by Aaron Levy
One of my good friends, Ty, was working at a fast-growing company that provided unlimited funds for his personal development. He could buy books on Amazon, sign up for courses to take online, or go to conferences to better himself. And yet, he still quit. Why? He quit three months after his boss left for a different company, and, as he shared with me, “My last boss was awesome. I loved working with her, and I learned so much in such a short time. My new boss doesn’t really care about me or my growth, so why stay and do the work when I can go learn more on my own?”
As a business leader, this can be baffling, knowing you are investing in your people and not having them recognize it. It’s because the biggest influence on an employee’s perception of her company and her place within the company is her manager.
When a business leader needs to fill a management role, the natural thought is to look at top performers. We pluck them out of their role as individual contributors and put them into a management role, as a team lead. We do this because they are good at their job, not because they are good at leading people. This is the problem. A top performer will not necessarily be a great leader. Leading and performing require vastly different skill sets. In fact, fewer than 10% of employees naturally have the tools and skills to be great leaders.7 We often pick the wrong person because we are not looking at the right set of skills. We look at their key performance indicators, not their ability to listen to others or deliver critical feedback. We fail to assess their people skills, ultimately setting them up for failure.
FINDING YOUR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
I work with companies to fix the leak in their bucket by empowering managers with the tools, skills, and training to be better leaders of people. When you focus on empowering your managers to be coaches rather than micromanagers and on adding value to the talent you already have, you will get employees who want to stay and give you their all. Talent will find you because they want to be a part of what’s going on at your company. Employees will be engaged; they’ll give their extra discretionary effort to their work instead of to their Instagram account or side hustle because their managers help them see their impact, because they’ll feel connected to the company, and because they’ll experience constant growth, regardless of title changes or promotions. Managers will be leaders and not simply doers because they will have the tools and skills needed to lead.
When this happens—when you have a company of open, honest, and direct leaders, a group of leaders and not simply doers, of coaches and not simply managers—you’ll be in rare company. Most organizations don’t take the time to be so thoughtful, deliberate, and focused on developing the skills of their leaders. You’ll unlock the potential of your organization, and your people will become your competitive advantage.
That’s the opportunity I’m so excited to share with you and why I’m writing this book.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
This book is designed to share knowledge from my work with thousands of leaders and to provide you with the practical tools and skills to apply to your leadership and with your team, whether your needs are for an entire global organization, a growing team, or just a department of one. In sharing these lessons, tools, and skills, I hope you can learn from my mistakes and experiences to more rapidly develop your team of open, honest, and direct leaders. To do this, I’ve broken the book up into three parts.
Part 1
Part 1 is about how you can make sure to get it right when hiring and promoting managers in your company or team. As leaders, we tend to skip this step and go straight into how you make your managers better. I advise you not to skip this part of the book, as it can save you a lot of pain later on in the development of your leaders.
Part 2
The tools in part 2 get much more tactical; I’ll share activities, checklists, and frameworks to serve as a practical guide to developing the four key skills to make you and your team more powerful leaders.
Part 3
Finally, we’ll bring it all together, walking you through the steps to get started today with plans to organize and schedule your leadership successfully and without too much headache!
The goal of this book is for you to be able to put, if nothing else, at least one new skill into practice in your life as a leader. If out of all the insights shared and gained, you put one idea into consistent action, you’ll have succeeded. Small changes taken consistently over time lead to profound impact.
Enjoy the read. I can’t wait to hear what action you’ve put in place on the other side of this book. Many of the frameworks, models, and checklists featured in the book are also available on openhonestanddirect.com for your use. That’s where you can connect with me directly to find out more about an idea in this book, ask a question, or share a win. Please do connect. I want to hear from you; it’s what fills me up!
Note
For some of the stories in this book, I share the challenges clients and friends discussed with me. As a means to respect their confidentiality, I’ve changed their names.
For other stories, I’ve kept the names of clients (with their permission, of course!) and provided more specifics about their situation to give you more context and relatability to a situation you may be facing.
PART 1
CHOOSE THE RIGHT MANAGERS
It is crucial that you choose the right people as the foundation of your company’s leadership. To secure that foundation, we need to know why managers fail, how good ones succeed, and how to help encourage that success in your team. Without all three pieces, your leadership team will fail.
For instance, what happens if you have good managers who aren’t given the time or tools to connect with, evaluate, and support their reports? You get a disconnected team. You get frustrated managers and employees. You get a revolving door of talent. But with topdown support—leading by example—you can give your managers every chance to help their team grow and succeed.
