Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Leading Teams

Living with Rules You Don’t Like

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As a manager, sometimes you have to enforce rules that you don’t agree with.

Try your best to empathize with the rules, and if you can’t, you have no choice to accept the rules and implement them.

No manager wants to be the bearer of bad news, particularly when it’s about something the manager disagrees with. To avoid conflict with your employees, be concise, straightforward, and empathetic. Pass on the underlying principle communicated down to you. Then assert, “I’m afraid we have to live with this rule.”

Allow for venting, but discourage debate.

To maintain respect for those who have made the decisions, you may add, “Our executives have considered other options. They’ve made the choices based on what’s best for the organization. Decisions made at the top are often the final word on a subject. Rules are the rules. It’s okay to question them and not like them, but they still need to be followed.”

Emphasize that some disputes and disagreements are worth fighting, and others just aren’t. “I certainly don’t like it any more than you do. This isn’t the choice I would have made. But, let’s live with this rule, implement the change to the best of our abilities, and focus on our work and our team.”

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Why Your Employees Don’t Trust You—and What to Do About it

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If you have trouble getting employees to trust you, perhaps one—or more—of the following reasons are to blame:

  • You don’t model what you say.
  • You make promises you can’t keep.
  • You guard and selectively disclose information.
  • You don’t allow your employees to exercise their judgment.
  • You ask for input from your employees and ignore them.
  • You seek to monitor everything—including time spent on social media.
  • You tend to shift the blame.
  • You avoid giving credit where credit is due.
  • You ignore workplace concerns and problems until they become more significant problems.
  • You have double standards (employees tend to be especially very alert to this.)

Management scholars have suggested that trustworthiness entails three attributes: competence to perform tasks reliably (your ability,) having benign intentions (your benevolence,) and acting consistently with sound ethical principles such as fairmindedness, sincerity, and honesty (your integrity.) If you can exhibit these three attributes credibly and dependably, all will trust you. Get any of these three attributes wrong, and your standing will suffer.

Here are a few actions you can take to rebuild trust within your organization:

  • Communicate openly. Listen. Value everyone’s opinions equally. Involve employees in decision-making. Be as transparent as possible.
  • Empower employees. Encourage them to use their best judgment to identify and solve problems. Don’t be unnecessarily rigid with enforcing rules.
  • Make everyone accountable. Take responsibility. Invite and listen to feedback. Communicate expectations. Invest in commitments.

Idea for Impact: Trust is reshaped—strengthened or undermined—in every encounter

If your employees don’t trust you, then they won’t do what you need them to, and they won’t stick around long.

Trust is a consequence of your actions, not merely an intention or message. Trust is truly behavioral; it is complicated and fragile. Trust must be hard-fought, hard-earned, and hard-won every day, through actions, not words.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Don’t One-up Others’ Ideas
  2. Don’t Manage with Fear
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  4. 20 Reasons People Don’t Change
  5. Don’t Lead a Dysfunctional Team

Great Leaders Focus on the WHY and the WHAT—Not the How

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The most effective leaders provide their employees with a heartfelt portrayal of the WHY, a precise description of the WHAT, and freedom on the HOW.

The WHY encompasses a vision in a way that matters to people. As Howard Schultz, the Starbucks tycoon once said, “People want to be part of something larger than themselves. They want to be part of something they’re really proud of, that they’ll fight for, sacrifice for, that they trust.”

The British-American organizational consultant Simon Sinek‘s passable Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2009; a good summary) identifies the difference between “giving direction and giving directions.” Great leaders, he explains, motivate with the WHY, a deep-rooted purpose, before defining the WHAT, the product or service, or the HOW, the process.

The latter, the HOW, is to be deprioritized—effective leaders leave it to their employees to figure out.

In contrast, ineffective leaders provide specificity around HOW to complete a task but fail to share the big picture, the WHY.

Don’t live in the weeds. Have faith in the ingenuity of your employees. Give much latitude in how they do things.

Idea for Impact: Define the job. Explain the responsibility. Equip your people with the tools and skills they’ll need. Establish expectations. Identify the standards. That’s the essence of delegation.

