It’s election season, the GOP convention is literally in my backyard, and while this is not a political blog, I can’t help myself. As we as Americans grapple with the question of who we want to be our next leader (or at least those people who live in the 11 annointed swing states do), I have had a lot of thoughts lately about the question of what makes a good leader, and what the differences are between successful leadership in politics and successful leadership in business.

James O’Toole’s article on President Bush on page 31 of the September issue of Fast Company (no link available yet) brings up a really interesting point in comparing Bush to former president Ronald Reagan. He asserts that “what made Reagan effective and respected was that his actions followed consistently from a positive worldview.” (I’d also argue that the positive worldview as a starting point had something to do with it, but that’s beside the point.) He goes on to say that Bush has an “implementation problem” in that he “has vacillated between contradictory approaches to leadership: realism and idealism.” His central thesis is stated very clearly that

“Realists and idealists can both be effective leaders. But one cannot be both at once…The leadership lesson for GW – and for any leader – is simple: Followers don’t much care if leaders are realists or idealists, but they distrust inconsistency.”

This may or may not be true in the political arena, but I know it’s not true in business. Jim Collins’ watershed books Built to Last and Good to Great — both must reads! — describe the ideal CEO as someone who can simultaneously be optimistic and idealistic about the future of the company while simultaneously recognizing and dealing with the realities of the short-term situation. Ironically for this posting, Collins calls this the Stockdale paradox, after retired Admiral James Stockdale, a military leader and erstwhile vice presidential candidate of Ross Perot in the 1992 election.

As CEO, I have to constantly be selling the vision of the company — what we’re trying to become and how we’re going to get there — in broad strokes to my investors, board, management team, employees, and even customers. It’s that vision that keeps the whole machine running and keeps everyone focused and excited and working hard towards our long-term goals. But I have to be equally vigilant about the mundane realities of the current quarter, making our numbers, containing costs, and running the machine. If I did either one without the other, I think the whole system would break down.

Is Bush’s problem, as O’Toole asserts, that he articulated two different types of reasons for the war in Iraq — one rooted in Realism (WMD) and one rooted in Idealism (freedom and democracy)? Same goes for his states reasons for the tax cut — Realism on the one hand (to stimulate the economy) and Idealism on the other hand (shrink government). I agree that the Bush Administration has occasional implementation problems and doesn’t have nearly the “following” that Reagan and other more successful leaders in the past have, but I don’t think they’re caused by combining Realism and Idealism in the President’s leadership style. I think the leader of the free world has to do both well, each at its appropriate time, in order to be effective at his job.

Next up in this series: Admitting Mistakes.

Book Short:  Just One Minute

What The One Minute Manager does for basic principles of management and goal setting, The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey does for delegation.  Both are blessedly quick reads (the classic “airport” book), and Ken Blanchard really nails some of management’s most critical components with simplicity and grace.

I’m a fan of the One Minute Manager school, and it does work well for some of the basics, but it has its limitations in terms of how broadly it can be applied.  My colleague Whitney McNamara‘s words in an email to me a few months back say it all:

OMM has actually been useful.  I have to agree that it’s got a bit of a “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” mystical simplicity thing going, but as you say, simple is sometimes what works best.

It’s really strong in that the basic lessons are at root so simple that they’re easy to forget about day to day…having them articulated in a similarly simple way, so that they stick at the top of mind easily, is nice.

The other side of that is that it presents such a simplified, best-of-all-possible-worlds sort of scenario that I did sometimes find myself wanting to set fire to the OMM’s office building and scream “let’s see you deal with *this* in 60 seconds, buddy”…but on balance a pretty good experience. 🙂

In the end, it’s not that good management is easy — but it can be quick and relatively painless if done well and regularly.

Book Short:  Be Less Clever

In Search of the Obvious: The Antidote for Today’s Marketing Mess, by Jack Trout, is probably deserving of a read by most CEOs.  Trout at this point is a bit old school and curmudgeonly, the book has some sections which are a bit repetitive of other books he and his former partner Al Reis have written over the years, he does go off on some irrelevant rants, and his examples are a bit too focused on TV advertising, BUT his premise is great, and it’s universally applicable.  So much so that my colleagues Leah, Anita, and I had “book club” about it one night last week and had a very productive debate about our own positioning and marketing statements and how obvious they were (they need work!).

