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The Effective Manager

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The Effective Manager

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Highlights & Notes

It’s about getting the most out of your direct reports,

Most managers are terrible at the most important thing they’re supposed to be doing: getting top performances out of the people they are managing.

Also, people aren’t easily placed into neat conceptualized models that can be analyzed and measured. People are messy.

I got promoted, and they didn’t tell me anything about what I was supposed to do or how I was supposed to do it. They just gave me a team and wished me luck.

Do you understand? An audience doesn’t react to a speaker’s nervousness. They react to the behaviors that they see and hear that they ascribe to nerves. If Paul is nervous but doesn’t behave as if he is nervous, will his audience notice? Of course not. They’ll think he’s confident.

Success at work is about what you do—you are your behaviors. Almost nothing else matters.

“The plural of anecdote is not data.”

“How do you measure what a good manager is, or does?”

Your First Responsibility as a Manager Is to Achieve Results

Your first responsibility is NOT to your team of directs. It’s NOT to your people. You should NOT worry about them first. Your first responsibility is to deliver whatever results your organization expects from you.

About the only way to really feel good about what your responsibilities are is to have quantified goals, in numbers and percentages: “Higher than 92 percent call quality each week”; “Achieve 1.6 MM in sales”; “Maintain gross margins above 38 percent”; “Reduce shipping losses by 2.7 percent cumulatively year over year.”

The problem with not having clearly delineated responsibilities is that you can’t make intelligent choices about where to focus. You begin to feel that “everything is important.” You begin to “try to get everything done.” Of course, you can’t, and you probably know that already, because you’re working long hours and never get everything done.

If you can’t list your goals almost off the top of your head, make a note somewhere to go to your boss in the near future. Ask her: “What results do you expect of me?” “What are the measures you’re going to compare me against?” “What are the objective standards?” “What subjective things do you look at to round out your evaluation of me?”

Okay, so results come first. Managers who produce great results have more successful careers than those who produce average results.

There are managers who put results so far ahead of everything else that they justify all sorts of behaviors to achieve those results.

When the ends justify the means for managers, bad things happen to the workers who report to them.

A focus only on results far too often leads to abuse of workers.

Your Second Responsibility as a Manager Is to Retain Your People

Replacing employees is expensive. When someone leaves, there’s the lost work that had been planned for, the cost of interviewing in both money and time, the likely higher salary that will be paid in the event of replacement, the time and expense of training the new employee, and the cost of less productivity by the new employee until that person can match the quality and quantity of work of the person who has left. For today’s manager, it’s not enough to get results.

The Definition of an Effective Manager Is One Who Gets Results and Keeps Her People

How well did this manager do her job, as shown in her results? Did she retain her people?

The four critical behaviors that an effective manager engages in to produce results and retain team members are the following: Get to Know Your People. Communicate about Performance. Ask for More. Push Work Down.

the single most important (and efficient) thing that you can do as a manager to improve your performance and increase retention is to spend time getting to know the strengths and weaknesses of your direct reports. Managers who know how to get the most out of each individual member of the team achieve noticeably better results than managers who don’t.

Despite the fact that your primary responsibility is getting results, the most important thing you can do isn’t strategizing, task assignment, resource planning, or priority analysis. It’s getting to know the people who have the skills and who are going to get the work done.

Our data over the years suggest that, generally, a manager who knows his or her team members one standard deviation better than the average manager produces results that are two standard deviations better than the average manager’s results.

Every person on the earth expects and deserves to be treated as an individual. Sadly, what most of us as managers do (I know I did early in my career) is manage others the way we would like to be managed.

You do to your directs what would make sense if you were one of those directs.

People and their behaviors are what deliver results to your organization. (Not systems, not processes, not computers, not machines.) Results are your primary responsibility.

the biggest leverage of all: a trusting relationship with those whom you manage.

Most managers, however, have no idea how one-sided their conversations are with their team members. They have no idea how little influence those brief conversations actually have on building relationships.

But that’s not how your directs see you. They see you as their boss. It’s a hard truth, but one worth remembering. Because of the power of your role, your directs don’t see you the way you see yourself.

When you control others’ addiction to food, clothing, and shelter, they’re going to see you through a different lens than you see yourself.

If you doubt this, if you think that you’re different—that you’re loved and not feared at all by your team—think of it this way: do you tell your boss everything? Of course you don’t.

Generally, the more a team trusts its manager, the better the results will be, and the better the retention as well.

When I trust my boss, I spend less time worrying about what her intentions are and whether I have to cover my tail on all of my work. I don’t have to second-guess the “why” of a task or the delegation of it, or ask my colleagues for political support if I decide to push back on something. There’s more time for results.

When we give managers an organizational chart showing the managers and their directs and we say, “Draw your team,” the managers generally circle themselves and the team as a whole. But when we give that same instruction to the directs on that team, the directs circle themselves and their peers—and leave the manager out.

the binding and distinctive element of teams that outperform others is the amount of trust that they build and engender among their members.

The quality of our communications is judged by whether or not what we talk about is of interest or benefit to them.

If you’re going to create trust and trusting relationships with your directs, then, you’re going to have to talk to them frequently about things that are important to them.

Getting to know your directs accounts for 40 percent of the total value created by engaging in the four critical behaviors.

the most important thing you can do as a manager is to develop a trusting relationship with the people on your team. If you do, everything else is easier. If you don’t, everything else is harder, and your results will be attenuated.

Would your performance improve if you heard more often from your boss about how you were doing? Most professionals, when we ask them that question, give a resounding yes.

If you want more performance communications from YOUR boss, you know your directs want the same thing from you.

“Well, my boss doesn’t do what I want her to do, but my people—they LOVE me.”

At times, play at the highest level approaches beauty.

One baseball player once said that he thought they turned 5,000 double plays every spring—5,000!—when, in a normal season, turning 150 would be an outstanding accomplishment! Why that amount of practice? They know that creating and using the feedback that they receive will make them better, when it matters.

About the only part of human endeavor in which feedback isn’t rapid, frequent, and timely is management. Just about the only place where feedback isn’t given, isn’t used, isn’t taken for granted is between managers and their directs.

When we talk to high-performing directs who rate their boss as outstanding, performance communications come up over and over again as a core reason. “He tells me how I’m doing.” “When I do well, he says so.” “When I mess up, he quickly tells me, and we move on.” “I never need to worry about where I stand—she tells me.”

If you want high performance, you’re going to have to talk about it with your directs. It matters more than anything else, other than your relationship with them.

Performance communication accounts for 30 percent of the total value created by engaging in the four critical behaviors.

This means that, if you build a great relationship with each of your directs and talk with them about performance regularly, you’re 70 percent of the way to getting results and retaining your team.