In part 1, you’ll find key checklists to follow when looking for the right manager (chapter 1), an understanding of the key skills all great leaders possess (chapter 2), a deeper explanation of how habit formation works (chapter 3), and a framework to more rapidly change behaviors within your company today.
Let’s start putting the pieces together.
Chapter 1
WHY MOST MANAGERS SUCK
“I most seriously believe that one does people the best service by giving them some elevating work to do and thus indirectly elevating them.”
—Albert Einstein
Intention: It’s on you to set your managers up for success.
Let’s face it: Most managers suck. We will first take a focused look upstream at this problem and explore three key questions for hiring and promoting the right manager for your team. Choosing the right manager can make or break the success of your team and company, so it’s critical to get this step right. You may not feel as though you have the tools or the time to properly vet a manager yourself. We’ll discuss ways to give you more clarity throughout the process, making it easier to determine the right hire or promotion and saving you hours and hours of rehiring later on.
WHY TOP PERFORMERS DON’T MAKE GREAT LEADERS
Top performers are promoted into management roles because of their ability to do work well, not because of their ability to lead. The problem with turning your top performers into managers is that their skills as individual contributors don’t always directly translate into leadership skills. The skills required to lead are vastly different from the skills required to be a top performer.
Too often, I see organizations promote top performers and then leave them alone to figure out how to run a team. Once they are promoted, top performers-turned-managers typically tend to power through, sticking with what got them there and relying on talents that may not apply well to their new situation. However, what got your manager there—being good at doing a job—doesn’t necessarily mean they know how to lead others doing that job. When they continue to do all the work individually, they
turn into what I’d refer to as a super doer rather than a leader, and the negative impact on the team and its success is immediate and profound. Without the right tools and skills, the transition from top performer to manager leads to an inevitable drop in employee performance, increased company turnover, and a lot of frustration for all parties.
This recently happened to one of my clients, Katya. Katya was the corporate hero. She’d mastered the science of success, of getting work done, and had achieved a level of excellence that most others don’t reach. After being promoted to partner in her company, she found herself stressed out, overworked, and unsure of how she could keep up as her responsibilities and team grew.
Katya, like most other super doers, fell back on her work ethic. As her company grew, she had trouble saying no to all the various requests coming her way. From client fires to employee questions, Katya found herself increasingly more frazzled. Instead of benefiting from additional team members, she took on more tasks and responsibilities. To ensure success, she double-checked all client emails, orders placed, and proposals sent out. In reviewing every detail, it seemed she hoped her team would learn how to do great work simply by osmosis.
For Katya, things reached a breaking point when she was faced with a several-thousand-dollar mistake one of her employees made for the second time in three weeks. The first time it happened, she blamed the employee. But the second time, Katya realized it wasn’t the employee’s fault; it was hers.
THE IMPACT OF A BAD MANAGER
Having the wrong person in the wrong seat hurts the business on many levels. Not only is the manager being asked to be accountable for the growth, development, and success of a team of people, but she is also expected to continue performing on the same level herself. The results are often a failure on both ends.
First, you lose a top performer. They go from delivering great work to now having to manage their time between doing the work, leading others, and putting out fires. Instead of doing one thing well, they are now doing many things poorly.
Second, you create a team of frustrated employees who are also not performing. They are frustrated because their manager doesn’t support their growth, doesn’t communicate clearly, or doesn’t help them be better at their work. The frustration can only last so long before you start to lose employees. And it all stems from this single manager promotion.
ACTIVITY: THREE QUESTIONS FOR HIRING RIGHT
□ Does she want to lead?
□ Do I have the right metrics in place to measure her success?
□ Does she have the skills to lead others?
HOW CAN I GET IT RIGHT?
The manager is still the number-one reason people leave their jobs. The impact of picking a bad manager never seems to end for a company. That’s why it’s so critical to get this right.
The most important thing to do is make sure you have the right people in the right seats. This means taking a step back and looking at your hiring and promotion practices. Before hiring a manager, I recommend first asking yourself these three questions:
Do they want to lead?
The desire to lead is the single biggest factor in the development of a leader. I once had an executive ask me if I thought certain people just aren’t meant to lead. Although there are people who seem naturally and intuitively inclined to lead, I’ve found that anyone can lead if they have the desire to learn and are willing to do the work. I’ve learned through my work with leaders that those who are the most successful in our training are the people who want it—who want to grow and develop themselves as leaders.
