Great Manager

Making It Happen: Book Summary of Bossidy’s ‘Execution’

November 5, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

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.”
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.”

Taking Responsibility Means Understanding That Your Actions Can Make a Difference

October 29, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When problems unfold, leaders often look for ways to absolve themselves of responsibility—especially if they stand to lose face, favor, standing or will incur someone’s wrath.

Problems don’t simply just go away if un-addressed. They fester. They get worse. Then they blow up.

Taking responsibility means being there and facing the consequences, rejection, or revelation of ineptitude or weakness.

Leading authentically starts with being in charge. It refers to taking responsibility for the plans and actions that occur under your watch. (If you want to split hairs, glance at my explanation of accountability v responsibility.) Consider Captain Sullenberger, pilot of the Flight 1549 that crashed into New York City’s Hudson River. Even after he realized that the plane was in one piece after hitting the water, he worried about the difficulties that still lay ahead. The aircraft was sinking: everyone had to be evacuated quickly.

The Buck Stops with Leaders

As entrepreneur and venture capitalist Brad Feld emphasizes here, being responsible is one of the most admirable traits of an effective leader:

Many of the strong CEOs I work with owned whatever was going on at their company. There was simplicity in this—no blame, no excuses, no justification. They just took ownership.

When I step back and ponder this, the CEOs I respect the most are the ones who take responsibility for the actions of their company. Good or bad, successful or not, they don’t shirk any responsibility, blame anyone, or try to make excuses. They just own things, and if they need to be fixed, they fix them.

Idea for Impact: Taking Responsibility is Empowering

Ignoring a problem and passing blame is negligent.

The most effective leaders I’ve known have the humility and the courage to acknowledge when there’s been a mistake under their watch, avoid blaming others or the circumstances, and aspire to make amends or learn from their failures.

Often, individual action is the only real way to recognize and solve problems. Take ownership now.

Don’t Be Friends with Your Boss

October 16, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

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.

How to Manage Overqualified Employees

September 16, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

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:

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.
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.

Lessons from Drucker: Manage People, Not Things

August 13, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

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.

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.

Leaders Need to Be Strong and Avoid Instilling Fear

July 14, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Fear is many a leader’s dirty little secret. He can use it when he’s either unwilling or unable to persuade his team to work together to achieve a specific goal.

Sure, fear gets results. However, it does so at a great cost.

Fear can be enormously helpful for spurring change, particularly during periods of acute threat. But fear can backfire under certain circumstances, especially when creativity is necessary. Using fear and intimidation as a motivator only shuts down people’s brains.

People don’t always think and act rationally when they’re afraid. Fear and anxiety make it more difficult to have their energy and enthusiasm to keep going.

A leader needs to be strong without instilling fear. Often all a leader can do to motivate people is to foster a workplace wherein people feel safe bringing themselves to work.

People can contribute, be creative, and be motivated internally. There’s no need to watch them like a hawk, micromanage excessively, track every move they make, question every decision, or enact rules that make people feel constrained and under surveillance.

Idea for Impact: Steer clear of a tyrannical management style. Use feedback and coaching to be considerate and encouraging whenever you can be, and tough when you must be.

Good Boss in a Bad Company or Bad Boss in a Good Company?

July 9, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Who would you work for: a good boss in a mediocre company or a bad boss in a good company?

Without a doubt, your boss matters more than you realize. Having a good boss is one of work-life’s greatest experiences. A good boss can make work fun and meaningful and enriching.

Alas, the system of finding jobs is designed to let bosses pick employees, not the other way. You can’t expect to work at all times under a good boss.

Neither will you always have a chance to choose your boss (or your subordinates for that matter.) You’ll need to learn to get along with all sorts of people.

The Surprising Benefits of a Bad Boss

There’re quite a few reasons you’ll be better off for having endured a boss who’s insensitive, moody, manipulative, bad-tempered, or just plain incompetent.