Our data show that, if you want great results and retention, you have to be willing to constantly raise the bar on performance. It’s not enough, based on what we see, to simply be a caretaker. It’s not enough to accept from your directs what their “comfort zone” is. It’s not enough to let your directs “stay where they are.”

It’s the manager’s job to figure out what the external change means for her group and to direct the performance of her group in ways that satisfy the needs of the organization.

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “I’m stressed out.” You’ve probably even said it yourself. Well, this may surprise you: as managers, we’re supposed to stress out our directs. Yes, you read that correctly. You’re supposed to create stress for your directs.

How is this possible? Well, what most people don’t know about stress is that there are two kinds. There’s distress: that’s the kind you mean when you’re feeling “stressed out.” It’s a level of stress that impedes or hinders your performance. You’re overwhelmed, you can’t think straight, and you feel fearful, uncreative—frozen, even.

Eustress is the stress you feel that helps you get ready, get excited, and “get up” for the big game. It’s that tingly feeling of anticipation, eagerness, and a sense of fire and determination that you feel when your team huddles and shouts, “Team!” or, “Beat Navy!” before a game.

The ideal place for your directs to be for maximum output/results is right on the line between distress and eustress, almost over the line into fear, but not quite there. They should have lots of energy but not panic. The only way to know where that line is, for each direct, is to push each direct into moments of distress and pay attention to when they start to lose effectiveness. Everyone has his or her own point of diminishing returns.

As managers, we’re responsible not just for the status quo, but for improving the performance of the whole team. The best way a team’s performance improves is if each individual’s performance improves.

To be an effective manager means encouraging and inspiring all of your directs to higher performance even when they say they don’t want to—because you know the organization needs that to stay competitive.

Asking for more accounts for roughly 15 percent of the total value created by engaging in the four critical behaviors.

The reason “pushing work down” is the fourth part of our “Management Trinity” is that, while the first three parts of the “Management Trinity” create value for the team, “pushing work down” creates capacity for the organization. Managers are the ones who have to push work down, but the organization is the one that benefits. Put differently, you can produce results from your team with only the first three parts of the “Management Trinity,” but pushing work down creates growth potential for your entire organization.

The direct should do the job and not the manager, because the direct is cheaper labor. If we can achieve an acceptable quality level with less cost, for all but the most important things we do, we should do so.

The question becomes, in a world in which everyone is busy with too much to do, “What work is most valuable to the organization?” That’s the work we have to get done, right? And, in a general sense, the more important work of the organization is being done at higher levels.

Pushing work down accounts for roughly 15 percent of the total value created by engaging in the four critical behaviors.

That’s the “Management Trinity”: The four most critical behaviors a manager can engage in, to produce results and retain team members: Get to Know Your People. Communicate about Performance. Ask for More. Push Work Down.

However you manage, your techniques, behavior, and philosophy must be both teachable to others and sustainable.

We expect people in finance, say, to be able to explain the functions they put into a spreadsheet and why. We expect engineers to be able to walk us through why they chose a particular design or a material. We expect developers to comment their code so that someone else can debug it. We expect marketing people to explain their rationale for why they chose a certain data-gathering campaign. But somehow we don’t hold managers to this standard. Somehow, with all the work being done about people, systems, motivation, pay, benefits, rewards, and culture, “management” is some sort of inexplicable “black art.”

What does it say about the most important systemic behavior in every organization that the majority of us learned how to do it from others who were never taught it and who privately worried that others would discover that they didn’t truly know what they were doing?

The way an effective manager manages is visible to others and is teachable to others. And the effective manager can repeat the core behaviors in any situation, nearly anywhere.

The reasons for this are fundamental to any organization. If we can’t teach others how to manage, it’s much harder for the organization to grow. We can’t teach “personality,” and we can’t teach “I don’t know.”

When your organization’s business or service grows, at some point more managers are going to be needed. If the people who are considered for promotion to a newly created managerial role haven’t learned how to manage well from their own manager, they’re not going to be any good at it. And just when the organization needs additional effectiveness in order to sustain its growth, that effectiveness not there.

To sustain organizational growth, new managers must be created, and the way to create new managers is to teach them before they move into the role. Otherwise, they will learn the hard way—when they’re already in the role. And that means learning from their own mistakes, at a time when the organization doesn’t need new, weak managers but, rather, managers as good as the ones they already have—and better—before the growth. The newer managers have to be better because, as organizations grow, growth becomes more difficult, so the same behaviors in a more difficult situation begets less performance just when more is needed.

The study was scheduled to run for 30 months. Unfortunately, and frustratingly, we had to stop the test after only 19 months. The reason was that because 18 months into our test, unrelated to the test, a corporate document was distributed, showing which managers had been promoted to which roles in the past 12 months. Of the 43 managers promoted, 42 of them came from the test group, and only one came from the control group. Although you might think this was a validation of our effort and justification for continuing or even expanding the effort, a month later we had to shut down the study. Why? Because the managers in the control group, who also wanted to get promoted, started doing O3s as well, which ruined the science involved in our study. However, 18 months was long enough to capture some of the outcomes we had hoped to track. Results and retention among managers in the test group rose by 9 percent and 8 percent, respectively. Results and retention among the control group rose slightly, by 1 percent.

Weekly—Biggest improvement in both results and retention Biweekly—Slightly less than half the improvement seen by weekly O3s No One On Ones—Slight improvement in results and retention Monthly—Slight decrease in results and retention

Critical Behavior Manager Tool Get to Know Your People One On Ones Communicate about Performance Feedback Ask for More Coaching Push Work Down Delegation

However, If you don’t really feel like you know what you’re doing If you don’t have your own technique If your technique is your personality If you can’t teach others your technique If you can’t write down your methods If you’re not certain you could replicate your technique and methods in a different company/industry Then here is Manager Tools’ guarantee to you: Use the Manager Tools as described here, and we guarantee that you will become an effective manager—one who gets results and retains the team.

What is a Manager Tools One On One? It is a meeting That is scheduled That is held weekly That lasts for 30 minutes That is held with each of your directs In which the direct’s issues are primary In which the manager takes notes

The value of having One On Ones is that by doing this you are saying to your directs, “You’re always going to have time with me. I’m always going to be investing in the relationship.” If you don’t schedule your One On Ones, you’re saying to your directs, “This might be important in a given week. You might be important, and the time with me might be valuable to me. I don’t know. Let’s play it by ear. We’ll see how things go.”

(Our data show that if you conduct O3s 85 percent of the time, you get the kinds of results and retention you expect. Fall below 85 percent, and outcomes decline.)

