My Favorite of the How-to-Manage Books

Hands down, my favorite book about managing was First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. It is fabulous with concrete and usable advice, based on interviews with 2 million employees and 80,000 managers.

The thesis of the book is that you should figure out what your employees' talents are and place them in positions where those talents will shine, instead of trying to force them to improve skills for things they will never be good at.

Below are 12 things employees need to rate highly if a business is to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees. The first six questions have the strongest links to the business outcomes of productivity, profitability, retention, and customer satisfaction.

WHAT DO I GET?

(1) Do I know what is expected of me?

(2) Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?

WHAT DO I GIVE?

(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?

DO I BELONG HERE?

(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?

HOW CAN WE ALL GROW?

(11) In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?

(12) This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

Good managers address these issues in order. If you work on question (7) before your employees rate their jobs highly on issues (1) and (2), it is wasted effort.

The book also gives some good ideas about interviewing for talent, as well as concrete suggestions for creating good working environments where excellence at any job is rewarded equally. The idea is to to create an evironment that rewards excellent engineers, secretaries, and managers equally, rather than forcing those who are excellent at one type of activity to move into another type of activity in order to get a raise.

I LOVED this book.