Wondering what to read next?

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  4. How to Manage Smart, Powerful Leaders // Book Summary of Jeswald Salacuse’s ‘Leading Leaders’
  5. When Work Becomes a Metric, Metrics Risk Becoming the Work: A Case Study of the Stakhanovite Movement

How Can a Manager Get Important Things Done?

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Distinguish the Variances That Require a Manager’s Attention

When critical care facilities in hospitals monitor patients’ vital signs, staff nurses are notified only when vital signs go beyond each patient’s pre-programmed range. Unless the monitoring devices sound an alarm, nurses take for granted that the patient’s condition is stable enough and will receive only routine medical attention.

The “Management by Exception (MBE)” method is the notion that a manager’s attention must be focused only on those areas in absolute need of his/her engagement.

As a rule, lower-level managers should handle recurring decisions. Only problems concerning extraordinary matters should be referred to higher-level managers.

This “exception principle” emphasizes that executives at the upper levels of an organization have serious restrictions on their time, capacity, and willpower. They should refrain from being caught up in minutiae that can be handled just as effectively by their junior managers.

A case in point: many companies establish protocols that designate the level of authorization required for purchases. Companies delegate authority carefully, prescribing spending limits for each level. For instance, a team leader’s approval is necessary for purchases of over $1,000. A department manager must approve purchases of over $5,000, the divisional leader for purchases of over $10,000, and the CEO for purchases over $50,000.

Managers Just Can’t Do Everything

The exception principle helps managers focus their attention on more worthy matters that justify their attention. Most managers hesitate to manage by exception because of the very human predisposition to focus on the immediate, tangible, and well-defined problems as against the distant, high-priority, challenging, and abstract problems.

In other words, mangers must distinguish programmed decisions from non-programmed decisions. Programmed decisions are routine activities that are well-defined and can be dealt with by using an established protocol. Non-programmed decisions are exceptional or significant endeavors that involve unfamiliar, one-time, and unstructured problems needing higher-level decision-making.

Idea for Impact: Don’t Get Lost in the Thicket of Trivia

As a manager, there are only a few things that you must do. Focus on those and delegate the rest. But keep an eye on how things are going; you are still accountable for any work you delegate.

Decentralize as much decision-making as possible. Establish protocols and standard operating procedures (SOPs) that empower your staff and enable your organization virtually to run itself.

Identify what deviations constitute as an exception and intervene only to solve significant problems.

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  4. Do You Have an Unhealthy Obsession with Excellence?
  5. Advice for the First-Time Manager: Whom Should You Invest Your Time With?

What Makes a Great Relationship

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Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things (2014) is one of the best business books I’ve read in a long time. Here’s what he says about how he and Marc Andreessen have worked effectively in partnership across three companies over two decades:

Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.

Close relationships—at work or home—are tough. Nothing in life prepares you for them. But the intellectual and emotional rewards of close relationships are stimuli enough for navigating these choppy waters.

Disagreement is inevitable, but it is at the heart of creative thinking and problem-solving. An unassuming disagreement—even a misunderstanding—can cause tensions to rise. Differences of opinion can turn into disputes and arguments can cascade into fights, putting a relationship at risk.

The healthiest relationships are built on a strong foundation of mutual respect. A reciprocally beneficial connection entails accepting the others, knowing their goals, supporting them to become the best version of themselves, and wanting to work through difficulties and disagreements.

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  5. Stop Trying to Prove Yourself to the World

How to Stop “Standing” Meetings from Clogging Up Your Time

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Monthly staff conferences, progress updates, weekly sales calls, and other regularly scheduled “standing” meetings, essential though they may be, tend to be wasteful, especially so when they’re convened per tradition and attended out of an obligation.

The beginning of the year is a great time to examine all the standing meetings that you’re invited to. Review your calendar and consider the RoI of each standing meeting. Make each one of those meetings defend the use of your time—and your employees’ time.

