First, Break All the Rules

by Marcus Buckingham

  During the course of the strengths interview he will tell you how often he wants to meet to discuss his progress with you (Q.5). Schedule the first performance planning meeting of the year at the interval he indicated. For the purposes of this description, we will assume he said, “Once every three months.”

  The Performance Planning Meetings

  To help him prepare, ask him to write down answers to these three questions before each meeting:

  A. What actions have you taken? These should be the details of his performance over the last three months. He should include scores, rankings, ratings, and timelines, if available.

  B. What discoveries have you made? These discoveries might be in the form of training classes he attended, or they might simply be new insights derived from an internal presentation he made, or a job-shadowing session in which he participated, or even a book that he read. Wherever they came from, encourage him to keep track of his own learning.

  C. What partnerships have you built? These partnerships are the relationships he has formed. They might be new relationships or the strengthening of existing relationships. They might be relationships with colleagues or clients, professional relationships or personal ones. It is up to him to decide. Whatever he decides, it is important that he take responsibility for building his constituency, inside and outside the company.

  At the beginning of the meeting ask him A, B, and C. Jot down his answers and keep a copy. He should keep his written copy. If he wants to share all of his written answers with you, wonderful, but don’t demand it. Either way, use his answers as a jumping-off point to discuss his performance over the last three months.

  After about ten minutes direct the conversation toward the future, drawing on the following questions:

  D. What is your main focus? What is his primary goal(s) for the next three months?

  E. What new discoveries are you planning? What specific discoveries is he hoping to make over the next three months?

  F. What new partnerships are you hoping to build? How is he planning to grow his constituency over the next three months?

  Terms such as “discovery” or “partnership” may not fit your style or your company’s culture. You will know the right words to choose. But whatever your word choices, make sure that your conversation about his next three months extends beyond simple achievement goals. Suggest that he write down his answers. You should discuss his answers, agree to them, and then keep your copy. His answers will now serve as your specific expectations of him for the next three months.

  After another three months have elapsed, ask him to write down his answers to A, B, and C, and once again, at your second performance planning meeting, ask him these three questions and use his answers to spur discussion about his performance. Then quickly move into a discussion about the future and ask him D, E, and F — once again, it will be helpful if you and he write down what he says and keep copies. As you talk through his successes, his struggles, and his goals, try to keep focusing on his strengths by setting expectations that are right for him, by helping him to perfect his style, and by discussing how you can run interference for him.

  Repeat this routine at the next three-month interval, and the next, until the year cycle is complete.

  By the end of the year you will have met at least four times. You will have reviewed his past and planned in detail his future progress. You will have learned more about his idiosyncrasies and, perhaps, have used what you learned to help him identify his true strengths and weaknesses more accurately. Perhaps he will have changed his mind about some of his opinions and some of his needs. You will have been close to him through some difficult times and through some successes. You will have disagreed on some things and agreed on much. But whatever happens, you will now be stronger partners. By meeting frequently, by listening, by paying attention, by advising, and by planning in detail, you will have developed a shared and realistic interest in his success. And, important, he will have a record of it all.

  Career Discovery Questions

  At some point during your performance planning meetings, the employee may want to talk about his career options. He may want to know where you think he should go next. A healthy career discussion rarely happens all at once. Instead it is a product of many different conversations, at many different times. However you choose to handle these conversations — and each will be unique, according to the potential and the performance of the individual employee — you need to ensure that, over time, two things happen. First, the employee needs to become increasingly clear about his skills, knowledge, and talents. Lacking this kind of clarity, he will be a poor partner as you and he together plan out his next career steps. Second, he needs to understand, in detail, what this next step would entail and why he thinks he would excel at it.

  He must come to these understandings by himself. But you can help. You can use these five career discovery questions, at different times, to prompt his thinking:

  Q.1 How would you describe success in your current role?

  Can you measure it?

  Here is what I think. (Add your own comments.)

  Q.2 What do you actually do that makes you as good as you are?

  What does this tell you about your skills, knowledge, and talents?

  Here is what I think. (Add your own comments.)

  Q.3 Which part of your current role do you enjoy the most?

  Why?

  Q.4 Which part of your current role are you struggling with?

  What does this tell you about your skills, knowledge, and talent?

  What can we do to manage around this?

  Training? Positioning? Support system? Partnering?

  Q.5 What would be the perfect role for you?

  Imagine you are in that role. It’s three p.m. on a Thursday. What are you doing?

  Why would you like it so much?

  Here is what I think. (Add your own comments.)