The premise in short is that, in advertising:

Logical, direct, obvious = relevant, and

Entertaining, emotional = irrelevant

And he’s got data to back it up, including a great case study from TiVo on which ads are skipped and not skipped – the ones that aren’t skipped are from companies like Bowflex, Hooters, and the Dominican Republic, where the presentation of the ad is very direct, explanatory of the product, and clear.  His reasons why advertising have drifted away from the obvious are probably right, ranging from the egos of marketing people, to CEOs being to disconnected from marketing, to the rise in importance of advertising awards, and his solution, of course is to refocus on your core positioning/competitive positioning.

It is true that when the only tool in your box is a hammer, everything starts to look a bit like a nail, but Trout is probably right in this case.  He does remind us in this book that “Marketing is not a battle of products. It is a battle of perceptions”– words to live by.

And some of his examples of great obvious advertising statements, either real or ones he thinks should have been used, are very revealing:

• Kerry should have turned charges that he was a flip-flopper in 2004 around on Bush with the simple line that Bush was “strong but wrong”
• New Zealand: “the world’s most beautiful two islands”
• The brilliance of the VW Beetle in a big-car era and “thinking small”
• Johnny Cochrane’s winning (over)simplification of the OJ case — “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit”
• BMW is still, 30 years later, The Ultimate Driving Machine
• “Every day, the Kremlin gets 12 copies of the Wall Street Journal. Maybe they know something you don’t know.”

If you are looking for a good marketing book to read as a refresher this year, this one could be it.  And if you’re not a very market-focused CEO, this kind of thinking is a must.

And for the record, the library of books by Trout and/or Reis (sometimes including Reis’ daughter Laura as well) that I’ve read, all of which are quite good, is:

• Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind – the original – a brilliant, short, classic
• The New Positioning (link, post) – good refresher on the original, gets into repositioning
• Marketing Warfare –
• The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR – excellent but pre-social media
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding –
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! –
• Bottom-up Marketing –
• Differentiate or Die: Survival in Our Era of Killer Competition –
• In Search of the Obvious: The Antidote for Today’s Marketing Mess – the current book

Book Short – Another Must-Read by Lencioni

The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate The Three Essential Virtues (hardcover,kindle is Patrick Lencioni’s latest and greatest.  It’s not my favorite of his, which is still The Advantage (post,buy ), but it’s pretty good and well worth a read.  It builds on his model for accountability in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post,buy)and brings it back to “how can you spot or develop and a good team player?”

The central thesis of the book is that great team players have three attributes – hungry, humble, and people-smart.  While I can’t disagree with those three things, as with all consultants’ frameworks, I sound two cautionary notes:  (1) they aren’t the absolute truth, just a truth, and (2) different organizations and different cultures sometimes thrive with different recipes.  That said, certainly for my company, this framework rings true, if not the only truth.

Some great nuggets from the book:

-The basketball coach who says he loves kids who want to come to practice and work as hard as they can at practice to avoid losing
-The concept of Addition by Addition and Addition by Subtraction in the same book – both are real and true.  The notion that three people can get more done than four if the fourth is a problem is VERY REAL
-When you’re desperate for people, you do stupid things – you bring people on who can get the job done but shouldn’t be in your environment.  I don’t know a single CEO who hasn’t made this mistake, even knowing sometimes that they’re in the process of making it

The framing of the “edge” people – people who have two of the three virtues, but not the third, is quite good:

-Hungry and Humble but not People-Smart – The Accidental Mess Maker
-Humble and People-Smart, but not Hungry – The Lovable Slacker
-Hungry and People-Smart, but not Humble – The Skillful Politician

In my experience, and Lencioni may say this in the book, too (I can’t remember and can’t find it), none of these is great…but the last one is by far the most problematic for a culture that values teamwork and collaboration.

Anyway, I realize this is a long summary for a short book, but it’s worth buying and reading and having on your (real or virtual) shelf.  In addition to the story, there are some REALLY GOOD interview guides/questions and team surveys in the back of the book.

Book Short: The Challenger Sale

I’ve written a couple times in the past about how we sell at Return Path.  I’ve written about our principle sales methodology for the past decade, SPIN Selling, by Neil Rackham (and Major Account Strategy, also by Rackham, which is basically SPIN Selling for Account Managers), which focuses on a specific technique for solution selling by using questioning to get the prospective client to identify his or her own needs, as well as Jeffrey Gitomer’s two short books, the Little Red Book of Selling and Little Red Book of Sales Answers, which are long on sales questioning techniques.  And I also wrote this post about another book called Why People Don’t Buy Things, by Kim Wallace and Harry Washburn.  The great thing about this book is that it dives into the need for variation in sales communication strategies based on BUYER personae, such as The Commander, The Thinker, and The Visualizer.