Ask how else you could accomplish the goals of each meeting efficiently. If you must hold a meeting, remind all its participants of the reasons for gathering, and check if the meeting—and the frequency—still serves that purpose. Rewrite the charter of these meetings if necessary. Look at ways to complete the meetings more efficiently—perhaps in half the time, half as frequently, or with half the people.

For instance, a design team may convene for twice-a-week status reports at the project launch while there may be many decisions to make. Once the early frenzy subsides, only a monthly meeting may be justified, complemented by frequent status updates shared via email.

Idea for Impact: Don’t keep going to every meeting just because you’re invited, or because you think you have to.

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Don’t One-up Others’ Ideas

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A manager who has the tendency to put his oar in his employees’ ideas ends up killing their ownership of ideas. This diminishes their motivation and performance.

When employees feel disrespected or unappreciated, survival instincts will kick in—employees turn inward and stop participating fully in their teams. It will only erode their commitment and led to poor results.

People Tend to Reject Ideas Offered by Others in Favor of Their Own

'What Got You Here Wont Get You There' by Marshall Goldsmith (ISBN 1401301304) In the bestselling What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (2007,) the celebrated leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith describes this behavior as the tendency to “add too much value.”

If you’re inclined to get wrapped up in adding your two cents and improving the quality of an idea a little, you may devalue an employee’s commitment to execute the idea:

Imagine an energetic, enthusiastic employee comes into your office with an idea. She excitedly shares the idea with you. You think it’s a great idea. Instead of saying, “Great idea!” you say, “That’s a nice idea. Why don’t you add this to it?” What does this do? It deflates her enthusiasm; it dampers her commitment. While the quality of the idea may go up 5 percent, her commitment to execute it may go down 50 percent. That’s because it’s no longer her idea, it’s now your idea.

Effective Coaching is Helping Others Discover Insights

Focus on helping others discover insights—not by solving the problem for them, but by helping them improve how they’re thinking about the problem.

  • If you have an idea that the other must hear, don’t tell them immediately. Use Socratic questioning to tease the idea out of them.
  • Examine how you hand out ideas. Resist the temptation to add your advice. Before you propose an idea, pause and ask yourself, “Is it worth it?”
  • Avoid declarative statements such as “you should …” or “I think … .”
  • The higher up you go in an organization, the more your suggestions become interpreted as orders.
  • Don’t marginalize the concerns of your team members in the interest of moving your ideas forward. Ignoring employees’ inputs can send a message to the entire team that you’re not actually looking for their creative ideas, but that you’ve got your own agenda and just want them to rubberstamp it.
  • Get your team involved early. People are more motivated to do the things they have to do if they are part of the planning and strategy.

Idea for Impact: Improve your team performance by encouraging better thinking, not by handing out advice.

Don’t give unsolicited advice. Don’t make team decisions to which you—but nobody else—is committed. Learn to persuade others to see things your way by tapping into their talents, passions, and abilities.

Remember, being an effective manager is not about winning yourself; it’s about making other people winners.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. 20 Reasons People Don’t Change
  3. Don’t Lead a Dysfunctional Team
  4. The Jerk Dilemma: The Double-Edged Sword of a ‘No Jerks Here’ Policy
  5. How to Conquer Cynicism at Your Workplace

The Business of Business is People and Other Leadership Lessons from Southwest Airlines’s Herb Kelleher

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Herb Kelleher (1931–2019), the larger-than-life cofounder and long-time CEO-chairman of Southwest Airlines, passed away earlier this year. He is celebrated for establishing a people-oriented company culture that any leader would envy.

What started as a doodle scratched on a cocktail napkin (this account has been disputed) changed the face of flying. Herb’s then-revolutionary vision of low-cost air travel boiled the business down to its essentials. The disciplined execution of this strategy broke the mold of the aviation industry, brought the freedom of travel to millions of people, and encouraged successful copycats the world over—from JetBlue to Ryanair, and IndiGo to Air Asia.

Here are some key lessons that Herb (he preferred to be called just that) had to teach.