  These questions, scattered throughout the year, will function as cues to get the employee thinking in detail about his performance. Does he want to build his career by growing within his current role? Does he want to move into a new role? If so, what strength and satisfaction would he derive from it? These five questions won’t necessarily provide the answers. But, asked in the right way, at the right time, they will help the employee focus his thoughts, and he will come to know your thoughts. Together you will form a few firm conclusions about his present performance and his potential. Together you will now make better decisions about his future.

  Keys of Your Own

  “Can an employee turn these Keys?”

  No manager can make an employee productive. Managers are catalysts. They can speed up the reaction between the talent of the employee and the needs of the customer/company. They can help the employee find his path of least resistance toward his goals. They can help the employee plan his career. But they cannot do any of these without a major effort from the employee. In the world according to great managers, the employee is the star. The manager is the agent. And, as in the world of performing arts, the agent expects a great deal from his stars.

  This is what great managers expect of every talented employee:

  Look in the mirror any chance you get. Use any feedback tools provided by the company to increase your understanding of who you are and how others perceive you.

  Muse. Sit down for twenty or thirty minutes each month and play the last few weeks back in your mind. What did you accomplish? What did you learn? What did you hate? What did you love? What does all of this say about you and your talents?

  Discover yourself. Over time, become more detailed in your description of your skills, knowledge, and talents. Use this increasingly deep understanding to volunteer for the right roles, to be a better partner, to guide your training and development choices.

  Build your constituency. Over time, identify wh
ich kinds of relationships tend to work well for you. Seek them out.

  Keep track. Build your own record of your learnings and discoveries.

  Catch your peers doing something right. When you enter your place of work, you never leave it at zero. You either make it a little better or a little worse. Make it a little better.

  SO YOU WORK FOR A DISCIPLE OF “CONVENTIONAL WISDOM” … OR WORSE

  Great managers are still a minority. Few employees are lucky enough to work for “supersupervisor”: the perfect balancer of warmth and drive, support and authority, a manager who understands them, accepts them in all of their imperfection, and knows just how to energize them on even the most sluggish of mornings.

  Instead most employees work for a supervisory “work in progress”: a manager who genuinely wants to treat his people well, who genuinely wants them to excel, but who is still struggling to get it right. Maybe he spends too much time telling his people what to do and not enough time listening to the unique needs of each person. Maybe he wants to perfect his people by making them learn his way of doing things. Maybe he naively treats everyone the way he would like to be treated. Maybe he is well-intentioned but too busy to find the time to talk with all employees about their performance. Or maybe he is less well-intentioned. Maybe he dislikes people, distrusts them, takes credit for their successes, and blames them for his failures.

  If you work for any one of these managers, what can you do? What can you do to help him or her make the most of you? While we cannot offer you a surefire solution, we can give you a few pointers for managing your manager.

  A. If your manager is just too busy to talk with you about your performance or your goals … schedule a performance planning meeting with him. Remove the planning burden from his shoulders and tell him that you will provide the structure for the meeting in advance so that you can use your time together most efficiently. You will prepare a short review of the last three months, the actions you took, the discoveries you made, the new partnerships you built. You will then want to discuss with him the next three months — specifically, your main focus, the new discoveries you want to make, and the new relationships you want to build. All he has to do is show up to the meeting and focus on you for forty-five minutes.

  If he consistently cancels the scheduled meeting, or has nothing to say to you during the meeting, then your problem is not that he is too busy. Your problem is that he is a poor manager. Faced with this problem, you are limited in your options. If you love the job itself and feel you are doing well, you may simply have to put up with him. The alternative is to make a move, which we will discuss in item E.

  B. If your manager forces you to do things her way … she is probably focusing on process too much. Pick your moment, perhaps during your performance planning meeting, and tell her that you want to define your role more by its outcomes than by its steps. Ask her which outcomes she would use to measure your success. As you discuss this, describe for her how your style, although different from hers, will still enable you to achieve the outcomes expected of you. Your point here is not to persuade her that your style is better than hers. Your point is simply that your style is the most efficient way for you to reach the outcomes on which you and she have agreed. When viewed through this lens, her style, no matter how sensible it might seem to her, really does not apply.

  Of course, a misfocus on steps rather than outcomes may not be the problem. She may be forcing you to do things her way because she likes this feeling of power and control. If you can adapt to her style without compromising your integrity, fine; otherwise you may wish to make a move to another job.

