The One Thing You Need To Know To Be A Great Manager: discover what is unique about each person, and capitalize on it

The One Thing You Need To Know To Be A Great Manager

JENNA GOUDREAU AUG. 27, 2013, 2:53 PM 3,981 3

Marcus Buckingham aimed in 2005 to boil countless professional insights down to one piece of advice for managers, leaders, and individual contributors. His best-selling book, “The One Thing You Need to Know: …About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success,” pulled this off, and it holds up remarkably well.  For managers, Buckingham says the most important thing is to discover what is unique about each person, and capitalize on it. Why? Buckingham believes the ultimate goal of a manager is to figure out each individual employee’s talents, and turn those talents into performance. Leveraging an employee’s strengths can reap much better outcomes than attempting to better their weak spots, he says, which produces only small improvements. What’s more, it makes the employee responsible for honing their unique skills, and it’s better for the team to have each person working their best angles, so that they rely on and respect each other.

How? Learn their strengths and weaknesses, what motivates them, and their unique styles of learning, be it by watching, doing or analyzing. While observing them can be a useful strategy, an even more straightforward approach is asking them simple questions, like: What were the best and worst work days you’ve had in the past three months, and what were you doing? Who was your best manager, and what made the relationship work so well?

Meeting this primary goal typically involves following some basic principles:

1. Hire good people. Spend enough time on this step to thoroughly vet candidates and get the right person for the job, Buckingham says. Managers can identify talent and fit, he notes, by first defining what they’re looking for. In the interview, he suggests asking open-ended questions like “what do you enjoy most about the job?” to hear spontaneous answers, and requesting specific examples of how they’ve done things in the past.

From barnesandnoble.com

2. Set clear expectations, often. Buckingham says good managers don’t set once-a-year goals. Instead, they constantly revise and reinforce expectations, and meet with employees four to five times a year to talk about progress, offer feedback, and course correct.

3. Offer praise and recognition. “Recognize excellence immediately, and praise it,” Buckingham writes. “Praise isn’t merely a reaction to a great performance; it is a cause of it.” He strongly advises against withholding praise for an employee’s good work just because you don’t want it to go to their head. If performance is high, there’s no such thing as too much praise, he says. On the other hand, only offer it if warranted, since insincere praise is easy to sniff out.

4. Show your people you care about them. According to the research, there’s a clear link between caring and productivity, Buckingham says, to the point that workers who feel cared for by managers are less likely to miss work, have accidents, steal or quit. How do you do it? Essentially, the same way anyone shows kindness: Listen, tell them you care, keep their confidences, and learn about their lives, he says.

Ultimately, great managers make their employees’ success a primary goal, Buckingham says, and derive personal satisfaction from watching them grow.

“Success, whether as a manager, a leader, or an individual performer, does not come to those who aspire to well-roundedness, breadth, and balance,” Buckingham writes. “Success comes most readily to those who reject balance, who instead pursue strategies that are intentionally imbalanced.”

The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success Hardcover

by Marcus Buckingham  (Author)

Following the success of the landmark bestsellers First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham offers a dramatically new way to understand the art of success.
With over 1.6 million copies of First, Break All the Rules (co-authored with Curt Coffman) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (co-authored with Donald O. Clifton) in print, Cambridge-educated Buckingham is considered one of the most respected business authorities on the subject of management and leadership in the world. With The One Thing You Need to Know, he gives readers an invaluable course in outstanding achievement — a guide to capturing the essence of the three most fundamental areas of professional activity.
Great managing, leading, and career success — Buckingham draws on a wealth of applicable examples to reveal that a controlling insight lies at the heart of the three. Lose sight of this “one thing” and even the best efforts will be diminished or compromised. Readers will be eager to discover the surprisingly different answers to each of these rich and complex subjects. Each could be explained endlessly to detail their many facets, but Buckingham’s great gift is his ability to cut through the mass of often-conflicting agendas and zero in on what matters most, without ever oversimplifying. As he observes, success comes to those who remain mindful of the core insight, understand all of its ramifications, and orient their decisions around it. Buckingham backs his arguments with authoritative research from a wide variety of sources, including his own research data and in-depth interviews with individuals at every level of an organization, from CEO’s to hotel maids and stockboys.
In every way a groundbreaking book, The One Thing You Need to Know offers crucial performance and career lessons for business people at all career stages. Editorial Reviews

Review

“The One Thing You Need to Know is actually a modest title. It contains many things you need to know. Marcus Buckingham is flat out the most original, provocative writer there is on the subjects of leadership and management. He comes to his theories the old-fashioned way: by truly getting to know the people and the workplaces he writes about. He also happens to be a wonderful writer and a joy to read.”
— Tony Schwartz, coauthor of The Power of Full Engagement; president, The Energy Project

“Buckingham is a superb writer and speaker who can make complex ideas crystal clear, cut through to the core insight, and reveal its crucial importance. He has been an inspiration to all of us at Lexus.”
— Denny Clements, group vice president and general manager, Lexus U.S.

“As I read The One Thing You Need to Know, for the first time I had the urge to compare someone — Marcus Buckingham — to Peter Drucker. Buckingham performs the most magical of acts: He speaks with surpassing common sense, yet reaches profoundly uncommon conclusions. This is a wise — and radical — book; a true gem worth savoring.”
— Tom Peters

“Given the tremendous complexities of today’s business environment and consumer expectations, Marcus Buckingham is able to deliver a clear path of understanding to the simple truths at the heart of managing and leading. The ‘one thing’ I find invaluable about this book is its unique, challenging examples about how to stay laser focused on operational excellence.”
— Robert L. Nardelli, chairman, president, and CEO, The Home Depot, Inc.

“Marcus Buckingham has a keen sense of what it takes to excel, and he backs his insights with an impressive body of in-depth interviews and research. This is an important book for anybody who aspires to effective leadership, managing, or any kind of enduring individual achievement.”
— Richard M. Kovacevich, chairman, president, and CEO, Wells Fargo and Company

About the Author

Marcus Buckingham spent seventeen years at the Gallup Organization, where he conducted research into the world’s best leaders, managers, and workplaces. The Gallup research later became the basis for the bestselling books First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Best Managers Do Differently (Simon & Schuster) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (Free Press), both coauthored by Buckingham. Buckingham has been the  subject of in-depth profiles in The New York Times, Fortune, BusinessWeek and Fast Company. He now has his own company, providing strengths-based consulting, training, and e-learning. In 2007 Buckingham founded TMBC to create strengths-based management training solutions for organizations worldwide, and he spreads the strengths message in keynote addresses to over 250,000 people around the globe each year. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Jane and children Jackson and Lilia. For more information visit: marcusbuckingham.com