“Character is higher than intellect—a great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.”
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS BOOK, we asked you to consider the fact that your people are your number one competitive advantage. Whether you’ve hired them or inherited them, you must take responsibility for them, because they are your most valuable resource. Ultimately, you are accountable for their performance or the lack thereof.
Great bosses succeed in getting the most out of their people. To ensure that success becomes a habit, they continually raise the expectations of their people and hold them accountable to higher standards. They get their people to bring their A games every day. They’re willing to leave their office, to walk the shop floor and meet with people to see and hear firsthand what’s happening. They invest time in their people, knowing that the opposite of success isn’t always failure—more often it’s complacency that leads to failure.
When you continually raise The Bar, a potential side effect is some turnover. You may be asking yourself, “Is this a good thing or bad thing?”
GOOD TURNOVER, BAD TURNOVER: A REALITY CHECK
When helping our clients become great bosses, occasionally, at about the one-year mark, the issue of turnover comes up. When it does, we clarify the issue by asking them, “Is it good turnover or bad turnover?” Upon further investigation, the conclusion is always on the positive side. Good turnover is people going away because they are the Wrong Person, they are in the Wrong Seat, or they can’t live up to the new expectations. Bad turnover is when the Right People are leaving because of poor leadership and management. In other words, they’re working for bad bosses who let bad people linger on.
Whenever your vision for growth is crystal clear, the right structure is in place to support that growth, and you push to get the Right People into the Right Seats—leading, managing, and holding them accountable to execute the vision—there will be fallout.
Anytime your company breaks through the ceiling and goes to the next level, it is going to experience some turnover. For most of our clients the average is about 20 percent in the first year. The most was 50 percent. It’s also important to note that 80 percent of the time, the company’s Leadership Team itself changes. Several of our clients have completely turned over their entire Leadership Team, where the only person left was the owner.
One boss reflected, “I should have acted faster to get Right People into the Right Seats! I replaced one-third of my Leadership Team over a two-year period. I knew the people I replaced were the wrong people earlier when I decided to rebuild the company. Getting it done faster would have given us a competitive edge sooner.”
With all that said, it’s undeniable that, intuitively, any kind of turnover doesn’t feel good. However, think of the benefits when you replace the wrong people with the right people. You gain more of what you want from your business: productivity, growth, profit, enjoyment, peace of mind, and a thriving culture. At the same time, you greatly diminish the things that you don’t want: frustration, dysfunction, politics, whining, and stagnation.
Having Great People throughout your entire organization is possible when you do the addition and subtraction necessary to make it happen.
At this point, you may be feeling that becoming a great boss is going to take a lot of work. The fact is, you are already doing a lot of work. Having mediocre people in place and having Great People in place take equal amounts of hard work, but as boss you get to choose which—enjoyable hard work or frustrating hard work. We urge you to choose enjoyable hard work. Set The Bar high, have clear expectations, repeat them often, and be willing to walk the talk.
Here’s an image of what your ultimate job is as a boss. A vision is achieved more quickly when everyone’s energy is focused on common goals. Imagine the people in your organization as arrows, each with goals, objectives, values, and energy. If people have conflicting goals, objectives, and values, then the arrows all point in different directions and energy is wasted. As a result, your organization is spinning its wheels, stuck or frustrated by its slow pace. It looks much like Diagram 19:
Diagram 19
Now imagine those arrows as people aligned with your organization’s values and objectives. In this case, all of them are pointing in the same direction. Your organization or department moves forward freely and effortlessly, and together you achieve more. The combined power that’s generated propels the team even faster. As the boss, you have the ability to make all of the arrows point in the same direction like Diagram 20:
Diagram 20
This is ultimately your job—to get all the arrows pointed in the same direction. We’ve given you all the tools to do just that.
SUMMARY
We began this book by defining the title “boss” as a term of respect used to address a person in charge. Throughout this book we used the term “boss” purposely because that’s what you are—someone in charge, who leads and manages people. We then shared the results of both the Gallup and Harris polls that revealed that most American workers are not engaged at work. At the heart of this epidemic are bad bosses.
In an effort to prevent this from happening in your company, we then took you on a journey to becoming a great boss. You can do that by learning and implementing some real-world, practical tools. We’d like to quickly recap those tools for you in this summary.
We first explained that when it comes to the role of being a great boss, you must Get It and genuinely Want It. From there we explained further that you must have the Capacity to do it, and then defined the four types of capacity to make sure you possess all of them. With all four types of capacity in place, we then showed you a simple tool, Delegate and Elevate, to help you identify the activities that you must delegate to consistently free up your time to be a great boss.
With that context clear, we then turned to your people and gave you a powerfully simple tool, The People Analyzer, to define Great People for your organization, and ultimately confirm they are all the Right People in the Right Seats, at or above The Bar. We then went to the heart of what makes great bosses, The Five Leadership Practices and The Five Management Practices. By employing all these practices with each of your direct reports, you’ll be a great boss.
We completed a deep dive on the Quarterly Conversation to help you communicate better, stay connected to your people, and constantly improve your relationship. We identified the Four People Issues that you will likely face as a boss and shared specific ways to handle each one. We also shared the Three-Strike Rule as an effective method to deal with people who consistently fail to meet your expectations.
This handful of powerful tools will make you great. If you are feeling overwhelmed in any given area, applying the relevant tool will help you on your way to being a great boss. Choosing just one to begin with might also be a good starting point. But using all of the tools together has a powerful synergistic effect that will dramatically improve your skills, accelerate your results, and make you a great boss.
Here’s a final story about what happens when great bosses get all the arrows pointing in the same direction, and how the power that’s generated propels their team even faster.
During the 1936 Olympics, held in prewar Nazi Germany, nine determined young men from the University of Washington rowing crew climbed into their sixty-foot boat, the Husky Clipper. They had overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles just to make it to the Olympic Games. Then they were placed purposely in the worst lane, one subjected to high winds and choppy waves. Yet after a grueling effort, they emerged victorious 2,000 meters later to capture the gold medal. They epitomized the meaning of the inspirational poster that hangs in so many conference rooms today: “Together we achieve more.”
Those gold-medal-winning young men were chronicled in a book aptly named The Boys in the Boat. Author Daniel James Brown describes George Pocock, the man who designed and built the Husky Clipper, as someone who “learned to see hope where a boy thought there was no hope, to see skill where skill was obscured by ego or by anxiety. He observed the fragility of confidence and the redemptive power of trust. He detected the strength of the gossamer threads of affection that sometimes grew between a pair of young men or among a boatload of them striving honestly to do their best.”
Coaching them was a quiet boss, Al Ulbrickson, who worked tirelessly to place the boys in seats that matched their abilities and strengths. He ensured that each one shared a common goal of becoming a champion and brought out the best in them. Ulbrickson and Pocock got it, wanted it, and had the capacity to help their young men overcome all obstacles to achieve the gold medal. They were great bosses.
We thank you, boss, for reading this book, and we hope our message has resonated with you. We hope you see that these tools and practices are simple and recognize that the journey is not easy. It takes continual practice to be a great boss.
Your journey of becoming a great boss now begins. Apply the tools that we’ve taught you. Come back to this guide regularly, and someday soon one of your direct reports, during a Quarterly Conversation, will smile and say, “You’re the best boss I’ve ever worked for!”
Wear the title “boss” with pride. You’ve earned it!