Table 4.1 Scheduled O3s vs. Unscheduled O3s Scheduled Unscheduled Managers Surveyed 119 520 Managers Tested ≈100 ≈100 Improvement ≈8 percent ≈2 percent

Why is scheduling so important? Directs whose managers have started O3s tell us two key things: (1) “My boss is saying I’m important,” and (2) “I have time to prepare.”

When you tell your directs that they’re going to have scheduled time with you every week, no matter what, you elevate their importance to that of the rest of the items on your calendar; that is, you are making them also “important.”

moving an already scheduled One On One to a different time because of a conflict has no statistically significant effect on the manager’s results and retention improvements.

You don’t have time now—that’s understood—but the solution is easy. Don’t start your O3s for three to four weeks, when you can easily fit them into a calendar that is almost empty.

If you implement Manager Tools One On Ones, we guarantee that you will get more time back in your calendar than you spend in having them.

You think about deadlines that are coming up this week. You tend to put off things that are due next week, even if they will take you several hours of work. You probably know what your schedule is this week, and maybe you know a bit of what your schedule is next week, but for the week after next, you have little sense of what your week will be like, in most cases.

roughly 25 percent of what you would get if you held them weekly. Why would you save only 50 percent of time by going biweekly and then lose 75 percent of its value? That doesn’t make sense.

Directs tell us over and over again that they prefer having weekly O3s. It matches the rhythm of their work. They say that biweekly O3s end up being too general and less relevant.

If you have your One On Ones biweekly, you will lose the benefit of seeing interruptions notably decrease. Directs can’t wait over a week to meet with you in order to have their problems resolved.

A caveat: if you have more than ten directs, it’s okay to start with biweekly O3s. Trying to find, say, 8 hours (16 half hours for 16 directs) in your week may be a bridge too far. Spend 8 to 12 weeks allowing your schedule to absorb the 4 hours a week, and then try moving to weekly. (This habit of stressing your calendar will prepare you well for executive life, if you aspire to it.)

I would argue that with a team that big, you have an organizational structure problem and not a managerial behavior problem.

We have never seen an outcome where monthly O3s have improved performance.

Managers who conduct at least 85 percent of their O3s over a period of months achieve much of the results and retention improvement that managers get if they have 100 percent of their One On Ones. Once they fall below 85 percent, though, results and retention improvements are less likely. When they fall below 50 percent, it’s better just to stop having O3s, in terms of the benefit (more like cost) and the time you’re spending.

By studying meeting behavior, we’ve also learned that it’s better to have a jam-packed meeting that lasts 30 minutes than to have a relaxed meeting that is scheduled for an hour but for which you only have 40 to 45 minutes’ worth of content. If you overschedule a meeting, your directs will gradually begin to underprepare for them and will lose interest. Shorter, more compact, and busier 30-minute meetings will cause you and your directs to use them fully and to not miss them. Who wants another hour-long meeting that starts late and/or finishes late, which causes you to be late to your next back-to-back-to-back, hour-long meeting march?

If you’re going to do O3s, you’ve got to do them with all of your directs.

You should not hold One On Ones with anyone other than your direct reports. This means that you don’t do One On Ones with people who report to your directs.

For the record, “direct” means someone who reports directly to you. It doesn’t mean anyone in your organization.

(“Skips” is a large organization’s term for someone who reports to one of your directs. “Directs” are the people who report directly to you. And “skip level” is used if you have to skip a level in the organizational chart to get to them.)

Your immediate subordinate managers are responsible for their relationships with their directs. The way you maintain your relationship with your skips (and even levels below that, if it applies to you) is by keeping a strong relationship with your directs and relying on them to maintain relationships with theirs. Any other model for this just doesn’t scale.

Build an organization of effective managers under you. This is how organizations stay healthy and effective as they grow.

The lack of note taking added to the chance that managers and directs would talk less about work. While in some cases that was appreciated, in the majority of the cases, there was a general dislike about the lack of note taking. It made the O3 feel like a personal meeting, as opposed to a business meeting. The fact is, O3s are business meetings about results, and sometimes personal matters are discussed.

The problem with a One On One in which the manager does not take notes isn’t the lack of note taking; it’s the lack of accountability that no note taking implies.

In addition, because One On Ones are also about relationships, trust is especially important. That means that managers have to be sure to do what they say they’re going to do. Thus, remembering what we’ve committed to do takes on special meaning.

Circle what you promise to do, underline what you promise to do, or put asterisks next to what you promise to do, but be able to see your deliverables—your promises—at a glance.

Rather than mixing your coaching notes with the rest of your One-On-One notes, write them on the back of the previous One-On-One form.

Don’t do a One On One in public. One On Ones are like feedback in the sense that they are for the private use of one individual. The One On One you’re having with one of your directs is for you and that one direct.

Please, don’t go to the direct’s office. Don’t go from your office to the direct’s cubicle, because one person going to 6 or 7 or 10 different places doesn’t make any sense. It’s much smarter to have six or seven or 10 people come to one place, and, frankly, it makes it much easier on you.

If an initiative is important to you, it’s worth thinking through the possible rejoinders and being prepared to address them. If you’re not willing to verbally joust through some turbulence when you introduce a new idea, it’s probably not worth doing.

First, let’s be clear about pushback in general. Don’t ever be surprised by it. Just because you think what you’re going to try is a good idea doesn’t mean that your directs will go along with it. Quite the contrary: when you change how you manage, then fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about the change are always part of the response. Don’t assume it’s just you; it happens to all of us.

the fear your role power engenders creates an initial negative response to new managerial behaviors.

The three most common forms of pushback against O3s are the following: It’s micromanaging. I don’t have time. We talk all the time

Never tolerate from your directs what you would not do to your boss.

a direct who wishes for virtually no managerial oversight is a liability risk.

The direct who believes that a 30-minute meeting once a week is burdensome and means that you are overbearing is telling you either that he is afraid of oversight, which legally is scary, or that he is above it, which is a level of arrogance that could tear apart your team.

Management, reasonably practiced, in virtually every organization, provides necessary guidance, controls, and incentives far below a level that is intrusive or detrimental.

Micromanagement is the systemic and routine application of an intrusive relationship such that the manager assigns a task, explains what to do, how to do it, insists on total process compliance, and then observes the work in real time, correcting the work as it is being done, and, in the event of divergence from standards, taking OVER the work and completing it himself.

A demanding boss is not a micromanager. Asking for reports is not micromanaging. Expecting updates is not micromanaging. Asking for one meeting a week is not micromanaging someone. Spending time communicating about tasks, deliverables, deadlines, successes, failures, growth opportunities, and, yes, even family—is not micromanaging in any way.

What manager who considers herself effective would argue that she does not do these things: talk about performance, answer questions, provide feedback, assign work, praise, provide coaching, talk about relationships, discuss development, develop relationships, inquire about the status of assigned tasks, expect status reporting, pay attention to work-family balance, plan, check the work of others, and reward.

