First, Break All the Rules Read online

  ISBN: 978-1-59562-041-5

  Copyright © 1999 Gallup, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Gallup®, Q12®, The Gallup Path®, and The Gallup Poll® are trademarks of Gallup, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. The Q12 items are protected by copyright of Gallup, Inc., 1993-1998. All rights reserved.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Introduction: Breaking All the Rules

  Chapter 1: The Measuring Stick

  A Disaster Off the Scilly Isles

  “What do we know to be important but are unable to measure?”

  The Measuring Stick

  “How can you measure human capital?”

  Putting the Twelve to the Test

  “Does the measuring stick link to business outcomes?”

  A Case in Point

  “What do these discoveries mean for one particular company?”

  Mountain Climbing

  “Why is there an order to the twelve questions?”

  Chapter 2: The Wisdom of Great Managers

  Words From the Wise

  “Whom did Gallup interview?”

  What Great Managers Know

  “What is the revolutionary insight shared by all great managers?”

  What Great Managers Do

  “What are the four basic roles of a great manager?”

  The Four Keys

  “How do great managers play these roles?”

  Chapter 3: The First Key: Select for Talent

  Talent: How Great Managers Define It

  “Why does every role, performed at excellence, require talent?”

  The Right Stuff

  “Why is talent more important than experience, brainpower, and willpower?”

  The Decade of the Brain

  “How much of a person can the manager change?”

  Skills, Knowledge, and Talents

  “What is the difference among the three?”

  The World According to Talent

  “Which myths can we now dispel?”

  Talent: How Great Managers Find It

  “Why are great managers so good at selecting for talent?”

  A Word From the Coach

  “John Wooden, on the importance of talent.”

  Chapter 4: The Second Key: Define the Right Outcomes

  Managing by Remote Control

  “Why is it so hard to manage people well?”

  Temptations

  “Why do so many managers try to control their people?”

  Rules of Thumb

  “When and how do great managers rely on steps?”

  What Do You Get Paid to Do?

  “How do you know if the outcomes are right?”

  Chapter 5: The Third Key: Focus on Strengths

  Let Them Become More of Who They Already Are

  “How do great managers release each person’s potential?”

  Tales of Transformation

  “Why is it so tempting to try to fix people?”

  Casting Is Everything

  “How do great managers cultivate excellent performance so consistently?”

  Manage by Exception

  “Why do great managers break the Golden Rule?”

  Spend the Most Time With Your Best People

  “Why do great managers play favorites?”

  How to Manage Around a Weakness

  “How do great managers turn a harmful weakness into an irrelevant nontalent?”

  Chapter 6: The Fourth Key: Find the Right Fit

  The Blind, Breathless Climb

  “What’s wrong with the old career path?”

  One Rung Doesn’t Necessarily Lead to Another

  “Why do we keep promoting people to their level of incompetence?”

  Create Heroes in Every Role

  “How to solve the shortage of respect.”

  Three Stories and a New Career

  “What is the force driving the New Career?”

  The Art of Tough Love

  “How do great managers terminate someone and still keep the relationship intact?”

  Chapter 7: Turning the Keys: A Practical Guide

  The Art of Interviewing for Talent

  “Which are the right questions to ask?”

  Performance Management

  “How do great managers turn the last three Keys every day, with every employee?”

  Keys of Your Own

  “Can an employee turn these Keys?”

  Master Keys

  “What can the company do to create a friendly climate for great managers?”

  Gathering Force

  Appendices:

  APPENDIX A: The Gallup Path to Business Performance

  “What is the path to sustained increase in shareholder value?”

  APPENDIX B: What the Great Managers Said

  “What did great managers say to the three questions quoted in chapter 2?”

  APPENDIX C: A Selection of Talents

  “Which talents are found most frequently across all roles?”

  APPENDIX D: Finding the Twelve Questions

  “How did Gallup find the twelve questions?”

  APPENDIX E: The Meta-Analysis

  “What are the details of the meta-analysis?”

  Gallup Press

  Gallup Employee Engagement Center

  Foreword

  * * *

  Just 13% of the world's workers — and 30% in the U.S. — are engaged at work. Over the past decade, overall trends in engagement have remained flat.

  But it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, many companies have bucked this pattern to achieve double to triple the percentage of engaged workers we find in the populace. Among elite organizations, those that engage nine employees for every actively disengaged employee, company performance far surpasses their peers.

  This didn't happen by accident. These companies did something different and intentional. They developed a critical mass of great managers who look out for the organization's best interests while at the same time improving the lives of the people they manage. The 12 elements of great managing, which distinguish engaged and productive workplaces from their less successful counterparts, have now been measured and studied in hundreds of organizations employing more than 25 million people.

