Gathering Force
Great managers make it all seem so simple. Just select for talent, define the right outcomes, focus on strengths, and then, as each person grows, encourage him or her to find the right fit. Complete these few steps with every single employee, and your department, division, or company will yield perennial excellence. It sounds almost inevitable.
We know, just as you do, that it isn’t. It is very hard to manage others well. The essence of the role is the struggle to balance the competing interests of the company, the customers, the employees, and even your own. You attend to one, and you invariably upset the others. If you have just intervened between a rude customer and a stammering employee, it is hard to find the right words to placate the customer and yet save face for the employee. If you have just assumed responsibility for a team of thirty jaded veterans, it is hard to know how to gain their trust while still pushing them to perform. If you have just realized that the new employee, whom you so carefully selected, does not, in fact, have the talent to perform, it is hard to know how to break the news without demoralizing him and alarming his colleagues. No matter which way you spin it, it’s hard being the middleman.
This book doesn’t offer to make your role easy. It simply offers you a vantage point. It offers you a way to gain a clearer perspective on what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how to do it better. This perspective won’t tell you what to do in every situation. But it will guide you toward sound action. It will help you know how to start laying the foundations for an enduringly strong workplace.
We cannot promise miracles overnight. And you wouldn’t believe us if we did. You know that at work tomorrow you are going to see a lot of people cast in the wrong roles. You know that you are going to see many managers marching in lockstep with conventional wisdom. And you know the limits of what you can change on your own. You know that you will only be able to change things one employee at a time, conversation by conversation. Like all great managers, you are at the start of a long journey.
We can only promise that these Four Keys are an extraordinarily powerful beginning.
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On your journey, take strength from this: As you chip away at conventional wisdom, you are being aided by the gathering of two powerful forces. The needs of the company and the needs of the employee, misaligned since the birth of the “corporation” 150 years ago, are slowly beginning to converge. Today you, the manager, find yourself at their meeting point. …
Everywhere employees are demanding more of their work. With the breakdown of other sources of community, employees are looking more and more to their workplace to provide them with a sense of meaning and identity. They want to be recognized as individuals. They want a chance to express themselves and to gain meaningful prestige for that expression. Only you, the manager, can create the kind of environment where each person comes to know his or her strengths and expresses them productively.
At the same time, companies are searching for undiscovered reserves of value. Human nature is one of those last, vast reserves of value. If they are to increase their value, companies know they must tap these reserves. In the past they have tried to access the power of human nature by containing it and perfecting it, just as mankind has done with the other forces of nature. We now know why this cannot work: the power of human nature is that, unlike other forces of nature, it is not uniform. Instead its power lies in its idiosyncrasy, in the fact that each human’s nature is different. If companies want to use this power, they must find a mechanism to unleash each human’s nature, not contain it. You, the manager, are the best mechanism they have.
The intersection of these two forces — each company’s search for value and each individual’s search for identity — will change the corporate landscape forever. You will see new organizational models, new titles, new compensation schemes, new careers, and new measurement systems — all designed around the mantra “Don’t try to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in.” Some managers may try to resist these forces of change, but they will fail. A company’s search for value is as unending and as irresistible as an individual’s search for identity. You can slow these gathering forces down. You cannot stop them.
But you can speed them up. You can be the catalyst. The world’s best managers have shown you how.