Further, One On Ones can’t be micromanaging if you’re only asking for only 1 percent—1 percent!—of a direct’s time. Why is it 1 percent? Simple math: if your direct works 50 hours a week, one half-hour of that is 1/100th of their time each week, month, and year.

Role power is heightened by stronger relationships with one’s team.

That’s why, when we announce that we’re going to start doing One On Ones, we announce that they won’t start for three weeks. Part of that is to allow for the scheduling to take place.

But the main reason for the three-week lag time is that people who have full calendars the week of the announcement rarely will have that same fullness three weeks from now.

So, when your directs object on the basis of being too busy, tell them that you know and respect that, and that’s why you’re scheduling the One On Ones now for three weeks from now—when you know they have nothing already scheduled.

If it helps, another approach you can take to combat the “busy” pushback is that, if your directs are all so busy that they don’t have time for anything more, they better get their priorities straight. They may well be so busy that they’re not making time for the truly critical issues and opportunities. They need to be aligned, and what better way than a regular check-in?

The defensiveness that our directs feel is reasonable. Nevertheless, being so busy that one can’t change has dangerous implications. As busy as everyone is, this defense, left unanswered, suggests that the organization will never change. Yet, we all know that the busiest and most successful organizations change all the time. How do they change and get better when they are busy, too, just like we are? How can our busyness justify NOT changing, when they change when they’re busy and still deliver results?

Put differently, you’re busy if you’re not getting all your work done.

Before trying to get more of everything done, get the most important things done first.

Work on the right things first. Then become more efficient at doing those right things, and you’ll have more time for either more right things or some less important things.

When you’re working in “the now,” and someone asks for half an hour of your time, apoplexy might be a reasonable response. You never feel like you have half an hour when you’re up against the deadlines of “the now.” Yet, if I asked you for 30 minutes of your time next month, you’d surely be able to make that work.

There are three forms of power or influence in organizations. Role power, that which the organization grants you to compel others to act for the organization; relationship power, your own ability to change behaviors of others because of their knowledge of, and trust in, you; and expertise power, others’ perception of your technical, industrial, or topical knowledge that causes them to follow your guidance.

Just because we know that relationship power is the ultimate lever, this doesn’t mean that role power doesn’t exist. If we use it rarely, when we do use it, we will be respected. Role power tends to exist in inverse proportion to how often you use it.

The agenda is simple: first, 10 minutes for your direct to speak, then 10 minutes for you to speak, and then 10 minutes to talk about the future.

The direct goes first and talks about whatever the direct wants to talk about.

If it’s important to my team member, it’s important to me. That’s how you build relationships.

It has been our experience that managers who share a list of topics in advance step on the direct’s agenda, reducing the direct’s satisfaction with the meeting.

A typical O3 direct’s portion includes updates about ongoing work, questions about problems they’re having, project status reports, requests for assistance with budgets or communications, requests for guidance about next steps or about approaching a problem, verification of rumors they’ve heard, clarification of what you want or how you want something done, notifications of tasks they’ve finished, follow-up on pending actions, reminders of information or materials they need from you, and so on.

Trust your directs to choose to talk about what’s important to them.

While 74 percent of directs say that what they most want to talk about is work, 89 percent of managers say they want to talk about work.

If you want more guidance about work and personal topics in One On Ones, There’s a Cast for That™.

Don’t use your O3s to pass down standard information that everyone’s getting.

The 10/10/10 agenda is a template; you are not required to discuss the big picture or the future every week.

The average direct talks for 21 minutes. It would follow that we would then say that managers get the final nine minutes, but that’s not exactly true, because managers report that they often run over the scheduled time allotted for the meeting, in order to cover their list of items.

65 percent of their directs “talk about the right amount,” 30 percent “talk too much,” and only 5 percent “talk too little.”

The agenda of a meeting always serves the purpose of the meeting, not the other way around. The agenda is there to facilitate the purpose. If the agenda is getting in the way of the purpose, you jettison the agenda to get to the purpose.

Remember that every direct brings to the relationship with you, the boss, all of his previous relationships with his previous bosses.

Our data show that you can get roughly 80 percent of the value from a phone O3 that you get from a face-to-face O3.

Primary Focus on the Team Member Regularly Scheduled Never Missed 30 Minutes (and the 10/10/10 rule) Take Notes

If you really believe in the relationship value of One On Ones, you will make the time to call your directs, just like when you are going to a meeting in a conference room. Don’t make your directs come and find you.

The most important thing you’ll be evaluating from your distant directs is their work product. What form does work product most often take in these situations? Documents.

Distance management requires that you become much more effective at managing others based on their work product. Effective managers ask for more documents from their directs in advance of phone One On Ones to give themselves a better opportunity to assess the quality and quantity of their directs’ work product and to allow time to give them feedback on it.

We’ve found that asking for key documents in advance speeds up the One On One.

Ideally, rather than asking for documents in advance, you’ve created some sort of e-storage solution for your directs’ work product.

Know where your directs’ work product documents are, and have them available to you both when doing a One On One.

This means you have to focus. We have several suggestions for how to do this. Start with Your Back Turned. Too many managers look out over where their directs sit when they are on the phone. Don’t do this. Turn your back on the world. Close your door. Don’t look around. Ignore Interruptions. No one is ever interrupted “by someone else.” Every interruption is caused by the person being interrupted, when that person stops what she’s doing. When someone approaches, turn your back. If the person speaks to you, smile and point to the phone. If the person is standing there, waiting for you to get off the phone, turn your back. If the person touches your shoulder, hold up a hand while not turning around. Focus. Stop checking your e-mails. Stop looking at the stuff on your desk. Close your eyes, and visualize your direct speaking. Shut down your browser. Quit other programs. It’s only 30 minutes of your time, once a week. Your directs have earned it.

You Cannot Be Friends with Your Directs

Further, even if we ignore the friendship aspect for a moment, the appearance of friendship (whose moral obligations are always assumed) is a significant detractor to one’s ability to lead and manage others.

Friendship implies a social obligation to someone else.

Friendships also cause the majority of us to enter into an implicit understanding regarding the secrecy of our friends’ communications with us. One of the hallmarks of friendship is, in fact, an unstated understanding that the relationship confers the ability to share some things that normally would be closely held, or withheld from others. This “friendship confidentiality” can be invoked at any time, and, what’s more, invoked retroactively: “Hey, by the way, what I just said, you won’t share that, right?”

With both of these ideas—social obligation and implied secrecy—friendships run afoul of a manager’s professional obligations. A manager cannot expect to be treated as a professional if she at times accepts the different set of moral obligations that friendship also implies. If you’re a manager, a part of you knows this. It’s not a joy to talk about, but we can’t just ignore the friction between our various sets of obligations.

your directs don’t think of you as a nice person. Why? Because they think of you as the boss.