  First, Break All the Rules is a summary of Gallup studies accumulated in the mid to late 1990s that resulted in findings that have withstood the test of time, massive changes in technology, and the economy. It describes what great managers do differently than average, or mediocre, managers. Since this book's publication in 1999, Gallup has conducted many additional iterations of research across the world that reveal a multitude of connections between engagement and organizational outcomes — including research presented in the State of the American Workplace and State of the Global Workplace.

  Engaged workers view the world differently than disengaged workers do because they have managers who develop their strengths rather than fixate on their weaknesses. The insights from the study of great managers provide a lens into how your company can keep your best performers, engage your customers, improve performance and profitability — and ultimately improve the economy through authentic job growth.

  — Jim Harter, Ph.D., Gallup's Chief Scientist, Workplace Management and Wellbeing

  November 2013

  Introduction: Breaking All the Ru
les

  * * *

  The greatest managers in the world do not have much in common. They are of different sexes, races, and ages. They employ vastly different styles and focus on different goals. But despite their differences, these great managers do share one thing: Before they do anything else, they first break all the rules of conventional wisdom. They do not believe that a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They do not try to help a person overcome his weaknesses. They consistently disregard the Golden Rule. And, yes, they even play favorites.

  Great managers are revolutionaries, although few would use that word to describe themselves. This book will take you inside the minds of these managers to explain why they have toppled conventional wisdom and reveal the new truths they have forged in its place.

  We are not encouraging you to replace your natural managerial style with a standardized version of theirs — as you will see, great managers do not share a “standardized style.” Rather, our purpose is to help you capitalize on your own style, by showing you how to incorporate the revolutionary insights shared by great managers everywhere.

  This book is the product of two mammoth research studies undertaken by the Gallup Organization over the last twenty-five years. The first concentrated on employees, asking, “What do the most talented employees need from their workplace?” Gallup surveyed over a million employees from a broad range of companies, industries, and countries. We asked them questions on all aspects of their working life, then dug deep into their answers to discover the most important needs demanded by the most productive employees.

  Our research yielded many discoveries, but the most powerful was this: Talented employees need great managers. The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor.

  This simple discovery led us to the second research effort: “How do the world’s greatest managers find, focus, and keep talented employees?” To answer this question we went to the source — large companies and small companies, privately held companies, publicly traded companies, and public sector organizations — and interviewed a cross section of their managers, from the excellent to the average. How did we know who was excellent and who was average? We asked each company to provide us with performance measures. Measures like sales, profit, customer satisfaction scores, employee turnover figures, employee opinion data, and 360-degree surveys were all used to distill the best managers from the rest. During the last twenty-five years the Gallup Organization has conducted, tape-recorded, and transcribed one-and-a-half-hour interviews with over eighty thousand managers.

  Some of these managers were in leadership positions. Some were midlevel managers. Some were front-line supervisors. But all of them had one or more employees reporting to them. We focused our analysis on those managers who excelled at turning the talent of their employees into performance. Despite their obvious differences in style, we wanted to discover what, if anything, these great managers had in common.

  Their ideas are plain and direct, but they are not necessarily simple to implement. Conventional wisdom is conventional for a reason: It is easier. It is easier to believe that each employee possesses unlimited potential. It is easier to imagine that the best way to help an employee is by fixing his weaknesses. It is easier to “do unto others as you would be done unto.” It is easier to treat everyone the same and so avoid charges of favoritism. Conventional wisdom is comfortingly, seductively easy.

  The revolutionary wisdom of great managers isn’t. Their path is much more exacting. It demands discipline, focus, trust, and, perhaps most important, a willingness to individualize. In this book, great managers present no sweeping new theories, no prefabricated formulae. All they can offer you are insights into the nature of talent and into their secrets for turning talent into lasting performance. The real challenge lies in how you incorporate these insights into your style, one employee at a time, every day.

  •••

  This book gives voice to one million employees and eighty thousand managers. While these interviews ground the book in the real world, their sheer number can be overwhelming. It is hard to imagine what one talented employee or one great manager sounds like. The following excerpt, from a single interview, captures something of both the tone and the content of our in-depth interviews.

  As with all the managers we quote, we have changed his name to preserve his anonymity. We will call him Michael. Michael runs a fine-dining restaurant owned by a large hospitality company in the Pacific Northwest. Since Gallup first met Michael fifteen years ago, his restaurant has been in the company’s top 10 percent on sales, profit, growth, retention, and customer satisfaction. From the perspective of his company, his customers, and his employees, Michael is a great manager.