If someone doesn’t want to lead, then they shouldn’t be doing it, and that’s OK too. Sometimes this requires letting go of old mindsets and work structures where managing people is the only way to get ahead in business. It’s time to recognize there are other paths to growth within an organization. It’s OK to promote individual contributors up the ranks of your organization without giving them a team to lead.
Tip: It can be hard for an individual to recognize that they would rather be a contributor than a leader. Instead of asking them if they want to lead, ask them what excites them about leading a team. Their answer—the way they either light up when talking about others or skip over the team aspect—will give you a better insight into their true desires.
Why do we have to pluck a top individual contributor out of what they are good at and force them into something they don’t want to do? There’s no reason for it. We can stop this now by promoting those who want to lead into leadership roles while creating other avenues of growth for those who don’t. Knowing who wants to lead and who doesn’t also enables a company to prevent problems further down the line when it realizes it may not have the right person in the right position.
ACTIVITY: IDENTIFY YOUR INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTORS
1. Create a list of all your people managers.
2. Go through each manager on the list one by one and ask yourself:
a. Does she truly want to lead? (yes, no)
b. What is the impact of her managing people on your team? (positive, neutral, negative)
c. Is she better served as an individual contributor? (yes, no)
3. Put a big star by each manager who is a better fit as an individual contributor.
4. Determine your course of action with each manager.
Now that you’ve identified your people managers who would likely be better off as individual contributors, it’s time to determine your course of action. The impact of doing nothing is likely far worse than you might imagine in the moment. Just because someone isn’t a fit right now to manage others doesn’t mean they have to be demoted or fired. That’s counterintuitive if they’re great contributors.
Often, the most effective transitions have no impact on a person’s title, pay, or position in the organizational chart. Rather, the change that’s needed will free your leader up from the responsibilities of managing others and give them time to crush it for your organization, thereby performing even more effectively. By keeping certain leaders on as individual contributors and allowing them to continue to thrive within the organization, you create a path others can see for success, one in which career growth is not dependent on managing people.
Do you have the right metrics in place?
Once you’ve confirmed the answer to the first question and have determined your potential new hire or promotion does want to lead a team, it’s time to take an internal look at your metrics. Do you have the priorities and performance metrics aligned for your managers to be successful?
Priorities and performance metrics are the success measures and evaluation milestones for the position. They are what allow both you and your managers to understand what success looks like for them in this role. By understanding these metrics, you can better share them up front with each manager, giving them clarity about their role and your expectations.
Prioritizing your leadership
During a recent check-in meeting, my client asked how it was going with her team. In full transparency, I shared how they have the skills but they don’t have the time.
This is something I see frequently from organizations experiencing hypergrowth. As the leader of your organization, you have a picture of what you want the company to be—a beautiful vision of people who love to work for you, who love their coworkers, and who come to work excited to work alongside their boss and team. The only problem is the execution of this vision; that’s where most of us fail. We fail because although we say it’s critical for our leaders to spend time coaching and growing their team, what we do conveys the opposite message. Although she wanted her team to develop their skills and although she invested money to do it, my client wasn’t showing up as an example they could follow and didn’t give them the space needed to actually develop their skills.
People do what you do, not what you say. As the leader of the organization, you are the archetype of what success looks like; you are the corporate hero for your team. If you are constantly running
from meeting to meeting, showing up late, pushing meetings over and over again, and generally too busy to spend time developing your leaders, you are sending a specific message and creating a picture of what it takes to succeed in your organization. This CEO was sending a message that getting work done was more important than developing skills to lead more effectively and efficiently, so her leaders didn’t do the work it took to develop their leadership toolkit.
One of my clients recently admitted to me that he doesn’t do one-on-ones with his executive team. He says it’s because he trusts them to do their work and wants to give them autonomy. But autonomy without accountability doesn’t work. It’s a basic human need to have at least some level of certainty, and people crave structure and accountability, even if they say they don’t.
In reading between the lines, it became clear to me that, between board meetings, strategy sessions, and travel, my client had to choose where he spent his hours in the day, and making the time to meet with each person on a biweekly basis was not high enough on the priority list in an already busy schedule. What kind of example does this set for his executive team? By not making time for his team, his leaders then didn’t prioritize one-on-one meetings with their own direct reports, and the pattern followed, on and on, down the line, resulting in a company culture that lacked structure and accountability. And when this happens, people pay for it.