Let’s take this idea to its logical extension. Not only do your directs see you first as their boss, but also everyone else sees you as your directs’ boss, not as your directs’ friend. When your behaviors aren’t easily understood as normal manager behaviors, others in the firm will wonder why you’re not effective or not reasonable. They will assume that, regardless of any previous relationship, your decisions will be based on managerial factors, not friendship. If they ever find out otherwise, you will not be taken seriously for much longer.

You Can Be Friendly with Your Directs Hopefully, this is the gigantic loophole so many managers want it to be. You cannot be friends with your directs, but yes you can be friendly with them. You might think that the two mean the same thing, but there is a clear difference. The difference lies in what we’ve already talked about. Being friendly with your directs is simply a set of behaviors. Smiling, asking about their free time and families, being polite, starting conversations with small talk, sharing about your own life, encouraging them to join you for lunch, accepting lunch invitations, and so on—all of these are friendly behaviors. They are appreciated, respected, and often admired by those who struggle to get along well and easily with others.

Now, you might say, “Wait, these are the things friends do,” and you would be right. But, to be a friend, as opposed to simply engaging in friendly behavior, one also accepts the obligation that “being a friend” means, as opposed to just behaving in a friendly way. This is the obligation that we addressed earlier. It is the obligation of friendship, not the friendly behaviors, that is the problem with managers being friends with their directs. Friendly, yes; friends, no.

You can’t be friends with ANY of your directs. You CAN behave in a friendly way to all of your directs. You can’t behave in a friendly way to some of your directs—even if they’re not friends—without behaving similarly with all of your other directs.

The biggest problem with having differing levels of friendship—from actual friends to friendly behaviors to no special relationship at all—is the perception effect. Even if you genuinely aren’t friends with a direct, if you then behave in a friendly way toward her while not behaving similarly with others, this will be seen as a form of friendship and will be a cause for concern. Others will question your motivations and decisions. Your credibility will suffer. In other words, you can’t use the “friendly behavior” distinction to attempt to either hide a friendship with a direct or to differentiate among your team members. It’s not ethical, and it’s not effective.

If drinking is only a friendly behavior, then yes, you can imbibe with your directs. But remember: you can’t show favoritism. If you’re drinking with a smaller subset of your team regularly, you’re either admitting they’re your friends, or, if you wish to claim it’s only friendly behavior, then the subset makes it friendly behavior that is unevenly applied. Thus, favoritism.

You Cannot Do or Say Stupid or Drunk Things with Your Directs

Something else we’ve learned about drinking alcohol with directs: have only one drink with them. They’ll appreciate your willingness to not set yourself apart from them completely. When you turn the second one down, they’ll appreciate you more for setting an example and admitting you know you’re not one of them, completely.

I know it’s hard to hear that some friendships will have to become less important to you than your work responsibilities. We’ve felt that sting, and yet we’ve found over and over again that the best of friends totally respect it and understand it, and the relationship becomes better even as it becomes different. Effective managers want to know their directs, and they are required to make hard decisions that put the company first. Be a professional, and be friendly, not friends.

Can I Do One On Ones as a Project Manager? You can have One On Ones in a matrix or matrix-hybrid organization as a project manager. You don’t have to have line authority or control of directs who officially report to you to make it work. This type of One On One can work very well.

While we recommend One On Ones virtually exclusively for manager and team member relationships, the project manager and team member relationship has become important enough, and common enough, to justify this additional meeting.

Horstman’s Law of Project Management: WHO does WHAT by WHEN.

The way you can make one of your team members most effective on your project is by keeping that team member on track to meet their deliverables by the deadline.

For most of the project managers who have learned about this concept, these PMO3s turn into miniature status updates. Team members tell us where they are, what issues they’re facing, where they need help, and then we ask questions about what the status is and what their plans are to meet deliverable standards on time.

You might think that the weekly or biweekly project review does that, and you would be right. But we’ve been in hundreds of project review meetings ourselves, and the amount of professional, helpful candor that can appear in them, as opposed to blame shifting and defensiveness, is quite small. You can’t give feedback. There are too many empty moments during which everyone knows what’s going on but nobody wants to say it out loud. That’s not a problem in PMO3s.

Our general rule for the shortest project that benefits from PMO3s is three weeks.

Phone PMO3s also are fine.

If (a big if) you feel that you can add this to a project launch meeting, introduce your plan for having PMO3s there. Walk your team members through the idea of PMO3s.

One key difference between rolling out standard O3s and PMO3s is that you don’t wait three weeks for everyone’s schedule to clear. Early project successes—deadlines met, standards kept—are important bellwethers of overall success.

When the project is over, the PMO3s stop. Resist any attempt by a team member to have them continue.

This is how I manage projects. It will help with communication. It will last only 30 minutes once a week. It will give you guaranteed time with me regularly, no matter what. PMO3s will significantly reduce the bane of every project since the beginning of time: lack of communication.

Take the number of directs you have, multiply that number by 1.5, and that’s the number of choices you need to make available to your team in your e-mail.

Don’t choose Monday morning, because meetings slow people down, and you don’t want to slow them down at the start of the week. Don’t choose Friday afternoon, because if your O3 gets stepped on, you won’t have time to reschedule. Some managers prefer to have all of their O3s on one day (if they don’t have too many). Some managers prefer to spread them out. Our data are inconclusive about which works better—do what works for you.

Don’t let your directs choose whatever time works for them.

Don’t choose times that work for you without any input.

The reason you need 15 half-hour slots if you have 10 directs is so the last direct who chooses still gets a choice. Don’t worry—those five unused slots will come back to you.

Send Out a One-On-One E-mail Invitation You can find a recommended text to use for the e-mail on our website link. Basically, it says that you’re going to start doing weekly One On Ones in three to four weeks, it explains why you’re doing them, and that your e-mail is to start the scheduling process. Give your directs 48 hours to respond with their chosen time. Tell them to “Reply to All” when they respond so that everyone will know which time slots have been taken.

planning is everything; plans are nothing. Things are going to change.

So, you set the schedule, and then after a few weeks, you allow for some changes, based on whether the schedule is working for both you and your directs.

Once you’ve sent the e-mail and set the schedule, set some time apart in your next staff meeting—say, 30 minutes—and walk everyone through what you’ve learned here. Walk them through the purpose, the agenda, how you’re going to take notes, and how they’re going to continue indefinitely.

For 12 weeks, don’t introduce any other new management behavioral change. Just work on One On Ones, for 12 weeks. At the end of the 12 weeks, you’ll know your directs better, and you’ll be much more aware of how to deliver the next steps.