  Throughout the book you will hear Michael’s comments echoed by other managers and employees. But rather than pointing out these echoes, we ask you to make the connections for yourself as you move through the chapters. For the moment we will simply let Michael speak for himself.

  GALLUP: Can you tell us about your best team ever?

  MICHAEL: You mean my whole team? I have at least thirty people working here.

  GALLUP: Just tell us about the core of the team.

  MICHAEL: I suppose my best team ever was my wait staff team a few years ago. There were four of them. Brad was about thirty-five, a professional waiter. Took great pride in being the best waiter in town. He was brilliant at anticipating. Customers never had to ask for anything. The moment the thought entered their mind that they needed more water, or a dessert menu, Brad was there at their shoulder, handing it to them.

  Then there was Gary. Gary was an innocent. Not naive, just an innocent. He instinctively thought the world was a friendly place, so he was always smiling, cheerful. I don’t mean that he wasn’t professional, ’cause he was. Always came in looking neat, wearing a freshly pressed shirt. But it was his attitude that so impressed me. Everyone liked to be around Gary.

  Susan was our greeter. She was lively, energetic, presented herself very well. When she first joined us, I guessed that she might lack a little common sense, but I was wrong. She handled the customers perfectly. On busy nights she would tell them pleasantly but firmly that last-minute reservations couldn’t be accepted. During lunch some customers just want to get their order, pay, and leave. Susan would figure this out and let their server know that, with this particular customer, speed was of the essence. She paid attention, and she made good decisions.

  Emma was the unspoken team builder in the crew. Quieter, more responsible, more aware of everyone else, she would get the team together before a busy Saturday night and just talk everyone through the need to put on a good show, to be alert, to help each other get out of the weeds.

  These four were the backbone of my best team ever. I didn’t really need to interfere. They ran the show themselves. They would train new hires, set the right example, and even eject people who didn’t fit. For a good three years they were the restaurant.

  GALLUP: Where are they now?

  MICHAEL: Susan, Emma, and Gary all graduated and moved back east. Brad is still with me.

  GALLUP: Do you have a secret to building great teams?

  MICHAEL: No, I don’t think there is a secret. I think the best a manager can do is to make each person comfortable with who they are. Look, we all have insecurities. Wouldn’t it be great if, at work, we didn’t have to confront our insecurities all the time? I didn’t try to fix Brad, Susan, Gary, and Emma. I didn’t try to make them clones of each other. I tried to create an environment where they were encouraged to be more of who they already were. As long as they didn’t stomp on each other and as long as they satisfied the customers, I didn’t care that they were all so different.

  GA
LLUP: How did you get to know these people so well?

  MICHAEL: I spent a lot of time with them. I listened. I took them out for dinner, had a couple of drinks with them. Had them over to my place for holidays. But mostly I was just interested in who they were.

  GALLUP: What do you think of the statement “Familiarity breeds contempt”?

  MICHAEL: It’s wrong. How can you manage people if you don’t know them, their style, their motivation, their personal situation? I don’t think you can.

  GALLUP: Do you think a manager should treat everyone the same?

  MICHAEL: Of course not.

  GALLUP: Why?

  MICHAEL: Because everyone is different. I was telling you about Gary before, how great an employee he was. But I fired him twice. A couple of times his joking around went too far, and he really jerked my chain. I really liked him, but I had to fire him. Our relationship would have been ruined if I hadn’t put my foot down and said, “Don’t come in on Monday.” After each time, he learned a little bit more about himself and his values, so I hired him back both times. I think he’s a better person because of what I did.

  My firm hand worked with Gary. It wouldn’t have worked at all with Brad. If I even raised my voice with Brad, I would get the exact opposite reaction from the one I wanted. He would be crushed. He’d shut down. So when I disagree with him, I have to talk quietly and reason everything through with him quite carefully.

  GALLUP: Isn’t it unfair to treat people differently?

  MICHAEL: I don’t think so. I think people want to feel understood. Treating them differently is part of helping them feel unique. If I know that one of my people is the primary breadwinner, then as long as they perform, I will be more likely to give him better hours than someone who is a student. The student might be a little annoyed, but when I explain the situation to him, he usually calms down. Besides, he now knows that I will be paying attention to his personal situation when he needs a special favor. That’s always a good message to send.

  GALLUP: Other than Gary, have you ever fired anyone?

  MICHAEL: Unfortunately, I have. Like most managers, sometimes I don’t pick the right people and things start to fall apart.