Introduction
Managers are failing everywhere, and no one is helping. This is a big claim, but don’t worry, I brought receipts.
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Becoming a great manager takes hard work and constant practice, and even after you learn, practice, refine, and, heck, maybe even develop some expertise, you’re still going to make big mistakes. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that you can become a better manager, no matter what kind of person you are. It doesn’t matter if you’re super introverted or naturally outgoing. People with those personality types—and all types in between—just have to put in the work, and more than that, the right kind of work. To become a great manager you only need to learn, develop, and practice a few behaviors. Unfortunately, the world has conspired to confuse the hell out of the average manager by offering some combination of bad advice, good advice that is difficult to apply, too much advice, confusing or conflicting advice, or no advice at all. The people who promoted you often leave you to sink or swim; the people who write management books sometimes know more about theory than practice.
This book is different. Its leadership approach is astoundingly simple. It is also proven: it predictably and measurably delivers happy, motivated employees and excellent business results. It focuses on three key elements of leadership, or “the Big 3”: Direction, Coaching, and Career. Here is a brief overview of each:
Direction—Good managers ensure that every member of their team understands exactly what is expected and when it is expected.Coaching—Good managers coach their people toward both short-and long-term success, helping them understand what they should continue to do and where and how they can improve.Career—Good managers invest in their people’s careers in a way that considers their long-term goals and aspirations beyond the four walls of the current company, and certainly beyond their next promotion.Here are a couple examples of the difference this Big 3 leadership approach—when used together and systematically—can make. In 2011, Joe took over the Pittsburgh office of a Fortune 500 company. For years, Pittsburgh had been among the company’s biggest dumpster fires. The office’s culture was in shambles, and, predictably, sales were tanking. Once he arrived, Joe quickly recognized that there was solid talent on the team—even though some people needed a fresh start somewhere else—and so he set about reshaping his team. While he did, he spent time with each member, both tenured and new, ensuring they knew exactly what was expected of them in part by giving them a substantial voice in those expectations. Then he sat alongside them, day in and day out, and coached them to success. He further worked to understand every team member’s short- and long-term career goals and then helped them put specific plans in place to achieve them. Less than two years later, the Pittsburgh office achieved top results in sales revenue, operations, staffing, employee retention, and profitability. For the first time in this company’s history, it won the Office of the Year award.
Daniela, a tech industry colleague of mine, was a midlevel manager at a major credit card company when she took over the leadership of one of its service groups. The group had an exceedingly and unsatisfactorily high cost per contact, one of its key business measurements, and its employee satisfaction—one of a handful of measurements most companies use to understand employee engagement—was, at 55 percent, thirty points below the company average. Daniela quickly set up a series of listening sessions with one goal: to understand from the team’s perspective what was wrong. Team members opened up to her quickly, recognizing their chance to change both the perception and the reality of their performance. After listening carefully and humbly to nearly all of them, Daniela had four key insights: (1) the team lacked the technological tools required to do their jobs effectively and efficiently; (2) the company had an inconsistent system for rewards and recognition; (3) they had a culture that lacked clarity on exactly what the measurable expectations were for each team; and (4) there was a lack of transparency around career progression. She appointed four working groups, one for each area, to go deep on the nature of the problem. Daniela quickly implemented several of the solutions they proposed, and within one year her division cut their cost per contact from three dollars to one dollar and raised their employee satisfaction score from 55 percent to 85 percent.
As tempting as it is to focus on where to lay the blame for a failing team, it’s much more fruitful to zero in on what it takes to turn one around. It takes leaders like Daniela and Joe to come in and clarify what success looks like for each person, understand not only their strengths and weaknesses but also their hopes and dreams, and then work to enable each of them to find success. Legendary San Francisco 49ers head coach Bill Walsh summed it up nicely in his book, The Score Takes Care of Itself. He said that even with the best talent in the world, you cannot guarantee success, and that an excellent leader seeks to increase the probability of success by intelligently and ruthlessly pursuing solutions to the team’s problems. Focus on managing your teams using the Big 3, and problems such as low pride, an unwillingness to go the extra mile, poor employee retention, low enthusiasm, and missed targets will all take care of themselves.