If you start delivering feedback using our model after only a few weeks of O3s, you’ll be learning two things at once. We’ve tested it, and it doesn’t work. If you don’t take time to build trust, your directs will struggle more and longer with getting more feedback from you.

(It’s a great deal easier to give and receive feedback when trust has been built.) When you do it wrong, however, it feels really wrong to the direct. But doing it right just isn’t all that difficult.

When the average manager gives feedback, the focus is on what happened. The manager thinks about what happened in the past and asks herself how to talk to the direct—about what happened, in the past, about which the manager can do nothing. It ought to be obvious why talking about something that happened in the past is a problem. It also ought to give you a clue as to why directs get defensive when managers talk to them about their mistakes. They get defensive because managers talk to them about their mistakes—which happened in the past—about which the directs can do nothing. So, they feel trapped.

Have I made any mistakes in the last month? If you’re like the rest of us, you’ll privately admit, “yes, a number of them, if I’m being honest.” Did I intend to make those mistakes? Did I set out to mess things up on purpose? If you’re like the rest of us, you’ll immediately say, and perhaps vehemently, “No, of course I didn’t.”

Well, remember, our directs are similar to us. They made mistakes, but they weren’t actively trying to mess things up. They had good reasons for the mistakes they made! So, of course they’re going to respond to a discussion about their mistake by giving their reasons for doing what they did. The mistake may not be good, but at least their reasons were.

Challenge someone who fears you at some level, and you’ll get some pushback.

The purpose of performance communications (and therefore feedback) is to encourage effective future behavior.

Rather than thinking, “What can I say to this person about her mistake?” or, “How can I praise her for that great decision?” the right approach is to focus on what you want (the future), not on the past, because there’s nothing she or you can do about the past.

If your direct made a mistake, you want different behavior. If your direct did something well, you want more of the same.

When you realize this, you realize you’re not very interested in the mistake itself when it comes to talking about performance. Sure, you want to know what the mistake was, but you can’t do anything about it, because it’s already happened. The only question is, can you encourage the direct not to do it again?

The Manager Tools Feedback Model has four simple steps: Step 1: Ask. Step 2: State the Behavior. Step 3: State the Impact of the Behavior. Step 4: Encourage Effective Future Behavior.

Asking (and honoring a “no” response, if it is given) enables you to make sure that the direct is listening. To make this clear, before we ever use the Manager Tools Feedback Model with our team, we brief them about it first.

It’s an important managerial rule to never ask a question of your directs if you don’t intend to honor their answer.

Asking directs for permission to give them feedback significantly increases their appreciation for your giving them the feedback and also the likelihood of their effective future behavior.

do you want to be the boss, or do you want your team to be more effective?

We say, “When you (insert behavior)…”

The words you choose to say out loud to others are a choice, and different words produce different results. Your choice of words makes a difference in business results. Furthermore, certain words are known to produce distinctly better results in certain situations.

Even if the intent is the same, the words matter if they’re likely to influence the outcome.

Meaning is determined 7 percent based on the words we use, 38 percent by tonal differences, and 55 percent by nonverbal cues (facial expressions and body language).

What you do and how well you do your job are behaviors as well.

As a general rule, work product behavior is defined more specifically as: Quality: How does your work compare to accepted standards of effectiveness and excellence? Quantity: How much work have you done? This is certainly true in many jobs where there are numerical goals. There are also many jobs that are not formally measured where quantity and efficiency can be assessed. Accuracy: Does your work require rework, or does it meet generally accepted practices in your profession? Timeliness: Do you meet deadlines? Speed can sometimes create inefficiencies, but usually it is an enormous competitive advantage. Frequency of work product is also a part of timeliness. One’s own timeliness is included, too—being where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be there. Documents: You’re responsible for the communication (and analysis and ideas) you present to others in written and electronic form. E-mails are behavior: you made choices about what you said and how you said it. This is very much akin to the words you say and how you say them, as mentioned earlier.

we’re bad at guessing what others’ intent is, and our directs know they can argue about what’s in their head, because we can’t prove that was “actually” their intent.

Step 2 of the model always begins with the words, When you. By starting your sentence with these words, you encourage yourself to focus on the direct’s behavior.

In step 3, we state the impact that the direct’s behavior has had. These words form the effect part of cause and effect, the reaction part of action and reaction, and the response part of incident and response.

Our guidance is to look for small impacts that happen every day. It’s easier to give feedback on them, and all those small changes will add up.

Beginning step 3 with “Here’s what happens”

When we are giving negative feedback, we are asking the direct to behave differently. We’re not punishing the past mistake, because we’ve already forgiven it. Remember that our focus is on the future, not the past.

The easiest way to ask the direct to do this is, “Can you change that?” All this requires from the direct is an affirmative answer. Once you and your directs are comfortable with the model, you can also use “What can you do differently?” This is a more difficult question, because it requires the direct to come up with an alternative right away.

Giving immediate feedback is ideal. When athletes perform, they take an action, and they get an immediate response to their action. They can adjust based on what happens. When we drive, we turn the wheel, and the car responds. When we say something in a conversation, the person we’re talking to responds quickly.

The point of immediacy is not to wait. The sooner your directs get feedback about what they do, good or bad, the more quickly they can implement that feedback. If managers can give feedback immediately, it works better.

Frankly, most managers know that immediate feedback is really hard to achieve. And so they make the perfection—which is immediate feedback—the enemy of the good—which is feedback as soon as is practicable.

The value of feedback doesn’t decline appreciably within the first three to five days the vast majority of the time.

don’t give feedback that’s more than a week old.

Positive and negative feedback sound identical.

The anger is what’s driving my desire, not my direct’s effective future behavior.

Question 1: Am I Angry?

Question 2: Do I Want to Remind or Punish?

Question 3: Can I Let It Go?

If you’re not angry, if it’s not about the past or about punishment, and if you can let it go, then go ahead and give the feedback.

Remember that feedback is about the future, right? Suppose you don’t give the negative feedback, and then, for whatever reason, the behaviors that you were going to address don’t occur again. Seriously, what’s wrong with that? Just take credit for the magical change! Doing nothing worked.

The Shot across the Bow.

Basically, a shot across the bow says, “I can reach you, and I can hit you if I want to.”

In other words, we recommend that you give in when a direct argues or gets defensive.

Managers report to us that 91 percent of directs, when given negative feedback in our format, change their behavior after one instance.

Systemic feedback changes what you are talking to your direct about and raises the level of consequences associated with a continued failure to change. Systemic feedback addresses the direct’s combination of continued failure to change with the direct’s stated commitment to change. It addresses the greater failure to meet a repeated commitment. Failure to meet commitments is a systemic failure that no organization can long tolerate among its members.

