Preferred Summaries
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Author: Harvard Business Review
Pages: 224
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Category: Management & Leadership
Summarized By preferred Books…Distributing Knowledge!
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Name of Book: On Managing People
Chapter one:
Leadership that Gets Results By Daniel Goleman
SMP1: What is the most important task of a leader?
SMP2: The most professional answer you can get when you ask this question is that great Leaders get Results! There is no magic wand for getting results, because there are different styles of leadership and they are all suitable for different situations. So, great leaders have learnt how to use the different styles when occasion demands.
SMP3: The different styles of leadership are Coercive Leaders: these leaders are a bit autocratic and demand immediate compliance to instructions. Authoritative leaders inspire people towards a given vision. Affiliative leaders lead by building emotional bonds; they focus on relationships. Democratic Leaders lead by consensus and group participation. Pacesetting Leaders lead by doing it themselves and then demand that others do same excellently while being self driven. Coaching Leaders focus on developing people’s potentials for the future.
SMP3: According David McClelland of Harvard fame, the leadership style of leaders derives from their emotional components. He also discovered that great leaders have considerable mastery of some basic emotional strengths like Self awareness; a fair assessment of one’s strengths and weaknesses and manifestation of faith in one’s strengths. Self management; the ability to be in charge of one’s emotion, live by a certain standard of self imposed integrity and worth. Motivation; consistent internal drive to meet up to a certain self imposed goal. Empathy; ability to understand people emotionally; appreciate their perspective and help them become better. Social skill; ability to demonstrate leadership anywhere one finds oneself with little or no crisis.
Lesson:
Everything concerning effective leadership could be learnt. The most effective single style is the authoritative style but it cannot survive all situations. There is no single formula for great leadership. Aspirants to great leadership must consistently improve on their styles and know when to use and when not to use them
Chapter Two: How do you Motivate Employees? By Frederick Herzberg
SMP1: How do you get an employee to do what you want?
In most cases, managers don’t motivate, they just compel people by the use of authority and in doing so, they get motion instead of motivation. Several motivational approaches in use and labeled as KITA by the author are: A. Negative Physical KITA: this is where a manager employs physical force to motivate employees. B. Negative Psychological KITA: a manager instead resorts to psychologically oppressing people to get them motivated. C. Positive KITA: offering of different incentives to get people to do something.
SMP2: Motivation is self initiated drive towards a given direction.
SMP3: Motivation Myths: Organizations have come up with several techniques in getting employees motivated to no avail such as: Fringe benefits, reduced work time, increased salary, sensitivity trainings, communication trainings, Job participation, and counseling. All these have just become myths spiraling into endless circles that once again, achieve temporary motion with no motivation.
SMP4: Hygiene Factors vs. Motivators: The author discovered that at work, factors like achievement, recognition for achievement, the job itself, responsibility and growth motivate people while what he call hygiene factors like Supervision, relationship with supervisor, policy, salary, relationship with peers, work condition and security are the greatest cause of de-motivation at work.
SMP5: Eternal Triangle: there are three theories regarding motivation and they are: A. Organizational theory: proponents of this hold that human needs vary with situations and by aligning needs to meet situations while arranging work accordingly will motivate. B. Industrial theorists hold that the right economic package and proper scheduling of work to satisfy the mechanistic nature of man will motivate. C. Behavioral theorists hold that working on human sentiments and attitudes via proper training packages will motivate.
SMP6: The best way to motivate workers; to get them to want to do more without external inducement, according to hygiene-motivators theory above is to enrich their jobs, not to enlarge them. Enriching jobs psychologically energizes workers. The author calls them vertical job loading as opposed to horizontal loading. Simple means of vertical job loading are: a. removing controls b. increasing self accountability c. specifying jobs d. additional authority on their own job e. new and challenging roles f. helping them become experts at new skills
Lesson: if you have employees, use them and if you can’t, let them go. Motivation is like installing a generator in people; it must be self initiated and the best way of doing this is structuring the work to be more psychologically challenging and engaging. There’s a natural drive in man to become more, to become capable, to become important and when this job satisfies these, the worker will start operating like he has a generator in him.