Companies are built in the image of their founders. Herb was well known for his competitive chutzpah, his extroverted antics, and his knack for unforgettable publicity ploys (e.g. his paper bag commercial or the ‘Malice in Dallas’ arm wrestling contest.) To the flying public, Southwest became a brand infused with the unconventional, flamboyant, free-spirited personality of its boss. That culture will continue to reflect his vision even after he’s gone—the tone he set at Southwest is not unlike those set by Steve Jobs (foresight) at Apple, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield (social values) at Ben & Jerry’s, and Walt Disney (teamwork.)

Ego is the enemy of good leadership. Southwest stands as the paradigm of the power of a lighthearted culture. Herb’s stewardship of the well-being of employees started with the ego at the top. At a 1997 testimony before the National Civil Aviation Review Commission, Herb introduced himself saying, “My name is Herb Kelleher. I co-founded Southwest Airlines in 1967. Because I am unable to perform competently any meaningful function at Southwest, our 25,000 Employees let me be CEO. That is one among many reasons why I love the People of Southwest Airlines.” An ego-bound leader with no sense of humor can cast a shadow across everyone’s work, whereas a self-effacing leader who engages a genuine, self-deprecating humor can help create an environment in which employees take risks, work as a team, and enjoy themselves more. “Power should be reserved for weightlifting and boats, and leadership really involves responsibility.”

Focus on your people, they’ll take good care of your customers. Southwest’s successes are widely attributed to its highly committed and motivated workforce. From the very beginning, Herb fixated on looking after his employees, so they looked after each other and took care of their customers. And, the devoted customers ensured the growth of the business. He famously declared,

The business of business is people—yesterday, today and forever. And as among employees, shareholders and customers, we decided that our internal customers, our employees, came first. The synergy in our opinion is simple: Honor, respect, care for, protect and reward your employees—regardless of title or position—and in turn they will treat each other and external customers in a warm, in a caring and in a hospitable way. This causes external customers to return, thus bringing joy to shareholders.

Hire committed people who’ll fit your company’s culture. Under Herb, Southwest pursued job candidates who exemplified three characteristics: “a ‘warrior spirit’ (that is, a desire to excel, act with courage, persevere and innovate); a ‘servant’s heart’ (the ability to put others first, treat everyone with respect and proactively serve customers); and a fun-loving attitude (passion, joy and an aversion to taking oneself too seriously.)”

Hire for attitude, train for skill. For Herb, recruiting was not about finding people with the right experience—it was about finding people with the right mindsets. “We will hire someone with less experience, less education and less expertise, than someone who has more of those things and has a rotten attitude. Because we can train people. We can teach people how to lead. We can teach people how to provide customer service. But we can’t change their DNA.”

Get your employees committed. “We have been successful because we’ve had a simple strategy. Our people have bought into it. Our people fully understand it. We have had to have extreme discipline in not departing from the strategy.” Herb’s magic extended to making employees think like long-term business owners. He once reflected,

We don’t just give people stock options. We have an educational team that goes around and explains to them what stock options are, how they work, the fact that it’s a longer-term investment. From 1990 to 1994, the airline industry as a whole lost $13 billion. Southwest Airlines was profitable during that entire time, but our stock was battered. Eighty-four percent of our employees continued with Southwest Airlines stock during that four-year period. That’s the kind of confidence and faith that you have to engender, so people have a longer-term view, and they’re not trying to outplay the market every day.

Southwest has never been in bankruptcy, nor has it had to layoff or furlong employees—an extraordinary achievement in the turbulent airline industry.

Stay focused on the core mission. During Herb’s era, Southwest never wavered from its core operating strategies. “We basically said to our people, there are three things that we’re interested in. The lowest costs in the industry, the best customer service, a spiritual infusion—because they are the hardest things for your competitors to replicate.” Herb’s low-cost recipe, however, did not expand to pinching on his employees’ earnings during tough times.

Herb’s Idea for Impact: “The business of business is not business. The business of business is people.”

'Nuts- Southwest Airlines' by Kevin and Jackie Freiberg (ISBN 0767901843) Herb left a colossal impression not only on the airline industry and on those who worked with him, but also on people-management as a practice.