Rest assured, our directs know that continued failure to change a behavior that we’ve asked to change is a problem.

I’m going to keep giving him feedback about his weekly failure for six weeks without much difference. I will probably offer him help, as mentioned above. But whether he accepts the help and uses it or doesn’t, I’m still obligated to give him the feedback. I’m not going to not talk to him about his failure to meet a standard just because he’s “working on it.” I’m happy he’s working on it, and I want him to continue. And, he’s still not making it, and I’m still going to talk about that too.

Directs who feel that they can’t make a couple of mistakes—even in the same area—get defensive quickly.

Standard feedback is about small behaviors. Systemic feedback addresses the moral hazard of a direct committing to new behavior but then failing to follow through. We can tolerate directs who make mistakes. We cannot tolerate directs who repeatedly make commitments they don’t keep.

You should use systemic feedback when you have already given six instances of standard feedback in a period of time that indicates a pattern, and the direct has not been engaging in the behavior they’ve committed to.

It is not appropriate to deliver systemic feedback in a casual way. Committing to actions and then not following through is notably more serious than missing a quality deadline, even if it is done repeatedly.

We Must Be Faithful to the Feedback Model’s Step 4.

Implied Sanctions Must Be Delivered.

However, if we promise sanctions, we must deliver them when and how we say they are going to be delivered, if behavior change is not forthcoming.

Systemic feedback is an exceptionally effective way to get the direct’s attention and to motivate the change of a direct who has resisted change up to that point. It does so in a way that is faithful to the overall feedback system, which is all about behavior. It also adds weight to the delivery of the feedback, by addressing a far more dangerous behavioral weakness: a failure to meet commitments.

After 12 weeks of having One On Ones, you can start the process of delivering your performance communications in the Manager Tools Feedback Model.

Announce Your Intention in Your Weekly Staff Meeting

Feedback is an individual behavior, but announcing it to the team says that everyone is going to treated similarly.

Schedule 30 Minutes for Your Briefing

Cover the Purpose of Feedback

The fear that your directs will feel about feedback will cause them to attribute to you motives that you are unlikely to have in your heart. So, you’ve got to counteract that fear and tell them plainly why you’re using the feedback model. Tell them when you give them feedback, you’re focused on the future.

Walk Them through Each Step of the Feedback Model

“I’ve got an obligation to help you be at your very best every day. If you’re like me, you’re not always sure that your good work is being recognized or that it’s what the boss wants. And you’re not sure if you’re always doing it exactly right or if there is a better way to do it. The feedback model is just a way for us to talk about what you’re doing and what the results are.”

Tell your directs that negative feedback isn’t about punishment; it’s about doing things better. It is about the future.

Give Only Positive Feedback for Eight Weeks

They’ve learned to be afraid of any performance communications, because they are rare and so often negative.

If you are wondering how much feedback you should give, shoot for one item of feedback to one direct per day as you start. This does not mean one item of feedback to each of your directs but, rather, just one item of feedback to any one member of your team. Start slowly.

Add in Negative Feedback after Eight Weeks

Stay as Positive as You Can

If you believe you should be “vigilant” against “mistakes,” two things will happen gradually: you’ll start seeing all the mistakes, and you’ll stop seeing all the good behaviors.

Positive feedback is a much more powerful tool than negative feedback. Don’t wait your entire career to finally realize that.

The third critical behavior for effective managers is to ask for higher levels of performance: Ask for More.

If a direct is capable of more/better/higher performance, the manager is obligated to work hard to make it happen.

Many managers are afraid of introducing conflict, fearing it may increase turnover rates (even though, of course, the opposite is the case).

Feedback takes seconds, but coaching takes months—it seems much harder.

Manager Tools defines coaching as a systemic effort to improve the performance of a direct in a specific skill area.

Step 1: Collaborate to Set a Goal Step 2: Collaborate to Brainstorm Resources Step 3: Collaborate to Create a Plan Step 4: The Direct Acts and Reports on the Plan

Once we’ve decided what our direct is going to get better at—more about which in a moment—we sit down with the direct and set a goal.

Note that the first three steps of our model start with the word collaborate.

Coaching is most effective when it is collaborative. Managers know where the most likely opportunities are, but the direct is the one who will be learning and growing, and the manager can’t do that for the direct any more than the direct can always be right picking the topic or knowing the resources.

Manager Tools uses a goal structure called DBQ: Deadline, Behavior, Quality. We start with the Deadline portion because deadlines drive behavior. Also, because we remember that coaching is a more powerful tool than feedback, we usually don’t set deadlines of less than four months away. If someone can change their behavior in less than four months, the person probably just needs a lot of feedback and we don’t need a coaching plan.

We have to define what the measure of success is for the behavior we’re expecting to change.

We recommend you write down the coaching engagement goal on your One-On-One forms.

There is no one approved solution to how to help any person get better at any skill or ability. Too many of us managers mistakenly think, “Oh, there’s a right way to do this, but since I don’t know it, and there’s risk in being wrong, it’s better not to try.” Rather than making the perfect the enemy of the good, we’re going to take some steps to help Derek. If they don’t work perfectly, we don’t care, as long as Derek makes progress that he wouldn’t have made had we not tried.

You don’t have to know how to get someone from start to finish to stop interrupting. You only have to know how to start them to learn how to not interrupt.

But to avoid doing anything that might be wrong, what most of us do is nothing at all.

We all seem to want silver bullets—quick and easy, one-shot, no-brainer solutions. Stop looking for those (there aren’t any). Start thinking about things that might work. When they do, celebrate the progress toward the goal. When they don’t, consider it a lesson learned.

The idea with all brainstorming is simply to go for volume, not accuracy.

It is silly for us to assume we will know exactly how to improve someone else in some skill that we ourselves are not necessarily good at.

The steps in the plan each have three parts: a deadline, a behavior, and the reporting that the task is done, which is inherent in the task. The reporting (see the list below) is what makes a task a deliverable.

Don’t expect the direct to learn it the way we did. Mike likes to read books; I like having mentors. Neither one is right; they’re just different. This is just respect for behavioral diversity.

Note here something that surprises a lot of managers: we’re only going to plan the first one to two weeks. We are not going to plan the entire six months’ worth of work.

If you’re like most managers, you’ve learned that if you assign additional work, and give it a long deadline, it’s unlikely to get done.

the vast majority of directs struggle with long deadlines.

And at some level you know that urgency is a key driver of organizational behavior. You know that, if you have to do something and there’s no deadline, all other things being equal, you’re going to act on the tasks that have deadlines that are reportable or enforceable, and you won’t do the one that has no deadline.

the best way to help people improve is by creating short-term tasks.