Chapter three:
The Set Up to Fail Syndrome By Manzoni and Barsoux SMP1: When employees fail, who is to blame? Managers are directly implicated, if not responsible for the failure of employees. There is a dynamic that usually sets in immediately an employee starts underperforming; the manager begins to assume that the employee may be incapable, lacks the skills or is not well suited for the job. In order to help the employee as they assume, they evolve and begin to implement certain techniques that eventually lead to the failure of the employee. These techniques come in the form of over supervision and monitoring, over stressing of instructions, undue demand for compliance. In fact, the manager engages in micro managing. The manager believes that by doing this, he is ensuring that the employee doesn’t blunder more and more but the effect of his actions are largely the opposite. This is because; the employee so treated begins to feel not trusted, unsure and insecure, perceiving the undue monitoring as proof of his incompetence. Eventually, what the manager wanted to avoid will end up happening; failure of the employee. This syndrome breeds two group of employees; the manager’s in circle; those who enjoy the respect and trust of the manager and the out circle members; those that are just condoned.
SMP2: The Syndrome is costly: the cost of this syndrome to the organization is enormous. It takes a great chunk of the manager’s time in trying to oversee everything done by the employee. It also produces a liability prone employee who is often fired, adding to the cost of employee turnover.
SMP3: Breaking out is Hard to do: very few employees break out of the managers ‘out circle’ to join the ‘in circle members’. This is because, for an employee to achieve this transition, he has to set and achieve super human targets and often, will not achieve them because he is human which ends up worsening the situation
SMP4: Getting it Right: before any rectification can happen, both parties must accept that there’s a problem. By following these steps, it can be corrected: 1. the location to be used must be a neutral one to make the employee comfortable; preferably, outside the office. 2. Both parties should diagnose the employees weaknesses factually, not sentimentally. The manager should question his assumptions regarding the employees and back them with facts.3.The causes of the weakness should be unearthed mutually.4.Both should agree on mutual solutions which entails what both of them should do ameliorate the problem.5.Both must agree to hence forth communicate openly. Open communication is perhaps, the greatest way of sustaining the process of reversing the trend. Preventing this syndrome is far cheaper than reversing it but if it’s happened, the steps above should be adhered to in correcting it.
Lesson:
Mangers contribute greatly to the performance of their employees, assuming, of course that the employee has the basic qualifications and skills. Great managers are always aware of this trend and do everything to break it before it develops and they do this by focusing on facts and continually questioning their biases.
Chapter four:
Saving Your Rookie Managers from themselves by Carol Walker
SMP1: When new managers are promoted, often, they fail to appreciate that their job is no longer that of personal achievement but of helping others succeed.
SMP2: Delegating: often, rookie managers believe that delegating work to others will make them appear as non achievers which was what helped them get promoted in the first place. They believe it takes the shine out of them and this stifles their leadership efficiency
SMP3: Getting Support: New managers, instead of asking for help, often want to do it all themselves, even when they are stuck. This is because they think that asking for help portrays them as incapable without knowing that in fact, management expect them to ask for it. This often punctures their leadership.
SMP4: Projecting Confidence: Rookie managers find it difficult transiting from pleasing their former bosses to leading their new team. In deferring unnecessarily to management and making pressurized decisions, they end up appearing less confident before their team and weaken their leadership.
SMP5: Big Picture: New managers often focus on immediate activities that make them look like achievers instead of long strategic goal of their team. This takes care of things temporarily but keeps them out of sync with the company’s overall goal
SMP5: Feedback: Most Rookie managers wait too long to elicit constructive feedback from their team members. A manager should detect when a subordinate starts floundering and offer help without being misunderstood. This sort of corrective feedback can be elicited when an employee does well on a task and senior management can make it easier by making feedback sessions to look like an empowerment session.
