Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Managing People

What Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Learn on the Floor

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The Frontline Advantage

What Leaders can Learn

Leaders can learn a great deal on the frontlines, not only about the inner workings of the products they produce and the services they offer but also about their employees:

  • Tesla CEO Elon Musk sees being on the production line and understanding it an integral part of his job. Musk famously declared, “I have a sleeping bag in a conference room adjacent to the production line, which I use quite frequently.” He has helped his California factory hit its production goals—even “real-time triaging cars at the end of the line trying to get to the root cause of what the issues were.”
  • Amazon requires its deskbound managers to attend two days of call-center training. CEO Jeff Bezos said in 2007, “Every new employee, no matter how senior or junior, has to go spend time in our fulfillment centers within the first year of employment. Every two years they do two days of customer service. Everyone has to be able to work in a call center. … I just got recertified about six months ago. The fact that I did a lot of customer service in the first two years has not exempted me.”
  • Subway Restaurants’ chief development officer Don Fertman appeared incognito as a “sandwich artist” for a week on the popular CBS Undercover Boss reality TV show in 2010. Fertman remarked that this ground-level perspective offered managerial empathy and led to better decisions. Subway’s senior-level executives are now required to spend a week every year in the field, becoming aware of how their choices influence franchisees and customers.

Idea for Impact: The frontlines offer leaders unfiltered information

Leaders, don’t risk the ego trap of losing touch with the frontline experience.

Venture out of the office and work directly with frontline employees. Even do the work of those they lead for a while. You’ll break down the hierarchy and glean a valuable new perspective.

Don’t forgo the frontline advantage—that’s where problems are discovered, and solutions are born.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Putting the WOW in Customer Service // Book Summary of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness
  2. Lessons from Toyota: Genchi Genbutsu
  3. How Smart Companies Get Smarter: Seek and Solve Systemic Deficiencies
  4. Learning from the World’s Best Learning Organization // Book Summary of ‘The Toyota Way’
  5. Lessons from the Biography of Tesla’s Elon Musk

Don’t Surround Yourself with People Like Yourself

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Don't Surround Yourself with People Like Yourself It’s easier to hire people you naturally feel comfortable with, and you’ll feel most comfortable with people who remind you of yourself and your in-group. This is instinctive—it’s part of what psychologists identify as implicit bias.

However, clone-hiring initiates groupthink. There’s much value in surrounding yourself with others who are not like you—people who may make you feel a little uncomfortable and bring a different perspective. As the Bay-Area career coach Marty Nemko cautions, “We find comfort among those who agree with us, growth among those who don’t.”

To build a team with diverse talents, look for people with complementary skills and agreeable temperaments. As I explained in my article on competency modeling, identify the traits, characteristics, and behaviors in the star performers on your team and not in the average performers. Then, hire and promote people who have demonstrated the distinct traits and behaviors of the star performers.

Idea for Impact: Don’t try to hire clones. Instead, look for people who’re a complement. You need people less like you and more of a complement to you. Compatibility is not about being similar in nature; it’s about co-existing and thriving in harmony.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Competency Modeling: How to Hire and Promote the Best
  2. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  3. What is Behavioral Interviewing?
  4. Surround Yourself with Smarter People
  5. Etiquette: Protocol of Introducing People

Making It Happen // Book Summary of Larry Bossidy’s ‘Execution’

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It’s back-to-basics in Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan’s Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done (2002.) Bossidy is a retired business executive (General Electric, AlliedSignal/Honeywell,) and Charan is a distinguished business consultant.

Execution was the best-seller that defined the corporate zeitgeist in America after the dot-com meltdown and the Enron and WorldCom scandals. Catchphrases such as “execution,” “shaping the broad picture,” “straight talk,” and “robust action” became caricatures of how American companies got things done.