While both these principles are good – asking questions and tailoring communication styles based on the buyer – anyone who has ever tried to run a whole sales call by asking questions knows that it’s REALLY HARD and can sometimes just outright flop.  There’s a new movement that I’ve been reading articles about for a few months now called The Challenger Sale, and I finally finished the book about it this past week.

If you run a company or a sales team that has any kind of complex sale or a hybrid software/service model, then you should read The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson.  Whether you adopt the methodology or not, there are a few really great insights in the book that will help you recruit and manage a sales team.  Some of the insights include:

• Understanding the five types of sales reps and why/when they’re successful/not successful.  The labels are telling in and of themselves:  the Lone Wolf, the Hard Worker, the Relationship Building, the Reactive Problem Solver, and the Challenger
• Why sales reps can be trained as Challengers, and how important it is to rally an entire organization around this sales model, not just train sales reps on it (that’s probably a good reminder for any sales methodology)
• The ingredients of the Challenger sale – Commercial Teaching for Differentiation, Tailoring for Resonance, Taking Control of the Conversation.  I found the section on Commercial Teaching the most enlightening, particularly in our business, where we’re not selling an established category with established budget line items

The Challenger Sale feels like the beginning of a wave that will take over a lot of selling organizations in the next decade, either directly as written or as it inspires ancillary works and related techniques.  For that reason alone, it’s worth a read.

Book short:  Proto Gladwell

I’m sure author Robert Cialdini would blanch if he read this comparison, but then again, I can’t be the first person to make it, either.  His book, Influence:  The Psychology of Persuasion, is an outstanding read for any marketing or sales professional, but boy does it remind me of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Blink (book; blog post).  Of course, Cialdini’s book came out a decade before Gladwell’s!  Anyway, Influence is a great social science look at the psychology that makes sales and marketing work.

Cialdini talks about sales and marketing professionals as “compliance practitioners,” which is a great way to think about them, quite frankly.  He boils down the things that make sales and marketing work to six core factors: consistency, reciprocation, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity.

Reciprocation – we hate being in a state of being beholden so much that we might even be willing to do a larger favor than the one done for us in order to remove the state.  Think about “free gifts” in merchandising as an example of this, or being in a negotiation where someone trying to make a cold sale on you offers a fallback, smaller sale.  For example, you don’t want to buy anything from the boy scout, but after you say no to the $5 raffle ticket and he asks about the $1 candy bar, you feel more obligated to buy the $1 candy bar because the boy scout has “given” on his initial request.

Consistency – once we have made a choice, personal and interpersonal pressures force us to back it up and justify our earlier decision – even more so when in writing or when declared to others.  This is why marketers love getting testimonials from customers; the testimonial locks the customer in emotionally, as well as encouraging others to buy the product.

Social proof – if others think it’s correct, it must be correct, especially if those other people are like us.  There are some scary examples in the book here, such as Reverand Jim Jones and The People’s Temple mass suicides.  Gripping, but creepy.

Liking – we listen to people we like, and we like people to whom we’re similar or who are physically attractive.  This section was especially reminiscent of Blink, but with different and more marketer-focused examples.

Authority – we have an extreme willingness to listen to authority, even when the authority isn’t quite relevant.  This is why celebrity endorsements work so well.

Scarcity – we have a extreme motivation of fear of loss, either or something, or of the opportunity to have something.  Who doesn’t like to keep doors open as long as possible?

The one place the book falls down a little bit is in the sections at the end of each chapter talking about how to resist that particular technique through jujitsu – the art of “turning the enemy’s strength to your advantage.”  While nice in theory, Cialdini’s examples aren’t super helpful beyond saying “when you think you’re getting suckered, stop — and then say no.”

Overally, though, the book is well written and choc full of examples.  Thanks to marketer Mallory Kates for sending me this great book!

Book Short:  Worth Buying Free

The cynic in me wanted to start this book review of  Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson, by complaining that I had to pay for the book.  But it ended up being good enough that I won’t do that (plus, the author said there are free digital versions available — though the Kindle edition still costs money).  At any rate, a bunch of reviews I read about the book panned it when compared to Anderson’s prior book, The Long Tail (post, link to book).