Lesson:
newly promoted managers should understand that no matter how smart they are that management positions are a bit complex and must be prepared and disposed to learning whatever it takes and from the right sources without feeling underrated.
Chapter Five: What Great managers do By Marcus Buckingham
SMP1: One thing sets great managers apart from the crowd; they discover what is unique about people and capitalize on it. They ignore their weaknesses and maximize their strengths, because everyone has got something in them. Whereas great leaders rally people towards a given vision, great managers discover people’s peculiarities and turn into a tool for victory.
SMP2: Great managers are Romantic: They don’t just detect employees’ talents but they create roles to suit those talents. Capitalizing on uniqueness saves time, makes the person more accountable and builds stronger team
SMP3: Three Levers: These three things define a great manger’s management approach; detect talents, detect what triggers those talents and find out how they learn things. Great mangers are aware that the greatest factor that determines performance is what the Father of Social Learning Theory; Albert Bandura calls self assurance. So, they re-enforce it often in their employees. Great managers attribute poor performance to lack of effort instead of deficient ability to save employee’s confidence. If its lack of skill, apply training but if its lack of talent, try pairing with a compensating talent.
SMP4: Great Managers Trigger Good Performance: Great managers know what makes their employees perform and they pull those strings often. It might work schedule, mode of supervision or cash reward but the bets trigger is Recognition. Employee performance is triggered by different circumstances. Some are triggered by peer recognition, others by private recognition and others by their boss’s admiration.
SMP5: Learning styles: according the author, there are three ways people learn. Some learn by analysis; where they simplify information by breaking it into pieces, before understanding the whole, some are Doers; who learn by doing and making mistakes and the last group is the Watchers; who learn by observing how it is done before being able to do themselves.
Lesson: Great managers focus on release instead of transformation. They create outlets and responsibilities for maximizing their employee’s peculiarities. They concentrate on utilizing the individuality of their employees instead of trying to make them fit the mold
Chapter Six:
Fair Process; managing in the knowledge Economy By Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
SMP1: People don’t just care about outcomes; they also care about the process that produces such outcomes. This is especially for companies that want to maximize the benefits of knowledge based economic system.
SMP2: Good outcome, Unfair Process: According to the author there was a company that wants to transit to a more mechanized means of production. The outcome from would be greater efficiency, greater skill development but the process was unfair due to poor communication on the part of management which made employees suspicious and unsure of the process and they eventually sabotaged the process. The company was so rooted in the outcome that they forgot about the process paid dearly
SMP3: What’s Fair Process? A fair understanding of fair process was arrived at by when John Thibaut and Lawrence Walker combined their interest in the psychology of justice with a study of process and the summary of their findings is that people want to treated as intelligent; people want their decisions to count in a decision that concerns them. They want to be valued as human beings not just as personnel
SMP4: Three Principles of Fair Process: There are Three Principles that govern fair process and they are 1. Engagement 2. Explanation and 3. Expectation Clarity. Engagement is sincerely getting people’s input in a decision that concerns them and giving them the power to accept or reject them, Explanation is getting the people to fully understand the details of this process and Expectation Clarity is stating before the process kicks off the expected outcomes, rewards and punishments accordingly.
SMP5: Fair Process in Knowledge Economy: Knowledge is a resource in the mind of people and cannot be coerced out but can only be inspired out. Its fair process that inspires people to go beyond the normal call of duty to sharing their ideas. Infact, its been discovered that fair process is more important that outcomes. This is not the same as performance and reward system of management. Rather, fair process is anchored on trust and commitment
SMP6: Overcoming Mental Barriers: Most managers confuse fair outcome with fair process. Paying salary on time, giving due rewards, satisfying needs are fair outcomes but not fair process. Often, this barrier is mental, because most managers know that knowledge is a form of power, so, they psychologically assume that sharing it will mean giving up their power. Some assume that employees only care for what’s best for them and therefore should be bothered with the process but it has been proven that when the process is fair, employees will even accept outcomes that are not totally in their favor.