THE ORIGIN OF THE THREE-PART LEADERSHIP STANDARD
In 2016 I left Twitter to cofound Candor, Inc. with Kim Scott. Candor was a software company that worked with companies to put the ideas in Kim’s bestselling book, Radical Candor, into practice. During my time there, I personally interacted with somewhere in the neighborhood of one thousand companies. When they called, I was usually the first person they talked to, and I generally started our conversations with a simple discovery question: “What problem are you trying to solve?”
Their answers were shockingly similar across industries, company sizes, and geographies. Some companies had some evidence and others just a feel, but the problem they were wrestling with nearly always came down to this: We have an employee engagement problem related to low manager skill. Of course, the most natural follow-up question was, “Well, can you tell me about the nature of that skill gap?” As I listened to their answers, a common set of themes began to emerge, and the problem started to feel more addressable. I ended up working directly with hundreds of these companies and sending advice via phone, email, Twitter, etc., to hundreds more. Through that process, I discovered the handful of simple practices that great managers do routinely and that less-great managers—the vast majority of us—don’t.
What I learned from working with these companies fit my intuition, which made sense because most of the things I learned listening to these companies also happened to have worked for me over twenty-eight years of leading successful teams. It starts with a simple and obvious idea: the only thing that we all have in common at work is that we want to be successful. It seems reasonable, then, that the best managers help each person understand what is expected of them and then help each person find success. I’ve been a manager since day one of my career. I started as an officer in the US Marines, leading a 40-person infantry platoon, and rose to company commander, responsible for 175 combat Marines. Since then, I’ve been in a few small companies—Pathfinders, FreeMonee, and Candor, Inc.—and a few bellwether tech companies, including Google, Twitter, and Qualtrics. I received an MBA along the way from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
I have seen and solved meaningful business problems inside scaling companies, having led teams as large as 700 people globally and businesses as big as $700 million. I joined Google very shortly after its IPO; during my seven years there, its payroll went from about 2,500 employees to more than 50,000. At Twitter (and later Qualtrics), I had the experience of helping the company plan for an IPO and then continue with hair-on-fire growth afterward. At every place, Direction, Coaching, and Career have been the key ingredients to leading successful teams.
But just because I think this approach works doesn’t make it so. I believe that for any management prescription to be taken seriously, the prescriber must define precisely what they mean by the word works. Any leadership approach can be said to work, only if it demonstrably, measurably, and predictably delivers both engaged employees and top- and bottom-line business results. You absolutely cannot sustainably get the latter without the former. Before I joined Qualtrics, I put together programs focused on each of the Big 3, delivered them to hundreds of companies, and solidified them based on feedback from my customers. Then, when I got to Qualtrics, I was able to formally test whether Direction, Coaching, and Career have mathematical relations to engagement and results. The answer, as you will see, was an emphatic yes.
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One of the things I’m most proud of in my career is winning the 2011 Google Great Manager Award. I’m proud of it because by using the Big 3 over the course of about three years, my colleagues and I were able to help a large and mission-critical team find its footing in the upside-down-snow-globe aftermath of having been acquired.
In 2007, Google bought DoubleClick, at the time its largest acquisition ever at $3.1 billion. Back then, Google was seemingly running on ice trying to develop and scale its non-search advertising businesses. The DoubleClick acquisition finally allowed Google to build momentum and dramatically scale its display advertising operation. My job became to integrate, run, and rework the enterprise services group—approximately seven hundred people located around the globe.
I quickly learned that there was room for improvement. The DoubleClick product management team hadn’t gotten along with the executive I replaced, feeling that he and his team had set the organization’s goals and priorities softly, unilaterally, and opaquely. They felt stiff-armed, and there had been little collaboration as a result. Worse, the senior leadership team within the services group didn’t seem fully aware of the rift, though they could sense that they were seen as not fully successful by their cross-functional counterparts. Further, I could see plain as day that this services team was being used in at least one major way that simply would not fly at Google.
Far too often, when the corporate development team completes an acquisition of a company, they incorrectly assert that the company has been “integrated” once every person from the acquired company has their laptop and email account and can print a document on the cleverly named laser printer down the hall. I call this administrative integration, and compared to the scope of the total integration problem, it’s trivial. The real integration is a painstaking multiyear process of reconciling both cultures and the assorted expectations each company holds for the various functional organizations within the acquired company. The team that I took over was extremely good at putting customers first, better than any group I’d seen at Google or anywhere else, and this was clearly something we needed to maintain and build upon. At the same time, they felt underappreciated and scared about what was in store for them. They feared not only for their jobs but also their long-term career prospects.