Volumes have been written about Herb’s exemplar of how organizations can be responsibly people-centered. Read Kevin and Jackie Freiberg’s Nuts: Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success—it provides an insight into the unique culture and legacy that Herb shaped at Southwest.

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  4. Nuts! The Story of Southwest Airlines’ Maverick Culture // Book Summary
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Do You Have an Unhealthy Obsession with Excellence?

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Yes, you must develop the habit of excellence, even in little matters. However, the price of perfection can be prohibitive. A maniacal emphasis on excellence can lead to a blind obsession that can drain productivity.

If you’re a manager, insisting on perfection everywhere can hurt workplace morale, reduce employee engagement, and decrease opportunities for innovation and change.

Managers too often call for excellence in the small things because they’re unable to prioritize what matters most. These managers tend to be the ones who also struggle with delegation—given their exacting standards, it makes sense that they would have difficulty letting others do their job. And because monitoring people’s efforts is often time-consuming and difficult, perfectionist managers tend to just decide that it’s easier and quicker to do the job themselves.

Smart Managers Have the Self-Discipline to Turn Excellence On and Off

The smart managers I know of accomplish great things because they often have a “sixth sense” that reminds them that some activities matter more than others do and therefore merit more attention.

They give themselves permission to produce second-rate work on the road to doing a first-rate job.

They are very selective about when they push their teams to the max—only when the stakes are big enough and when it’s entirely justified.

Idea for Impact: Be Excellent Occasionally

Expecting excellence in every detail uses up a lot of bandwidth.

Get comfortable with a little bit of lower quality now and then. Less-than-excellent is a satisfactory outcome. As the British novelist W. Somerset Maugham once warned, “only a mediocre person is always at his best.”

Making a conscious decision about where excellence matters and where it doesn’t is particularly pertinent to managerial success.

In the real world of limited resources, perfection is hard to achieve. The quest for excellence sucks up time, energy, and money that could generate better results elsewhere.

Managers, step back and look at the whole picture. You don’t have enough resources to do everything, so commit them where they’ll bring the greatest overall improvement (use the lens of opportunity costs.)

Have exacting standards, but don’t demand excellence in every idea.

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Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees

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Firing is About an Underlying Commitment to Retaining Great People

The former General Electric leader Jack Welch earned the moniker “Neutron Jack” for sacking some 100,000 employees in the early years of his tenure as chief executive. Welch defended the dismissals by emphasizing that it would have been far more heartless to keep those employees and lay them off later when they had little chance of reinventing their careers. The dismissals were part of his deliberate efforts to establish a corporate culture that emphasized honest feedback and where only the “A players” got to stay.

Many Fired Employees Feel Surprised That the Axe Didn’t Fall Sooner

Managers know that ending a bad fit sooner is better than doing it later. Firing a bad employee is often better for both the employee leaving and the employees remaining.

Then again, many managers hesitate because firing is awfully difficult. No one likes to fire people. Looking an employee straight in the eye and telling he’ll no longer have a job is one of the harshest things a manager will ever have to do.

Besides, some managers are so uncomfortable with conflict that they are unwilling to deal directly and honestly with a problem employee, not to mention of confronting the risk of a wrongful termination claim.

If an Employee is Not Working out for You, Fire Fast

By holding on to a bad employee, you are really doing a disservice to the employee. Forcing a person to be something he’s are not, and giving him the same corrective feedback—week after week and quarter after quarter—is neither sustainable nor considerate. Trying to keep the employee in the wrong role prevents his personal and professional evolution.

  • Give the employee a chance to turn the situation around—people can change.
  • Try to find him an appropriate role within your company. Recall the old Zen poem,

    Faults and delusions
    Are not to be got rid of
    Just blindly.
    Look at the astringent persimmons!
    They turn into the sweet dried ones.

    However, if the employee is a truly bad fit, reassigning him just shifts the problem to a different part of the company.

  • If your efforts to remediate a bad employee haven’t worked out, cut your losses and fire him promptly. Help the employee move on to a job or a company where the fit is much better.

Idea for Impact: It is much worse to retain someone who is not suited for his job than it is to fire him. Help him find a new role quickly and land on his feet.

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