Here’s a distillation of the main ideas in Execution:

  • Ideas are well and good, but how thoroughly you implement them is what “determines success in today’s business world.” Companies are hindered by the gap between what the company’s leaders want to achieve and their ability to achieve it. “The real problem is that execution just doesn’t sound very sexy. It’s the stuff a leader delegates.”
  • 'Execution Discipline of Getting Things Done' by Larry Bossidy (ISBN 0712625984) There’s no room for fluffiness if you want to get things done. Straight talk is “live ammo.” “You need robust dialogue to surface the realities of business the kind that can leave people feeling bruised if they take it personally.”
  • The leader sets the tone and leads the change. A good motto to follow is, “Truth over harmony.” Focus on “raising the right questions, debating them, and finding realistic solutions.” Avoid discourses that are “stilted, politicized, fragmented, and butt-covering.” “Candor helps wipe out the silent lies and pocket vetoes, and it prevents the stalled initiatives and rework that drain energy.”
  • Informality is critical to candor. Formal and ceremonial conversations and presentations leave little room for debate. Too often, communication is scripted and predetermined. Informality encourages questions and is more likely to promote intuitive and critical thinking.
  • Strategic, people, and operational processes are the building blocks for execution—and they’re interrelated. “The foundation of changing behavior is linking rewards to performance and making the linkages transparent.”

Recommendation: Skim Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan’s Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done (2002.) Most of the book is about setting expectations, holding people accountable, and following through. There’re no instructive case studies. There’re no new magic pills. The substance is genuinely elementary, and the tone self-righteous. You don’t need a book for exhortations like “put the right person in the right job,” “know your people and your business,” “test critical assumptions,” “follow-through,” “deal with non-performers,” and “expand people’s capabilities through coaching.”

Wondering what to read next?

  1. A Guide to Your First Management Role // Book Summary of Julie Zhuo’s ‘The Making of a Manager’
  2. General Electric’s Jack Welch on Acting Quickly
  3. Putting the WOW in Customer Service // Book Summary of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness
  4. Book Summary of Leigh Branham’s ‘The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave’
  5. A Fast-Food Approach to Management // Book Summary of Blanchard & Johnson’s ‘The One Minute Manager’

“I Told You So”

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I Told You So Meme Something goes wrong, and your frustration is so intense that you just can’t resist blurting out, “Told ya, I saw that coming” or even “Why didn’t you listen to me?”

The phrase “I told you so” one of the least justifiable in the language. It rarely generates a positive response, and it’s unfailingly damaging to marriages, friendships, and parents’ relationships with children.

Events and premonitions thereof make perfect sense with hindsight. Your loved one already knows that you were right, and she was wrong. Going through failure is hard enough. She doesn’t need you to pour salt on her wound.

At some point, when the dust has settled, you may say carefully, “Sweetie, this stinks. That surely did not go as intended. Perhaps we shouldn’t do that again.”

It’s never okay to do the “I told you so” spiel even if you have her best interests at heart. Keep your disappointment—or delight—to yourself.

'I Told You So' - One of the least justifiable in the language

Being right about something feels so darn good, doesn’t it? But hold your tongue on gloating. Give up that attachment to the need to be correct. Let your loved one be human—let her heal, learn, grow, and evolve.

Avoiding negativity in the supportive relationship sometimes means biting your tongue and allowing the pieces to fall where they may.

Give your loved one the positive support she needs and help her cope. If you are kind, she may be more willing to listen in the future.

Idea for Impact: In relationships, a little tact and a lot of silence go a long way.

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  3. Let’s Not Talk About Trump
  4. Here’s How to Improve Your Conversational Skills
  5. Office Chitchat Isn’t Necessarily a Time Waster

Don’t Be Friends with Your Boss

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Don't Be Friends with Your Boss Develop a cordial, constructive, and trusting relationship with your boss. But don’t extend that connection into a chummy friendship.

A boss-employee friendship comes with complications and tensions that don’t exist in other relationships. The boundaries in friendships are softer and more diffuse. In a boss-employee relationship, the boundaries are more pronounced, and rightly so.

When you’ve got a great rapport that comes with a friendship, it’s easy to start expecting to be treated a bit better than everyone else on your team. You’ll be disappointed when some special consideration—a plump assignment or a flexible vacation schedule—doesn’t come your way. Your boss will expect you to abide by the same standards and rules as everyone else.

You also have to be more vigilant about how your friendship appears to other people.