I won’t get into the details of the book, though you’ll get an idea from the paragraph below, but Anderson has a few gems worth quoting:

• Any topic that can divide critics into two opposite camps — “totally wrong” and “so obvious” — has got to be a good one
• Free makes Paid more profitable
• Younger players have more time than money…older players have more money than time
• Doing things we like without pay often makes us happier than the work we do for a salary
• It’s true that each generation takes for granted some things their parents valued, but that doesn’t mean that generation values everything less
  

While Free is s probably not quite as good as The Long Tail, it does a good job of organizing and classifying and explaining the power of different economic models that involve a free component, and I found it very thought provoking about our own business at Return Path.

We already do a couple forms of Free — we practice the “third party” model, by giving things away to ISPs but selling them to mailers; and we practice Freemium by providing Senderscore.org and Feedback Loops for free in order to attract paying customers to our testing and monitoring application and whitelist.  But could we do others?  Maybe.  They may not be revolutionary, but they’re smart marketing.

As some of the reviewers write, the book isn’t the be-all-end-all of marketing, it overreaches at times, and it is more applicable to some businesses than others, but Free was definitely worth paying for.

Book Short:  Bringing it on Home

Book Short:  Two New Ones from Veteran Writers

I’m feeling very New York this week.  I just read both Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, and Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America, by Tom Friedman.  Both are great, and if you like the respective authors’ prior works, are must reads.

In Outliers, Gladwell’s simple premise is that talents are both carefully cultivated and subject to accidents of fate as much as they are genetic.  I guess that’s not such a brilliant premise when you look at it like that.  But as with his other two books, The Tipping Point (about how trends and social movements start and spread) and Blink (about how the mind makes judgments), his examples are fascinating, well researched, and very well written.  Here are a couple quick nuggets, noting that I don’t have the book in front of me, so my numbers might be slightly off:

• Of the 200 wealthiest people in human history, 9 were Americans born within 5 years of each other in the 1830s – far from a normal distribution for wealth holders/creators
• Most Silicon Valley titans were both within 2 years of each other in 1954-1955
• 40% of great hockey players are born in Q1; 30% in Q2; 20% in Q3; and 10% in Q4, as the “cutoff date” for most youth leagues is January 1, so the biggest/oldest kids end up performing the best, getting the best coaches and most attention that propels them throughout their careers

Also, as with his other books, it’s hard to necessarily draw great and sweeping conclusions or create lots of social policy, both of which are quite tempting, as a result of the data.  Scholarly, comprehensive research it might not be, but boy does he make you think twice about, well, lots of things.

In Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Tom Friedman makes a convincing case that two wrongs can make a right, or more to the point, that fixing two wrongs at the same time is a good way of fixing each one more than otherwise would be possible.  What I like best about this book is that it’s not just another liberal journalist trashing America — Friedman’s whole premise here (not to mention language) is fiercely optimistic and patriotic, that if we as a country take a sweeping global leadership role in containing CO2 emissions, we will both save the planet and revive our economy, sustaining our global economic leadership position into the next century at a time when others are decrying the end of the American empire.

His examples are real and vivid.  Like Gladwell, one never knows how unbiased or comprehensive Friedman is, but he covers some of these topics very poignantly:

• The very strong negative correlation between control of oil supply and democracy/freedom
• A comprehensive vision for the energy world of the future that’s very cool, apparently has already been piloted somewhere, and feels like it’s actually doable
• The startling numbers, even if you sort of know them already, about the sheer number of people who will be sharing our planet and consuming more and more resources in the coming decades
• How too many years of being a privileged nation has led to politics he brilliantly calls “dumb as we wanna be”

Friedman calls his mood sober optimism — that’s a good description.  It’s a very timely book as many Americans hold out hope for the new administration’s ability to lead the country in a positive direction and also restore American’s damaged image in the world come January 20. I have to confess that I still haven’t read Friedman’s The Earth Is Flat, although I read him in the New York Times enough and have seen enough excerpts (and lived in business enough the last 5 years!) to get the point.  And actually, Hot, Flat, and Crowded has enough of the “Flat” part in it that even if you haven’t read The Earth is Flat, you’ll get more than just the gist of it.

(This post was written by my colleague Bethany Crystal and originally published on the Bolster blog yesterday. While I am still trying to figure out what posts to put on this blog vs. Bolster’s blog since the blogs are pretty similar, I will occasionally run something in both places.)