Deadlines that are going to be enforced but that are believed to be reasonable and reachable are a big facilitator of coaching success.

Reachable and reasonable deadlines drive behavior better than anything else.

So, what the Manager Tools Coaching Tool does is leverage what we know of human organizational behavior to set short deadlines, on do-able tasks, to increase the chance of completion.

This feeling of accomplishment is not to be taken lightly. It will lead to more effort in the weeks ahead, more willingness to keep at the self-improvement project when there are other tasks on the direct’s desk.

Also notice the use of tasks that are not done until they are reported on as “being done.” Yes, work is “done” in the mind of the doer when she finishes the task, but the work has no value to the organization until the organization knows it’s done. That’s the difference between assigning a task and assigning a deliverable.

The answer is the direct, for two reasons. First, the direct is the first to know, and reporting is always easier for the one who did the work. Second, the direct can do the report on it in less time than the manager can find out that it’s done, at a lower labor cost per minute, too.

Thus, we don’t assign reading a chapter of a book, for instance. We assign the task of reporting (to the boss) that reading.

There’s something else that’s important here as well. The adult learning model reminds us that we learn by doing. Whenever possible, we look for opportunities to observe our direct engaging in the behavior we want, to provide the direct with feedback on what we observe, and we make that a regular, very short-scope task.

We cannot stress this enough. All the classes in the world, all the books, all the mentors—none of that matters if the behavior doesn’t change.

The way this process is set up, we’re getting daily or at least regular updates in the form of task completion e-mails, and we are briefly discussing the direct’s progress each week during our One On One. If we are coaching one of our directs, we expect the direct to brief us during the One On One on his or her progress for the week.

We don’t tell the direct to spend the direct’s time on the agenda updating us. We tell the direct that we’ll ask about it during our agenda time, or we’ll cover it in the “future” portion of the O3.

Every week, in every One On One, we’re reviewing completed tasks, rescheduling uncompleted tasks, and creating new deliverables based on where we are in the process. That may include going back to our brainstormed resource list.

When the direct runs out of tasks, we just sit down in the next O3 and either extend the resource the direct is already using (more mentor meetings, more book chapters to read, more meetings to attend during which interruptions are counted, more positive feedback goals on not interrupting) or go back to our resource list to see if there’s something there we could use to help the direct move toward the goal.

When a particular resource doesn’t seem to work, we stop using it.

Following 12 weeks of One On Ones, and eight weeks of only positive feedback, followed by eight weeks of both positive and negative feedback, it’s time to roll out coaching slowly.

It’s not a good idea to try to start coaching everyone all at once.

After coaching a couple of your top performers through one or two successful coaching sessions, roll out coaching more broadly across your entire team.

He recognized early as a software development manager that his job had changed from solving technical problems to making others more effective so they could solve problems. His job had changed from one about technology to one about people. When he continued to get promoted, he realized that his job had changed again—from leveraging others’ technical skills to leveraging others’ people skills. And he found that if he hired or promoted the right people, he could trust them to take on more and more responsibility. And he delegated more and more responsibilities to them over time to help them grow.

He benefited enormously from his bosses giving him more to do.

Too many managers today think that because they are smarter and more effective at getting things done than their directs, they should try to get more done by doing it themselves. This isn’t sustainable,

What happened? They didn’t learn to trust their folks and delegate as a manager. Then, when they got that “big” promotion, their workload tripled. What’s more, as an executive, they had to spend roughly a third of their time talking to other execs, building coalitions to get things done.

If you’re a manager, your key to long-term success is to master the art of delegation.

Delegation, on the other hand, is you turning over responsibility for one of your regular responsibilities—something you routinely do—on a permanent or long standing basis, to one of your directs. Task assignment is different from delegation.

There’s no way you’re ever going to be 100 percent efficient. The in-between spaces represent our natural inefficiencies.

Don’t ever delegate a new responsibility your boss has just given you to one of your directs. Learn it first, master it, before you consider delegating it.

One of your small balls is a big ball to your direct.

Why shouldn’t you delegate one of your big balls to your direct? Because it would get bigger, and it would crush him. Because the balls get bigger as they go down the organizational hierarchy, your directs will be overwhelmed.

The best solution is to delegate each of the five small balls to a different direct.

The individual contributor stops doing something (or, more specifically, and to stay with the math, five small things). We call this “delegating to the floor.”

If we’re going to protect everything that individual contributor does, we’re going to force the company to stop taking on new customers, new revenue, new opportunities in the marketplace.

Delegating has five steps. State your desire for help Tell them why you’re asking them Ask for specific acceptance Describe the task or project in detail Address deadline, quality, and reporting standards

Notice, we don’t say, “Brian, can you do me a favor?” This isn’t a personal request. It’s a work request. We’re asking nicely, but we’re not getting personal.

We also don’t say, “Sarah, I need some help.” That word “need” gives the direct the impression that they don’t have a choice. But the best delegations allow the direct to say no.

Look for four areas of your directs’ abilities to determine what to delegate to whom: what they’re good at, what they like to do, what they need to do, or what they want to do. As a general rule, disregard what you are good at, or what you like to do.

This isn’t about you. In delegating your lesser responsibilities, you ought not to be thinking about yourself. They’re not valuable to you, but they could be very valuable to your directs. Don’t think about you, and about what you want to get rid of. Think about them, and what they could benefit from.

One reason we do this is that a direct who has already agreed (81 percent of them) is much more likely to listen to the details with an attitude of ownership and trying to solve the problem. If we wait to ask until they’ve heard all the details, they will often listen to all the details in a defensive way, worrying about workload and priorities.

Reporting.

Meetings.

Presentations.

Projects.

The direct knows they can say no, and they choose to say yes. That ability to choose frees up that last full measure of work devotion that we want from them.

Never ask a question whose answer you don’t intend to honor.

The trumping of honest answers leads to dishonesty. Period.

Eustress sometimes has to become distress to know where the dividing line is.

Love. If you want to be a great manager, do these things with love. What I mean is professional love: the willingness to risk yourself for the benefit of another. It means doing something that may be a little more difficult for you, as a way of showing respect for your colleagues and your organization.

You can be demanding while also showing respect for your team. You don’t have to withhold positive feedback. You can give negative feedback with love in your heart. You can deliver tough messages with kindness. You don’t have to be mean, short, or disrespectful to challenge people. You don’t have to be brusque, or rude. You don’t have to “act like the boss.” Nor do you have to sugarcoat hard messages. Be direct, and be kind doing it. That takes love. Today, part of why management isn’t held up in a noble way is because nobody’s been teaching us how. And it’s also because we’ve gotten away from loving our colleagues and team members. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Choose the harder right, instead of the easier wrong. Love is the engine to help you get there.

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