Idea for Impact: Boss first, friend second. Don’t mix the two. Sure, be friendly with your boss, but don’t expect to be treated as a friend.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Don’t be Friends with Your Employees
  2. Four Keys to an Excellent Relationship with Your Boss
  3. No Boss Likes a Surprise—Good or Bad
  4. Good Boss in a Bad Company or Bad Boss in a Good Company?
  5. Make Friends Now with the People You’ll Need Later

I’m Not Impressed with Your Self-Elevating Job Title

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I'm Not Impressed with Your Self-Elevating Job Title

Ben Horowitz of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz discusses giving employees ego-boosting new job titles to appease them for not receiving a promotion or a pay increase:

Should your company make Vice President the top title or should you have Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Revenue Officers, Chief People Officer’s, and Chief Snack Officers? There are two schools of thought regarding this.

Marc Andreessen argues that people ask for many things from a company: salary, bonus, stock options, span of control, and titles. Of those, title is by far the cheapest, so it makes sense to give the highest titles possible… If it makes people feel better, let them feel better. Titles cost nothing. Better yet, when competing for new employees with other companies, using Andreessen’s method you can always outbid the competition in at least one dimension.

And, as a counterpoint, the pitfalls of job title inflation:

At Facebook, by contrast, Mark Zuckerberg… avoids accidentally giving new employees higher titles and positions than better performing existing employees. This boosts morale and increases fairness. Secondly, it forces all the managers of Facebook to deeply understand and internalize Facebook’s leveling system which serves the company extremely well in their own promotion and compensation processes. He also wants titles to be meaningful and reflect who has influence in the organization. As a company grows quickly, it’s important to provide organizational clarity wherever possible and that gets more difficult if there are 50 VPs and 10 Chiefs.

It’s become trendy to create and bandy about outlandish job titles and inflate career profiles.

I’m never impressed with self-elevating titles (e.g., Revenue Protection Officer for a Train Ticket Inspector, Director of First Impressions for a Receptionist) that make you sound like a pretentious, egotistical, and obnoxious person.

Your job title is supposed to help me understand what you do without having to open up the dictionary.

Yes, vague and puzzling job titles surface partly because the world is changing, and so are trades and occupations. Some new job titles are going to be needed.

But it’d be great if we could get by with a much smaller and simpler inventory of descriptive job titles.

Idea for Impact: Avoid bogus grandeur—challenge job title inflation. Don’t assign senior-sounding job titles to those with middle-ranking wages.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave
  2. Job-Hunting While Still Employed
  3. Don’t Use Personality Assessments to Sort the Talented from the Less Talented
  4. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  5. Before Jumping Ship, Consider This

Moderate Politics is the Most Sensible Way Forward

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A sharp observation on political extremism in this 1987 TV ad by comedian John Cleese for the Social Democratic Party-Liberal Party Alliance (1981–88) in the United Kingdom:

Extremism creates a nastier harsher atmosphere everywhere, more abuse and bother boy behavior, less friendliness and tolerance and respect for opponents. What we never hear about extremism is its advantages … the biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good because it provides you with enemies. The great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies, and all the goodness in the whole world is in you. If you have a lot of anger and resentment in you anyway, and you, therefore, enjoy abusing people, then you can pretend that you’re only doing it because these enemies of yours are such very bad persons and that if it wasn’t for them, you’d actually be good-natured and courteous and rational all the time.

As relevant now as it was then.

I don’t belong to a political party, and I don’t think I’ll ever join one. Partisan talking points irritate me no end. I’ll watch the upcoming debates, though, because I’ll find all the onstage mudslinging and the impulsive provocations very entertaining.

In politics, everyone tries to push emotional buttons. Few seem to talk about an evidence-based attitude for making decisions and allocating society’s resources where they’ll make the most impact.

Besides, the media today have made the exchange of ideas particularly charged and increasingly polarized. The only way to be heeded to in a screaming vortex is to scream louder and resort to premeditated ad hominum.

Idea for Impact: Wisdom doesn’t reside solely on one side of the center. I am partial to those moderates whose political stance often varies with the issue. Contrary to popular perception, they aren’t tuned-out or ill-informed. Instead, they’re disposed to see both sides of the complex problems, disregard the left and the right’s excessively ideological positions, and seek the middle ground.

Wondering what to read next?

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  3. How to Gain Empathic Insight during a Conflict
  4. Rapoport’s Rules to Criticize Someone Constructively
  5. Presenting Facts Can Sometimes Backfire

How to Manage Overqualified Employees

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How to Manage Overqualified Employees Some employees are overeducated and overqualified—or think they are—for the jobs they are doing.