Prior to the acquisition, DoubleClick had been a large and successful company with a culture to match, but one aspect of the culture that was meaningfully different was their attitude toward scale. This difference hit my new group right between the eyes. DoubleClick was much more willing to use people—technical support workers—to cover up both large and small product gaps, while Google was relentlessly trying to use technology to do the same thing. The process of transforming this enterprise services group to better match up with Google’s culture, while also helping the cross-functional DoubleClick leaders feel like their voices were heard and their needs were met, is easy to write in a sentence but very difficult to pull off. All of this practically meant that we would need to thoroughly revise the group’s direction and substantially reset expectations for nearly everyone inside the organization.
Here’s an example. One of the activities that the group performed was implementation, which meant helping set up new customers and working with them to use their newly purchased products successfully. The group used a measurement called “Time to Live” (long “i” in “Live”), or TTL, to measure how long it takes from the time a customer signs a contract, until they are “live” and getting value from the product. This measurement was crucially important because the faster the customer is up and running, the quicker they are likely to be successful, the quicker we are going to be paid, and the more likely that customer will stay with us. When I took over the group, TTL was somewhere around six months, which my intuition told me seemed especially high. Worse, the measurement wasn’t being performed in a consistent manner across the entire customer base, so I couldn’t even be certain that the average six-month TTL was accurate.
I began to dig in and ask simple questions. As I listened, I had a hunch that we could cut TTL at least in half and standardize precisely how it was measured. Some folks were adamant that it couldn’t be changed. They focused on the things we were less able to control, such as our customers lacking a sense of urgency. Others were excited by the challenge and believed there was a lot of room for improvement. But the resistant voices were much, much louder than the excited ones. The bottom line for me was that our customers bought these products to solve their most pressing business problems, and they deserved our absolute best effort to get those problems solved at the earliest possible moment.
Fast-forward about half a year, and the team was able to reduce TTL to under a month. The pattern in this TTL example is representative of those that occurred across this large, complex, highly distributed team supporting over a dozen distinct products. It’s hard to convey in these pages how tiring it is to keep pushing while meeting resistance each time. We did this over and over, shedding measurements that didn’t matter, focusing on the ones that did, and improving those. What a time to be a-live!
Take that example and repeat it for nearly every group and every product we were selling, implementing, and supporting. We had to clarify the team’s purpose, determine our multiyear vision for success, and set measurable and meaningful targets in collaboration with our cross-functional partners. We had to nail down new expectations for every member of the group and then coach them toward success in a brand-new context. We needed to reform the leadership team to make sure every single manager in the group understood that their job was to clarify direction and coach their teammates for success. I then brought all seventy-plus managers to our Mountain View, California, headquarters to teach them the Career Conversations methodology featured in part IV of this book. We were repairing the airplane while it was midflight, but we weren’t just turning one or two bolts—we were turning hundreds of them.
When we finished reshaping the operation, employee engagement had risen from unacceptably low to well above average, and the team was delivering results in a way that nearly all stakeholders were excited about, including and most importantly our customers. I traveled to Sydney to meet with our team there, and one of the senior folks, Jenny Boshell aka “Bosh,” who had come in with the acquisition and remained through the transformation, pulled me aside and said, “Thank you so much for what you’ve done. Before you got here, this team was in a state.” Feedback like that is very rewarding, especially considering that I had lost count of the number of mistakes I made along the way.
On the heels of the transformation, my team nominated me for the Great Manager Award. Once the team’s nominations were reviewed and digested, the winners were selected by the CEO’s team, and flatly you were not going to get picked by the CEO’s team unless you had a track record and a reputation for driving measurable impact. But my team’s nomination meant more to me than the actual award—though we’d undergone a lot of change that had been difficult for all of us, the team seemed to believe that what we’d done was not just good for Google (and it had been good for Google) but good for all of them. The award perfectly sums up my own vision for all managers, which is to be the kind of leader whose teams get incredible work done and who are totally psyched while doing it. I think you can learn to deliver these kinds of “happy results” too, and I don’t think you need much more than this simple three-part leadership standard. If you’re like me at all, though, you’re thinking, “I’m gonna need the evidence, Russ.” Lucky for you, I’ve got it.
