The quality of materials coming out of Barking up the Wrong Tree is phenomenal. This post summarising Gallup information about how to be a great manager is just one example:
Being a manager is like being the parent of a very large, very dysfunctional family where everyone is going through puberty at the same time. But people are the job. A manager’s role is to unleash an employee’s unique talents to increase performance.
Great managers select for talent: a personal perspective beyond knowledge and skills that makes someone a natural fit for their job. You will never turn the office sloth into a racehorse. You can’t teach a fish to climb a tree, and you can’t teach me to care about sports.
Spend The Most Time With Your Top People: “What’s that, Sarah? You’ve streamlined the entire workflow process? That’s nice, but I have to go help Bob reset his password for the seventeenth time this week.” So Sarah, bewildered, nods politely while mentally drafting her resignation letter.
Treating everyone the same is like giving everyone the same prescription glasses and wondering why they keep bumping into things. Get to know your employees and treat them how they want to be treated.
Focus On Strength, Manage Around Weakness: Strength isn’t about not having weaknesses, it’s about ignoring those weaknesses so hard they develop abandonment issues. In your heist crew you don’t care if the safecracker is any good at driving the getaway car. Make each the best at their role.Eric Barker quoting Gallup, Barking up the Wrong Tree
Highly recommended, and sign up to the newsletter, you’ll be pleased you did.