At Bolster, we believe that 2021 will mark the rise of the on-demand economy for executives. More than ever before, executives are seeking out roles that distinctly aren’t full-time for a variety of reasons – they’re in between full-time roles and want to stay engaged and meet a wide range of potential employers; they’re retired or semi-retired/post-exit and want to keep working, just not full-time; they’re fully employed but are looking for advisory opportunities to help others; or they are committed to the more flexible lifestyle that being an on-demand affords. As business leaders, you might be wondering how to take advantage of this trend and incorporate on-demand talent onto your existing team. Don’t worry – we’ve got you covered.

Let’s start with a quick primer on the distinct types of on-demand talent. Here are the four most common themes we see among our member network at Bolster:

The Four Types of On-Demand Talent

1. Interim: Someone who is partially or fully dedicated to working with your company, but only temporarily (you can think of them as “filling a gap”)
2. Fractional: Someone who works part-time (or “fractionally”) with your company on an ongoing basis (they “own” the function on a long-term, part-time basis)
3. Advisor or Coach: Someone who supports your existing team by offering external advising, coaching, or mentorship as needed (this might be on a temporary or long-term basis)
4. Project-Based: Someone who is brought on to complete a specific project or a fixed span of work (this is the closest to typical consulting work)

Depending on your business needs, the capacity of your existing team, and your resourcing, you might find it useful to have one or more on-demand executives in the mix at any given time. We’ve also found this can be a great way to keep things fresh at the leadership level and make sure new ideas are circulated with some regularity.

Business Opportunities for On-Demand Talent

While every company’s on-demand talent needs will vary, we’ve already seen a few patterns emerge from the 2,000 executives in our member network. Here are a few times to think about bringing on-demand work to your business.

Choose interim work if you need…

• A temporarily placeholder at the exec level
  Whether unexpected or planned, transitions at the executive level can come with a high cost: Any week that goes by with an unfilled seat adds more work to the team, contributes to business lag, or both. While full executive searches can take six months (or more!) to get right, many CEOs find it helpful to bring on interim help as a “stopgap” in the meantime. The most obvious benefit of interim on-demand work is to prevent your business from falling behind in areas where you may not have a deep bench below the executive level. And you might also consider that bringing in a seasoned professional as you conduct your full-time search will give your team a proxy to compare against, making that placement process a bit easier. Last – while it’s not a guarantee, there’s always the chance that your interim hire is a great fit for you and wants to stick around for the long term! You then benefit from an on-the-job “interview” or audition.
• Surge capacity staffing
  Imagine a situation where your business doesn’t need an executive in a particular function. You’re small, scrappy, and you’re getting along perfectly well with the team you have in place – and you can fill in the bits of executive leadership required for that function yourself from time to time. But then something pops up where you need to be the CEO and can’t afford to ALSO be the CXO. An interim CXO could be the right solution. For example, the 3-5 months run-up to a Series A or B financing could be a good time to bring on an experienced CFO if your only relevant team members are handling AP, AR, and Payroll. Or you could be working on your company’s public launch with a less experienced marketing team and an agency – and an interim CMO could make all the difference between success and sideways.
• Parental leave coverage
  With a growing business trend of increased parental leave coverage, CEOs are starting to use interim executives to fill holes that might temporarily exist on the leadership team. Interim work is particularly useful if there isn’t an obvious “second in command” role on that team who might take on a stretch project in their absence. Implemented correctly, bringing on an interim exec can also help to squash any fears of “getting replaced” while someone is away on leave. As an added bonus, bringing in a new face (if only temporarily) can give the remaining team a chance to “try out” a new leadership style and share feedback about what worked and didn’t work during the interim period.

Choose fractional work if you need…

• A seasoned professional’s experience and skillset (but not all the time)
  Before every full-time leadership hire, there is the sticky “in between” period of need. That’s the period when some work starts piling up, but not quite enough to fill an entire work week for one person at the executive level – or the period when you know you need a more seasoned leader in a function but just can’t afford one full-time. If you don’t have an experienced executive in the role, you miss opportunities for effectively setting up scalable practices and processes. Often, a lack of senior focus in a functional area means that you miss strategic opportunities, and sometimes it also means that you expose yourself to risk that could be avoided with the right person having ownership of the function. This is the perfect time to introduce fractional work to your business. The most classic example of fractional executive talent is the CFO who oversees the bookkeeping and accounting for several companies at once. But you can find a fractional executive for just about anything. You might consider this type of on-demand executive if you don’t yet have anyone in that functional area, if you have a team of less experienced specialists or even a more junior generalist leader in that functional area, if you want a taste of what it’d be like to dedicate more resources there, or if you need just a few things done right, without having to think about them yourself.

