12: The Elements of Great Managing

This is a follow on to "First Break All the Rules" and provides you with a list of the twelve elements that great managers use. These were distilled from the ten million workplace interviews Gallup has done over a long period of time, and I think they make sense. Really, they are about supporting your workers, respecting them, treating them as people rather than cogs in a machine, and managing them with a view to giving to them rather than exploiting them and taking from them. If you or your company are all about getting all you can out of your workers and letting them take until they leave, this book will tell you that you are on exactly the wrong course. So, if you want to hear about a better way, read this book. If you are happy in your current exploitive approach, don't bother with this book (although you will be cheating yourself). The 12 elements are: 1) Ensuring your employees know what is expected not only in the tasks of their job, but in all of its ramifications and under a range of circumstances. 2) Provide your employees with the actual tools and resources they need to perform their job excellently. Don't make them scrounge, hoard, or steal to get their job done. 3) Do your best to let the employee use their best talents in their work. Fit the job to what they do best rather than making them fit themselves to get a job done. 4) Provide compliments, recognition, and public pats on the back weekly. 5) Foster an environment where people feel cared about as a person by other people. 6) Be sure employees understand a career path and are developing new skills. 7) Listen to employee opinions and implement the really good ones. 8) Show them how their work directly connects to the mission of the firm. 9) Foster teams that succeed and do quality work so each person has a sense of belonging, of success, and of pride. 10) Create a culture where each person feels that they have to come to work to be with one of their best friends. 11) Talk with each employee about their progress as part of your everyday work rather than only at the annual interview. Use the interview to review accomplishments and set next year's goals. 12) Provide real opportunities for each person to learn and grow as a person as well as an employee. And take some time to get your compensation package right. Too many companies are sloppy and not using the money they pay out to its maximum advantage. Pay is rarely the most important thing on an employee's mind and when it becomes a serious issue, you have already bungled other aspects of the person's employment. But you don't want to put yourself in a weak position in what and how you compensate your people. I thought this was an interesting and useful book. Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

There are a few good books on supervision, and a lot of impractical but "brilliant" books on "leadership" but this is the first that I've read that I could really apply to my job. I wish the three crushing layers of bureacracy above me would read this book too. I like the empirical data and real names. That gives this book much more credibility than the average management book for me. It's also a good way to do a self-report card in my relationship with each employee. Some of them are demanding and now I think "what does she really need to do the job, and am I providing it" instead of just responding to complaints without any analysis of the underlying situation. Bottom-level / front-line staff can be very good at manipulating managers or conversely very good at making a manager so defensive that we can't reply to them. With this book in my toolkit, I can stay above the emotions of the workplace and either fix what needs to be fixed or send the employee to EAP. My other two favorite books are Making Work Work by Morgenstern and Healing the Downsized Organization. They are also very practical.

If you haven't read First, Break All the Rules, I have good news for you: Just read this book instead. 12: The Elements of Great Managing is a better book. If you have read First, Break All the Rules, chances are it was a long time ago. You are probably ready for a refresher if you read that book back in 1999 or 2000 as I did. As before, the Gallup people have asked that reviewers not list the 12 elements. I think they are overly sensitive, but I'll honor their request. Let me characterize the 12 elements instead: Each point relates to either a necessity for being able to do your job well, having a sense that people care that you come to work, feeling engaged by your work, and seeing a future in what you are doing. Employees who feel engaged in these dimensions usually stay longer, are less likely to be out sick, and perform at higher levels of productivity. After you see the list, you'll accept those conclusions, I'm sure. Since the first book came out, Gallup has done a lot more interviews. One of the benefits of all hose millions of additional interviews is to provide extra information about how and why each element is important. I was pleased to see that the authors also draw on psychological and physiological research to help explain their findings. But the best parts, for me, were the 12 case studies that were like mini-fables of the sort that Ken Blanchard likes to write . . . except these cases involve real people. The leaders make mistakes as well as do things right, and you get a sense of how hard it is to improve performance in an important employee dimension when your organization has been doing it badly for some time. One of the things I liked best about the cases was that the authors didn't go overboard by just presenting organizations that perform in the top 1 percent that wouldn't seem quite real to most people. I also liked the section at the end about how pay overlaps with all of the other findings. Most people are affected by their pay, and I thought that the authors put that into perspective quite well. Although part of the message is that you need Gallup surveys to figure out what your problem is with employee engagement, the book is tactfully quiet on that point. Nice! Although you may be tempted to either just read the list and feel like you've got it or just read the cases in areas where you think you have problems, I encourage you to read all of the material. You might get a new assignment tomorrow that will look totally different from where you are today. That happened to several people in the book. You'll be better prepared when that happens. I thought that First, Break All the Rules was better than an MBA education on how to be an effective leader. This book is probably better than most DBA educations on the same subject. Be engaging!

The 12 elements represent the aspects of work that are most powerful in explaining workers' productive motivations on the job. They include job clarity, materials and equipment, recognition and praise... learning and growth opportunities. These are my reasons for rating this book 5 stars: 1. The insights are backed by empirical evidence, 2. Although the approach is scientific, the book is easy to understand, 3. It incorporates international perspectives. The authors illustrate the 12 Elements with examples from the US, Brazil, Germany, India and other countries. The insights are practical and backed by empirical evidence gathered from 10 million employee and manager interviews from 114 countries. In this book employee engagement has been linked to business performance. The authors have compared the top-quartile and bottom-quartile business units for the Elements, and have measured the overall difference between engaged and actively disengaged employees. Throughout the book you will read results that link these differences to a variety of business metrics - productivity, profitability, absenteeism, turnover, shrink (the retailers' euphemism for theft), accidents, customer ratings, etc. I enjoyed the way in which the findings were presented. Each chapter starts with a situation where a company has problems related to an Element. The authors then present their research and findings. After that a "great" manager implements changes and saves the day. This book is exceptionally well researched. In addition to research by Gallup, it includes references from the works of several other researchers and authors that stretch across time and disciplines; for example Economics (from Adam Smith to Steven Levitt), Psychology (from Abraham Maslow to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), Management (from Frederick Taylor to Jeffrey Pfeffer)... Movies (Office Space), TV (Seinfeld) and Cartoons (Dilbert). The book also includes discoveries from neuroscience and game theory. A note on the important of empirical evidence: Many managers prefer to manage by their gut feelings, intuition, or by whatever fad that consulting firms are selling. For them, "evidence" often means personal, N=1 experience, and not consistent demonstration of results across contexts and time. That's part of the reason that they will continue to create the same problems that so many before them have made. Today, movements such as "evidence based management" are gaining popularity in academic and business circles. Several HR and Organizational Behavior professionals and professors (for instance Stanford's Pfeffer and Sutton) are applying techniques from science, engineering and statistics to the discipline of management. Overall, I found this to be an excellent book and recommend it to all managers. Should you be interested, please feel free to read my guides and other reviews of management books.

One of the things that makes this book so worth the read is its SUPPORT IN DATA. The authors do a good job summarizing an enormously rich database down into actual, consise recommendations. So many other books I've read on this topic tend to draw from small, retrospective samples, personal anecdotes, or unique(?) case studies. Such books might make for interesting story telling. More rare is the book that tells the story supported by a whopping 10 million interviews/observations and then ties these observations to company performance outcomes. Read other books if you just like catchy, one-off stories. Read this one if you're looking for well told stories drawn from principles that are statistically proven to actually work.