rings and who now manages the Miami Dolphins, captures their attitude toward “fairness.” He made this point in a speech to the Miami players immediately after taking the reins from Don Shula:

  “I am going to be very consistent with every one of you because I’ll treat every one of you differently. That’s the way it is. The harder a guy works, the better he performs, and the more he meets my guidelines, the more leeway he is going to have with me. By the same token, if a guy doesn’t work very hard or if he’s not a good player, he’s not going to be around for very long.”

  That language might seem a little blunt for the corporate environment, but the concept rings true with great managers. Quite simply, they choose to invest more time with their best because their best are more deserving of it.

  They know that human beings crave attention. Each individual might value different kinds of attention, but, to a person, we all hate to be ignored. If love is not the opposite of hate, then surely indifference is the opposite of both. If you spend the most time with your worst performers, then the message you are sending to your employees is that “the better your performance becomes, the less time and attention you will receive from me, your manager.” From any angle, this is an odd message.

  So spend the most time with your top performers. Pay attention to them. Be fair to the right people.

  One of the most powerful things you can do after reading this book is to go back and “rehire” your best people — that is, go back and tell them why they are so good. Tell them why they are one of the cornerstones of the team’s success. Choose a style that fits you, and don’t allow the conversation to slip into promises about promotion in the future — that’s a different conversation, for a different time. Simply tell them why their contribution is so valued today. Don’t assume your best know.

  INVESTING IN YOUR BEST IS … THE BEST WAY TO LEARN

  There’s a great deal you can learn from spending time with your strugglers. You can learn why certain systems are hard to operate. You can learn why initiatives are poorly designed. You can learn why clients become unhappy. And over time, you can become, as some managers are, highly articulate in describing the anatomy of failure and its various cures.

  Ironically, none of this is going to help you understand what excellence looks like. You cannot learn very much about excellence from studying failure. Of all the infinite number of ways to perform a certain task, most of them are wrong. There are only a few right ways. Unfortunately you don’t come any closer to identifying those right ways by eliminating the wrong ways. Excellence is not the opposite of failure. It is just different. It has its own configuration, which sometimes includes behaviors that look surprisingly similar to the behaviors of your strugglers.

  For example, if you spent most of your time investigating failure, you would never discover that great housekeepers lie on the guests’ bed and turn on the ceiling fan, or that great table servers offer clear opinions, or that great salespeople feel call reluctance on almost every call they make, or that great nurses form strong emotional attachments with their patients. Instead, having found some of the very same behaviors among the very worst housekeepers, the worst table servers, salespeople, and nurses, you might have actually devised regulations or policies to prevent these behaviors from happening.

  Gallup worked with one of the largest healthcare providers in Europe to help them find more nurses similar to their best. As part of our research we identified, using supervisor ratings, one hundred excellent nurses and one hundred average nurses. We then interviewed each individual, searching for those few talents that the excellent nurses shared.

  Among the many talents common to great nurses, we discovered one called “patient response.” Great nurses need to care. They cannot not care. Their filter sifts through life and automatically highlights opportunities to care. But if the caring itself is a need, the joy of caring comes when they see the patient start to respond. Each little increment of improvement is fuel for them. It is their psychological payoff. This love of seeing the patient respond is the tal
ent that prevents great nurses from feeling beaten down by the sadness and suffering inherent in their role. It is the talent that enables them to find strength and satisfaction in their work.

  When we told their managers this, they replied: “We’re not organized that way, because we don’t want our nurses getting too close to their patients.” They said that patients were moved around all of the time. That it was usual for a nurse to return after a weekend or a day off and find his patients gone, moved to a different ward, transferred to a different hospital, or simply discharged. “There’s a great deal of pressure to make beds available,” they said. “And there’s no way we can organize ourselves to keep a nurse and a patient together for very long at all. Some of our nurses got upset when they found their patients gone. Consequently we now tell our nurses to keep their distance. We don’t want them feeling any loss when the patient is moved.”

  Despite these worthy intentions, their arrangement caused suffering all around. The nurses suffered — the whole setup denied them one of their most potent sources of satisfaction. The patients suffered — many studies have shown that patients will recover faster if they are cared for by a nurse with whom they have established a relationship. And the managers suffered — they had to cope with patients feeling isolated and nurses feeling demoralized.

  How should the hospitals have been organized? This is a difficult question. There’s no getting past the fact that in order to keep healthcare costs down, every hospital feels pressure to “turn” patients quickly so that the beds can be made available. However, although Gallup couldn’t offer them a quick-fix answer to their predicament, we could highlight the best route to that answer: Sit down with your best nurses and ask them to describe how they would balance the needs of patients, nurses, and number crunchers. Whatever solution they came up with, they couldn’t do worse than the assembly-line system that demeans patients and cuts great nurses off from their oxygen supply.

  Unfortunately this organization chose to ignore the voices of their best. They could not find the reasons, or perhaps the will, to alter their flawed but superficially efficient system. They are now struggling more than ever with patient dissatisfaction, nurse morale, and rising costs.

  Fortunately many other companies have started to realize the wisdom of studying excellence to learn about excellence. Organized business tours of such “gold standard” companies as Southwest Airlines, GE, and Ritz-Carlton have year-long waiting lists, and the Walt Disney Company even packages the secrets of “the Disney Way” as a seminar series.