Such employees will find their roles not demanding enough to keep them occupied. They may not feel fully engaged in those tasks and responsibilities that they judge “beneath” them.

Toffee-nosed employees can create team tension. They can develop negative attitudes, such as a sense of entitlement about their skills (remember the FedEx “Even an MBA Can Do It” advert?) or resentment through boredom. That frustration and disillusion can ripple out and bring everyone else in the team down.

Here are two guidelines for managing overqualified employees:

  1. To keep overqualified employees engaged, allow more autonomy, and assign them more creative assignments. Delegate longer-term projects or have them collaborate with other teams within the company. Though, be mindful that this may create even more resentment in the team towards the perceived overqualified employees. Discuss with the team why some people have been chosen for those special assignments.
  2. Work together with the human resources staff and help the overqualified employees chart out individualized paths for climbing the corporate ladder and reach their potential. Find ways to help them acquire new skills and get exposure to other parts of the organization. Coach them to apply for roles that possibly do not yet warrant their experience and expertise. Expand their leadership capacity by assigning training and mentoring responsibilities.

Idea for Impact: Nurturing and keeping overqualified employees can create a strong foundation for tomorrow’s management team.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Don’t Push Employees to Change
  2. Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees
  3. How to Promote Employees
  4. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave
  5. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers

How to Help an Employee Who Has Too Many Loops Open at Once

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The notion of ‘open loops’ is analogous to an internet browser with too many tabs open all together. Forcing a computer to do too much at the same time will overburden the computer’s CPU and memory. That causes lower processing speeds, even causing the browser to crash.

The same thing can happen to your employees in the workplace. Open loops add up to ongoing and unfinished mental processes—from a report that’s past due to a creative idea that has lingered on without being put into practice.

How to Help an Overloaded Employee Who Has Too Many Loops Open at Once

Having too many open loops restrains the time and attention employees give to specific responsibilities, stagnates performance, and breaks the team’s momentum.

Here are three ways you can help your employees handle their workload.

  • Encourage your employees to work through these open loops and close them one by one. Evoke the two-minute rule: a task shouldn’t be added to a to-do list if it can be done within two minutes.
  • Sit down with your employees, encourage them to make a list of their open loops, and prioritize the more significant open loops over the less important ones. Suggest the so-called Eisenhower Decision Matrix, named after President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who famously said, “The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
  • 'Getting Things Done' by David Allen (ISBN 0143126563) Buy them a copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (2001.) This best-selling time-management guidebook can show your employees how to examine all their open loops and “stuff” in the office—information, ideas, emails, projects, expectations, and even people—into a sensible, manageable system. Once organized, your employees can relentlessly “process” and sort out all open loops to conclusion. The resulting streamlined information flow can keep employees free from persistent worrying.

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  4. How to Prevent Employee Exhaustion
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Lessons from Drucker: Manage People, Not Things

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One of Peter Drucker’s big ideas was the notion of management as a “liberal art.” In The New Realities (1950,) Drucker argued that effective managers need a wide-ranging knowledge on subjects as varied as psychology, science—even religion.

Management is a liberal art—“liberal” because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; “art” because it deals with practice and application.

Lessons from Drucker: Management is a Liberal Art Management deals with people, their values, their growth and development—and this makes it a humanity. So does its concern with, and impact on, social structure and the community. Indeed… management is deeply involved in spiritual concerns—the nature of man, good and evil.

Managers draw on all the knowledge and insights of the humanities and the social sciences—on psychology and philosophy, on economics and on history, on the physical sciences and on ethics.

Idea for Impact: Management has become more about numbers and processes than about people

Manage people, not things.

A wise manager is a well-rounded one—somebody who understands and can leverage, in Drucker’s words, “the nature of man.”

Understand your employees. Understand how they think and act. Know what makes them tick—what drives them, what motivates them, what their aspirations are. Acquaint yourself to different approaches to management based on different sets of values. Individualize your management approach.

Use this understanding to create a productive work environment—that’s your foremost responsibility as a manager.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. To Inspire, Pay Attention to People: The Hawthorne Effect
  3. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  4. Four Telltale Signs of an Unhappy Employee
  5. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around