Lesson:
Knowledge is key in today’s economy and must be sought from everyone concerned but people don’t share their knowledge until they know that you sincerely care.
Chapter Seven:
Teaching Smart People how to Learn by Chris Argyris
SMP1: Success in today’s economy is basically dependent on learning. Ironically, most of the highly placed and highly educated professionals who occupy management positions don’t know how to learn. Most people simply see learning as solving problems but its more than that. Often, due to their long period of traditional education, this professionals, without knowing adopt a particular mode of problem solving. When things go wrong, instead of questioning their approach, they look for scapegoats, believing that they are infallible, hence shutting down learning opportunity. The author opined that professionals are what he calls single loop learner; those who react to things from a traditional one-way approach and double loop learners as those who think and adapt solutions to particular situations. He maintained that effective learning is anchored on working on thought patterns or attitude, not feelings.
SMP2: How Professionals Avoid Learning: Most Professionals, though highly educated habitually avoid learning by deferring to external factors other themselves for causes of problems. Professionals think it absurd for any form of imperfection to be found in them. Hence, whenever any allusion is made to them as being contributive to non performance, they psychologically push the question away from themselves, thereby shutting down learning
SMP3: Defensive Reasoning and the Down loop: Human beings have a pattern of reasoning formulated with time as a means of self defense. To some questions, people just react automatically in a defensive way and the more probing the question, the more defensive they become. In the case of these professionals, often, haven not experienced any failure, hence, not knowing how to deal with it, as a defense, they have perfected a psychological means of responding to anything that tend to link their behaviors as contributive to any form of failure and this shuts down learning completely
SMP4: Teaching People to reason productively: Often, people are influenced to reason in a particular way without being conscious of this and learning can only happen by interruption. We can capitalize on the human intrinsic need to be productive and effective to teach them to reason. Use their desire for positive results to teach them the reasoning that produces such results. This involves rigorous analysis and crystallization just like any other management trouble shooting process. True learning engages and questions thought patterns and attitudinal responses.
Lesson:
Learning has to do with mental processes which often are automatic and requires deliberate probing .True learning is a courageous exercise, because it entails the acknowledgement of a default in one’s hitherto thought processes and anyone incapable of this is not ready to learn yet.
Chapter Eight:
How Unethical are you? By Mahzarin R. Banaji, Max H. Bazerman and Dolly ChughSMP1: On the surface, most people think that they are ethical in their decisions but researches and outcomes have proven that we are unconsciously and traditionally biased in our though forms. Almost everyone is guilty of this, because it has its roots in our traditional thinking imbibed thinking dynamics.
SMP2: Sources of Biased Decisions: 1. Implicit Bias; without knowing, we habitually form habitually forms standards that automatically inform our decision pattern. A standard example is that we traditionally and unquestionably associate thunder with rain but its not always so. 2. Bias that favors one’s group; often, we extend favors to those within our group setting like those who are like us, our race, peers etc. this habit is not wrong in itself but if extended, could constitute a bias 3. Over claiming credit; most successful people tend to rate themselves high in performance and that’s okay but in a group setting which is typical of every work place, over claiming credit often damages group morale and leads to less commitment.4. Conflict of Interest; almost everyone makes decisions to favor a group that favors them. For instance, if referring someone to a dealer you patronize will increase at least, the dealer’s respect for you, you are most likely to make that decision, even if that dealer is not the best around.
SMP3: Trying harder isn’t enough: organizations these days organize broad based ethical trainings but that isn’t enough. They must focus on the mindset behind decision making using these approaches: 1. collecting data; managers must look for tangible evidences that define the way they make decisions to avoid biases 2. Shaping the environment; environments are implicitly bias inducing, hence, the need for its control top avoid bias and 3.Broadening decision making process; according John Rawl’s veil of ignorance, only those who are ignorant of their own identity can make truly ethical decisions. Managers should deliberately ignore the group they represent and take on generic identity to avoid bias, hence, broadening their decisions
Lesson:
Everybody is prone to be biased in decision making but great managers curtail this by permanently being vigilant of the sources of bias in all their decisions.