If the boss is very good at doing something that you aspire to become good at, it worth your while to learn from a master in action. Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, portrayed brilliantly by actress Meryl Streep in the movie The Devil Wears Prada (2006,) may be a terrible pain to work for, but she knows more about the fashion business than just about anybody else. Working as her assistant is a priceless experience, not to mention the exposure to some of the most influential people in the world of fashion.
If you have your antennae up, you can learn a lot about good management by working under a bad manager.
A stint at a company with an excellent reputation will give you a precious career credential down the road.

A Bad Boss Doesn’t Last Forever

All bosses—good and bad—will leave in due course. They’ll move up, out, or sideways. Organizational changes are widespread in good companies, and personnel departments tend to identify bad bosses and move them around.

Most companies make it easy to move between teams and groups. You can network your way into a fresh opportunity—perhaps with a better boss—within the company.

Think in terms of short-term pains and long-term gains. For the time being, working for a bad boss can a nightmare even in a good company. But in the long-term, until you or your boss can move on, you’ll have to make the best of the learning and networking opportunities.

You Can’t Always Pick Your Own Boss

Be mindful of the organization’s perception of you—do not allow your rocky relationship with your boss to typecast you as a “can’t-get-along.”

One of the best things about working in good companies is networking and becoming known to the people who matter. You can seek doors to new worlds, look for mentors who can guide your career’s progress, and scout job opportunities in other departments. Managers tend to fill up many internal job openings with candidates they have in mind already.

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

June 25, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

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.

Executive Compensation: Pay Them Well, But Not Too Well

January 23, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Our executive compensation system is broken. Surveys show that the average public company CEO compensation is many hundred times that of the average employee. This gaping disparity in pay vis-à-vis the relative value they bring to their organizations is a moral embarrassment to our society, a point that wasn’t lost on the Occupy movement of yesteryear.

The debate over executive pay won’t die away anytime soon. As election year approaches, grandstanding politicians are vying to outdo each other with pledges to implement pubic policies that limit executive compensation, whereas theorists argue that, in a market economy, compensations should be set by supply and demand for executive talent.

The latter position is commonly echoed by company boards and executive compensation consultants—both of whom owe their cushy jobs to the CEOs and their top teams. They assert that leaders need to be provided with personal incentives to attract and motivate them.

Strangely enough, such incentives often demotivate the leaders’ followers. Financial incentives that are directed disproportionately to the leader in isolation often prove downright counterproductive.

Leadership is an outcome of the relationship between leader and follower, and excessively compensated leaders do not engender followership effectively.

This comports with financier J. P. Morgan‘s observations at the start of the twentieth century that the only characteristic common to his failing clients was a tendency to overpay those at the top. As Peter Drucker commented in The Frontiers of Management (1986,)

[J. P. Morgan found] eighty years ago that the only thing the businesses that were clients of J. P. Morgan & Co. and did poorly had in common was that each company’s top executive was paid more than 130 percent of the compensation of the people in the next echelon and these, in turn, more than 130 percent of the compensation of the people in the echelon just below them, and so on down the line. Very high salaries at the top, concluded Morgan—who was hardly contemptuous of big money or an “anticapitalist”—disrupt the team. They make even high-ranking people in the company see their own top management as adversaries rather than as colleagues…. And that quenches any willingness to say “we” and to exert oneself except in one’s own immediate self-interest.

Idea for Impact: Employees’ efforts are devalued markedly under conditions of gross inequality. Pay leaders well (if you pay peanuts, you’ll get monkeys,) but not too well.

How Can a Manager Get Important Things Done?

January 13, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

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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Great Manager

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The Buck Stops with Leaders

Idea for Impact: Taking Responsibility is Empowering

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

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The Surprising Benefits of a Bad Boss

A Bad Boss Doesn’t Last Forever

You Can’t Always Pick Your Own Boss

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

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Distinguish the Variances That Require a Manager’s Attention

Managers Just Can’t Do Everything

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

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