Leadership Advice

Here is a cautionary tale about the consequences of a "forced ranking" performance review system. Kurt Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes.

 

“If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

t has been said that we remember 80% of the feelings in a conversation but only 20% of what was actually said. It doesn’t matter whether the conversation was uplifting or a downer, we seem to be wired to remember well what we felt.

 

As a leader, you’re being watched closely and although your words are important, it’s how you say them (the emotion behind them) that will be recalled and make the biggest impact on others.

It takes guts for a leader to admit when he or she is wrong, and even more so in front of an underling because it implicates the boss is part of the proble...

For 15 years, the authors studied what makes people happy at work. They also learned a lot about misery. Employees want to make a valuable contribution, and feel great when they make progress toward doing so. Yet many leaders, from team managers to CEOs, are already surprisingly expert at smothering employee engagement.

A stretch goal is most often an outcome metric, and is influenced by so many variables that systematic, scientific improvement isn't possible. A "target condition," by contrast, describes how we want a process to function — and that description requires that you understand the current condition deeply enough to know where to begin your improvement efforts. Without sufficient knowledge of the current condition, there's no way to make intelligent progress towards your ultimate goal.  

Few things in business are more important than how a manager reacts to problems. Here is some great advice on that point by Scott Berkun. There's gold here including: "Calm down. Nothing makes a situation worse than basing your actions on fear, anger, or frustration." "Get the right people in the room ... the more complex the issue, the smaller the group should be." and "The best available choice is the best available choice, no matter how much it sucks (a crisis is not the time for idealism)."

Yes, you need confidence and conviction in your authority once you've reached the top. But you equally need humility and vulnerability if you want to evolve to an even more inspired type and level of leadership. Which is why it's so important for successful people to keep cultivating the attributes of a lucky attitude and a lucky network.

 

The seven attributes of a lucky attitude are among the most difficult ones for leaders to master and maintain. They are: humility, intellectual curiosity, optimism, vulnerability, authenticity, generosity, and openness. Self-awareness around these seven qualities is key to not becoming a disconnected leader with nowhere to go but down.

The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of Generation Facebook. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of their worklife to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than a mid-twentieth-century bureaucracy.

The best bosses are obsessed with learning details about every aspect of the business; the worst--the least promising and most arrogant--treat such nuances as being somehow beneath them.  

“Big picture only” bosses often make decisions without a deep understanding of the constraints, cost, and time required to implement them. 

From a PwC study of 19,000+ employees who completed exit interviews with PwC clients, the results are clear. Five out of the 10 reasons are directly related to supervisor skills or lack thereof (I include recognition for contributions in this category as too often this is fully reliant on the supervisor).

Indeed, employees do leave managers, not companies.

Jobs said in an interview with Betsy Morris in 2008 "People think focus means saying 'yes' to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying 'no' to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully."

According to the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI), money is not the major motivator among college-educated workers. While raises or bonuses are not unimportant, especially in this uncertain financial climate, recent CTI data shows that workers across a spectrum of ages are looking for a remix of conventional rewards. Many of these don't cost a dime but pay off in increased engagement, loyalty, and willingness to go the extra mile.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is tech’s leading philosopher-CEO. He was recently featured in a cover story in Forbes, and George Anders summarizes his key leadership lessons. This is great stuff:

 

“There are two kinds of companies: those that try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.”

 

“In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”

We all like to think we are leading the way for our teams, but how do we know we aren't only in the way? Ask yourself these questions.

A powerful workplace motivator is our natural tendency to measure our own performance against the performance of others..  New research suggests that in deciding how hard we work and how well we think we're performing, social comparisons matter just as much as financial incentives."