Chapter Nine:
The Discipline of Teams by Jon R. Katzenback and Douglas K. Smith
SMP1: Teams are not just people coming together but people working together to get results. A group represents a set of values that incorporates people’s interests, opinions, doubts, achievements and reward for achievement. Teams are different from groups, because teams entail both individual and mutual commitments. A team is a small number of people with complementary skills, committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals and same approach towards a specific task to which they are mutually committed to. Specificity of goals while having a common purpose allows a team to be effective. The numerical size of a team also, is critical to its success; large numbers inhibits access to individual skills and mixability. Goal specifity allows teams to enjoy small wins as they pursue main objective, hence, creating dynamism, action, fear and the energy needed for effectiveness
Teams should be made up of people with skills suitable for the team objective. Team members should be so integrated that they can hold themselves accountable
SMP2: Team Types: 1. Teams that Recommend things: this functions mostly on consultative basis like task forces, audit groups etc. The main thrust of their work is getting off to a fast start and dealing with the bottlenecks needed to get recommendations implemented 2. Teams that Do things: this refer to those who are near or almost at the frontline, responsible for getting things done. 3. Teams that run things: this entails those that oversee things, those that undertake functional responsibilities. If companies don’t have the discipline needed to evolve teams due to the urgent need to get things done, they better stay with groups instead of indulging in deception. Effective teams do not swallow up individual efforts or organizational hierarchy, rather, they enhance them. Higher performing organizations need teams to do better.
Lesson: Teams are effective in driving any organization forward but it requires some degree of discipline of discipline to get this done and any organization that imbibes this discipline, though with patience with reap bountifully.
Chapter Ten:
Managing your Boss by John J. Gabarro and John P. Kotter
SMP1: To most people, this may sound a bit political or a bit manipulative but according to the authors, it’s a wholesome process of working with one’s boss to determine what is best for the boss, the company and you.
SMP2: Misreading the Boss/Subordinate Relationship: most people wrongly assume that the boss knows everything and needs nobody’s help but that’s very wrong, because, the both the boss and the subordinate have needs that should be mutually met by both of them. To do this, one needs the following: 1. understand the strengths, weaknesses and work styles of people 2. Use this Information to develop and manage a healthy relationship.
SMP3: Managing the Boss: in doing this, try to understand the boss and his context and your own situation. Understanding your boss entails understanding his work styles, pressures and personality and aligning your assignment to satisfy these.
SMP4: Understanding yourself: In managing your boss, you would have to understand yourself through self analysis and detect those things that make you work well with your boss and build on it. In doing this, you would have to appreciate that your boss is fallible so as not to over-depend or counter-depend.
SMP5: Compatible work styles: effectiveness in working with one’s boss, doesn’t mean that differences are not accommodated. It just means that any difference in work style you might have with your boss should be communicated to your boss such that your differences enhance instead of disrupt productivity
SMP6: Mutual expectations: its wrong for subordinates to assume that they understand the boss’s expectations. Great employees often has a way of directly or indirectly finding out from the boss what his expectations from them are
SMP7: Flow of Information: subordinates should never assume that the boss knows what they are doing, even though their work is an offshoot of his. Good employees have found a way of communicating to their boss the situations around their work in a style that is okay with the boss.
SMP8: Dependability and Honesty: this is perhaps one of the greatest blow to boss/subordinate relationship. You must ensure by all means that you are perceived implicitly or explicitly dishonest and undependable by doing what you say
SMP9: Good use of Time and Resources: no one has an unlimited store of time, energy and influence. So, a great subordinate should learn not to put a great demand on his bosses resources above which might injure his credibility. Whether, you know or not, you should manage your relationships well to excel.
Lesson:
in a crisis, subordinates suffer more that the boss. Therefore, wisdom demands that they learn to manage all aspects of their relationships with their bosses to optimize their productivity, that of their bosses and that of their companies
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