  C. If your manager praises you inappropriately or at inappropriate times … you can suggest alternatives. This isn’t always an easy conversation. In fact, telling your manager that you much prefer to be praised in private rather than in public can sometimes feel arrogant and presumptuous. Once again, you have to pick your moment. It would probably be neither wise nor sensitive to correct him immediately after he had the whole team stand up and cheer your success — Mark D., the insurance agent from chapter 5, certainly woke his manager up by storming off the stage, but we wouldn’t recommend this approach. Instead make your comments at a time when you are discussing all aspects of your performance, perhaps during the structured, dispassionate setting of a performance planning meeting (and it would not hurt to thank him for his good intentions). This will show him that you have thought carefully about what you need from him and will give him a chance to assimilate what you told him into the way he manages you.

  If the problem is less that he gives you the wrong kind of praise, and more that he gives you no praise at all, you will need to survive for as long as possible on your own reserves. If you are a natural self-starter, you may find that you can survive adequately for quite a while without any recognition at all. Most people, though, will soon feel a drain on their energy. Faced with the prospect of a recognitionless environment, you may wish to consider a move.

  D. If your manager constantly asks you questions about how you are doing and feeling, or otherwise intrudes … suggest that you don’t find this helpful. It is a delicate matter because you don’t want to seem insubordinate or as if you are his manager. But ask if it would be okay if you “check in” with him less frequently than he obviously wants to check in with you. Tell him that it is no reflection on him. Say that you are hoping to function a little more independently, and that if you can schedule a “check-in” meeting on your cycle rather than his, then you will probably be able to be a great deal more productive. Obviously it is a sensitive situation, but if you use unambiguous, unemotional terminology like “I like to check in every couple of weeks rather than every couple of days,” you should be able to handle it and come to some practical arrangements that work for both of you.

  If your manager is intruding because he is suspicious of you, the most unambiguous, unemotional terminology will be of little help. You will have to resort to a different strategy — a move.

  E. If the problems we have discussed are of an altogether different nature, which is to say, if your manager consistently ignores you, distrusts you, takes credit for your work, blames you for his mistakes, or disrespects you … then get out from under him. You might look for a lateral move or another position within the company, or you might simply leave. Yes, you might decide to stick it out for six months in the hope that he will leave. Yes, the generous company benefits might dull your pain enough to make your situation tolerable. Yes, you might be able to find a sympathetic ear with your manager’s boss or with the human resources department. But don’t fool yourself. If his behavior has been consistent over time, he is not going to change that much. Some managers simply should not be managers. Their misbehavior is not a function of misunderstandings or misdirected good intentions. It is a function of lack of talent (or sometime neurosis). Lacking the appropriate four-lane highways in their mind, they will forever make poor decisions. They will forever mistrust, overshadow, abandon, intrude, and stifle. They have to. It’s in their nature. Neither you nor this book nor weeks of sensitivity training will give them the strengths, the self-esteem, and the security they need to be a great manager.

  We would like to be able to tell you, “Don’t worry. Soldier on. Rely on the strength of your own talent and you will still excel.” But we cannot. You might be able to survive your predicament for a while in the hope that the manager will prove his own undoing and get fired. But, lacking a good manager, you won’t be able to last long. As this book has shown, in your struggle to turn all of your talents into performance, your immediate manager is a very important partner. If you are cursed with a truly bad one, then you will never see the best of you. No matter how much you enjoy the job itself, get out, fast. You deserve better.

  Master Keys

  “What can the company do to create a friendly climate for great managers?”

  We have said that an employee may join
a company because of its prestige and reputation, but that his relationship with his immediate manager determines how long he stays and how productive he is while he is there. We have said that the manager is the critical player in turning each employee’s talent into performance. We have said that managers trump companies.

  All this is true. From the employees’ perspective, the manager is indeed more influential than the company. However, the company still wields enormous power. By themselves, great managers can offer limited local resistance to conventional wisdom. Only a total company effort can dislodge it completely.

  In most companies conventional wisdom remains deeply entrenched. Even though many managers might disagree with some of its central tenets — each person has unlimited potential; help each person to overcome his weaknesses; treat others as you would like to be treated — still these tenets survive. They are held firmly in place by a network of policies, practices, and languages. This network pervades the company, affecting the way employees are selected, trained, paid, punished, and promoted. By themselves, great managers can make small advances in the opposite direction, but they can never break all the way through to the other side. No matter which route they try, sooner or later they open a door and find convention standing there with some policy or rule or system that stops the great manager in his tracks:

  “You can’t pay people that way.”

  “You can’t promote him if he doesn’t have more than three years’ experience.”

  “You’re not treating every employee the same. That’s unfair.”

  “Here’s our new performance management system. Make sure every employee is trained on every one of these competencies.”