Choose advisory or coaching work if you need…

• Mentorship for your current executives
  Sometimes it’s helpful to see what “great” looks like in order to achieve greatness yourself. If you’re looking for a way to give a current leader an added boost to their development plan, consider bringing on someone who can serve as a mentor or advisor on a temporary or long-term basis. Someone who has been in your shoes before and can give advice and guidance based on their experience. This on-demand exec role has two big benefits: The first being that it demonstrates to your executive team that you’re committed to their ongoing success and growth, which boosts morale (and hopefully performance). The second is that you’ll be able to equip your current team with the tools they each need to scale instead of having to bring on a new wave of executives for each business stage. The advisor or coach usually works a few hours per month, once they’ve set up a strong coaching relationship.
• Access to top talent without the full-time price tag
  Just as remote work unlocked the potential to find “the best of the best” without geographic constraints, on-demand work does the same at the executive level. More and more, we’re seeing CEOs incorporate advisors to their business as a way to gain exposure to best in class talent (at a fraction of the cost). This can be a great way to introduce subject matter or functional expertise into your organization without committing to a full-time salary.

Choose project work if you need…

• A fixed-scope expert engagement at the executive level
  Just as tools like Task Rabbit made it possible to find experts to accomplish tasks on a personal level (such as moving furniture or painting a bedroom), on-demand talent makes it possible to find seasoned executives to complete one-off projects at an expert level. That’s why, on Bolster, we ask each each member to indicate what roles they can take on, and also what projects they can be hired to do. As a CEO, you might consider outsourcing some of the crunchy stuff at the exec level that might take a lot of time, or in cases where you need a quick turnaround to get to an MVP. Common projects we’ve seen to date include building sales commission plan structures, designing a go-to-market launch plan for a new product, running due diligence on an acquisition, overhauling pricing and packaging, working on a strategic plan, TAM analysis, budgeting process, or creating a diversity & inclusion strategy for the company.
• An experimental project that won’t distract the current team
  One final area where you might consider on-demand work is for a project that feels more like an addendum to your current business, or an early experiment. At Bolster, we brought on an on-demand executive to help us think through and roll out a brand new product that we’re in the early days of testing right now. We’ve seen other CEOs use project-based work at the exec level for things like evaluating market expansion possibilities or speccing out the MVP of a potential new product.

This is just a short list of some of the possibilities where on-demand talent might support you in your business today. One of our favorite parts about this type of work is just that – the flexibility it offers to you and your team. Whether your business is just getting started or if you’re operating on all cylinders, don’t forget to consider on-demand work as part of your CEO toolkit for this year and beyond.

– Bethany Crystal, February 2, 2021

Book Short:  Next, Write a Sequel

Written by Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter and billed as “the long awaited sequel to First, Break All the Rules” (one of the best management books I’ve ever read), I thought 12: The Elements of Great Managing, was good, but not great.  12…, along with the original book First… and Now, Discover Your Strengths, the latter two both by Marcus Buckingham, are all based on an extensive database of research done on corporate America by the Gallup organization over many years.  All three are valuable reads in one way or another, although I found this to be the weakest of the three.  (Note that Now… is different from the other two in that it’s not about management, it’s about self-management — very different, though based on the same research.)

Anyway, the elements of great managing, so say the authors, is all about creating employee engagement.  I totally buy into that.  And since no book short on 12… would be complete if it didn’t list out the 12…

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
10. Do I have a best friend at work?
11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
12. This last year, have I had the opportunities at work to learn and grow?

The book fleshes out each of the 12, gives examples (some of which are better/clearer than others), and then addresses compensation in a very interesting chapter at the end.  Key takeaways on comp:

– Higher pay doesn’t guarantee greater engagement
– Good and bad employees are equally likely to think they deserve a raise
– Money without meaning isn’t enough
– Most employees, most of the time, feel undercompensated
– Individual pay can/should be private, but comp criteria should be very public
– People who feel well-compensated generally work harder

The book also cites a very provocative article suggesting that organizations would handle comp better if they made everyone’s comp public (in contrast to the final bullet above, yes).  I’m going to write more about compensation in future postings, so I’ll leave this section on those notes.

Finally, the book’s two closing thoughts are perhaps its most prescient:  one critical element of BEING a great manager is HAVING a great manager; and the managers who put the most into their people, get the most out of their people.