  Doubtless managers can learn something useful from investigating the practices of these companies, but even when focused on external best practices, they often miss the most important lesson: Go back and study your own top performers. That’s what Disney, Southwest Airlines, GE, and Ritz-Carlton did. To generate the material for their tours and seminars, they interviewed, shadowed, filmed, and highlighted their best practitioners. They studied excellence as it was happening every day within their world. They learned from their best.

  Every manager should do the same. Spend time with your best. Watch them. Learn from them. Become as articulate about describing excellence as you are about describing failure. Studying external best practices has its merits. But studying internal best practices is the regimen that makes the difference.

  How can you do it? The best way to investigate excellence is simply to spend a great deal of time with your top performers. You might start by asking them to explain their secret — although most of them are so close to their own success that it often proves difficult for them to describe exactly what they do that makes them so good.

  Instead, many of the great managers we interviewed said they spend a lot of time just observing their best. Sales managers discipline themselves to travel with one or two of their sales stars every month. School principals observe a couple of their best teachers’ classes. Customer service supervisors regularly listen in on their top customer service reps’ calls. The point of this time and attention is not to evaluate or monitor. The point is, as one sales manager put it, “to run a tape recorder in my head, so that back in my office I can replay it, dissect it, understand what happened and why it worked.” Like other great managers, you need to keep that tape recorder running.

  INVESTING IN YOUR BEST IS … THE ONLY WAY TO REACH EXCELLENCE

  The language of “average” is pervasive. Reservation centers calculate the “average” number of calls a customer service representative can handle in an hour. Restaurant chains project staffing needs by estimating how many servers are needed to staff the “average” restaurant. In sales organizations, territories are divided up based on how many prospects the “average” salesperson can handle. “Average” is everywhere.

  The best managers wouldn’t necessarily disagree with this kind of “average thinking.” They would admit that the effective management of a company requires some way of approximating what is going on every day within the company. However, they disagree vehemently when this “average thinking” bleeds into the management of people. Unfortunately it happens all the time.

  They might not be aware of it, but many managers are fixated on “average.” In their mind they have a clear idea of what they would consider to be an acceptable level of performance; what sales organizations often call a “quota.” This quota, this performance “average,” serves as the barometer against which each individual’s performance is assessed. So, for example, a manager may give her employees a rating based upon how far above or below “average” their performance lies. She may calculate her employees’ bonuses by figuring out the correct proportion of the “average” bonus each should receive. And, probably the most obvious symptom of “average thinking,” she may well spend most of her time trying to help her strugglers inch their performance up above “average,” while leaving her above average performers to their own devices.

  This kind of “average thinking” is very tempting. It seems so safe and so practical — by focusing on your strugglers you are protecting yourself, and the company, from their inevitable mistakes. Nonetheless, great managers reject it.

  Here are a couple of reasons why. First, they 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. These employees have already shown some natural ability to perform the role. These employees have talent. Counterintuitively, employees who are already performing above average have the greatest room for growth. Great managers also know that it is hard work helping a talented person hone his talents. If a manager is preoccupied by the burden of transforming strugglers into survivors by helping them squeak above “average,” he will have little time left for the truly difficult work of guiding the good toward the great.

  Jean P.’s story illustrates both the irrelevance of average and the growth potential of talent.

  For data entry roles, the national performance average is 380,000 keypunches per month, or 19,000 per day. Many companies use an average performance measure like this to determine how many data entry employees they need to hire. Upon hiring these data entry folk, a good manager should probably be able to raise his employees’ performance higher than this national average. How much higher? Using this average as your measure, what should a good manager’s goal be — 25 percent higher? 35 percent higher? 50 percent higher? Fifty percent higher would put you over 500,000 keypunches per month. In fact, the top-performing data entry employees make a mockery of the national average. They outperform it almost tenfold.

  Jean P. is one such employee. When she was first measured, she averaged 560,000 punches per month, already 50 percent above the national average. She was recognized for her performance, then she and her manager set out some individual goals that coul
d help her improve and track her performance. Three months later she hit a million keypunches. A couple of weeks after that milestone, Jean checked her total at the end of the day and saw that she had managed 112,000 keypunches in one day. She approached her manager and said, “You know what? If I average over 110,000 for the whole month, then I’ll hit the 2 million mark.” They put a plan together, and six months later she soared past 2 million.

  Jean became a model for the role. Her manager spent time watching her, asking her why she loved her work so much — “I’m real competitive; I love counting” — and why she seemed to make fewer mistakes the more keys she punched — “I have more practice.” He designed a talent profile to find more like her and a compensation plan to reward her excellence. Today Jean’s personal best is 3,526,000 keypunches in a month, and the average of all the data entry employees working around her is over a million.

  The lessons from Jean’s story are applicable to almost any role. Don’t use average to estimate the limits of excellence. You will drastically underestimate what is possible. Focus on your best performers and keep pushing them toward the right-hand edge of the bell curve. It is counterintuitive, but top performers, like Jean P., have the most potential for growth.

  BREAKING THROUGH THE CEILING

  “Average thinking” not only leads managers away from excellence and away from their top performers. There is one final, and perhaps most damaging, way in which it harms a manager’s best efforts. “Average thinking” actively limits performance. Jeff H., a sales manager for a computer software company, describes this debilitating effect:

  “I work for a company with one goal: 20 percent annual growth in revenue and profits. We have it drummed into us from day one that 20 percent growth is how we will judge our success as a company. We’ve hit it for twelve years straight, and Wall Street loves us. I can see why the company needs to shoot for that number every year. I can see why Wall Street likes that predictability. But as an individual manager of people, it’s hard.