3?E?R
To put it in plain English, embrace these three (3) things—Direction, Coaching, Career—and as a manager of any organization, you will have engaged employees (E) who are delivering the expected results (R). 3?E?R. To build this argument, we need to start with the central concept, employee engagement, and we must answer two big questions:
What is employee engagement, really?Why should we care about it?Once we understand the power of employee engagement and its relation to hardcore business results, the most natural next question to ask is, How do we affect engagement? Spoiler alert: the manager affects their team’s employee engagement more than any other factor, and folks, it’s not even close. Oh, and great news: you can reliably affect it for the better just by using the Big 3.
WHAT IS ENGAGEMENT AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?
As Gallup noted in its 2017 State of the Global Workplace report, companies in the top quartile in employee engagement deliver 17 percent better productivity and 21 percent more profitability than those in the bottom. There is a mountain of similar research to support this idea: engaged employees drive better results. This understanding is not the least bit ambiguous, though some folks are still inclined to call engagement a “soft measure.” When you hear that, be aware that you are in the presence of someone who truly doesn’t get it.
Let’s say you’re sold. “Okay Russ, I buy it. This engagement thing has a quantitative relation to results. So what does engagement really mean?” Great question. Engagement in this case means measurable engagement—not what you happen to think engagement is or what Johnny or Moira thinks engagement is. Measurable engagement is generally accepted to be a composite of a few ideas developed over thirty years of industrial and organizational (I/O) psychology, which is the scientific study of human behavior in organizations and the workplace.
If you’re skeptical that a magical measurement from psychology can help you drive better results, then get in line. I’ve been there too. Look, I rarely bow to conventional wisdom. As far as Gretchen Rubin, author of The Four Tendencies, is concerned, I am a Questioner through and through. You would never get me to do something because thirty years of I/O psychology tells me to or because “so-and-so senior person wants it.” I do things because they have the potential to deliver impact. Then I measure whether they really work. My team at Qualtrics systematically tracked the relationships among manager effectiveness, employee engagement, and real results, an effort that I initiated and was at the center of for a few years. To further your understanding, I’ve included some common measurable engagement concepts below, along with some of the questions we ask to pin them down:
Fulfillment—“How fulfilled are you by the work that you do?”Discretionary Effort—“How willing are you to put in effort beyond what is expected?”Pride in Employer—“How much do you agree with the following statement: ‘I am proud to work at [Employer]’?”Employee Satisfaction (eSAT)—“Overall, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with [Employer] as a place to work?”Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)—“How likely are you to recommend [Employer] as a place to work?”Intent to Leave/Intent to Stay—“How much do you agree with the following statement: ‘I am seriously considering leaving [Employer]’?”Ask your employees to answer these questions on a five-point scale, tabulate the results, and you can measure engagement not only at the level of teams but also at departmental, company, industry, country, and planetary levels. We would generally say that, on the five-point scale, the top two boxes of the five-point scale are positive, the middle box is neutral, and the bottom two boxes are negative. Measurable engagement, then, is the frequency with which either of the top two boxes is selected and is expressed as a percentage, e.g., “86 percent.” Inversely, disengagement is the frequency with which either of the bottom two boxes is selected.
That same 2017 Gallup State of the Global Workplace study measured global employee engagement to be 15 percent, which is shockingly low. In the United States, it’s more than two times better—33 percent—but that’s still abysmal. When you connect business results with employee engagement, these numbers indicate massive amounts of lost opportunity. Engaged employees are all in—they manufacture better products, write better marketing copy, sell better and more persistently, and create more thorough financial models and reports. For consumers, engaged employees are the ones you speak with on the customer support phone call and make it crystal clear that “we are going to solve your problem today.” If you’ve had this experience, you know that it cements your loyalty to that product, service, or company. You also know that the opposite customer service experience—maybe, you know, the “accidental” hang-up or a rude customer service rep—leads you to look at other service providers. Engaged employees produce better business results. Better results produce wins. Winning teams engage their employees more, who in turn deliver better results in a beautiful, virtuous cycle.
You’re still skeptical? Well, here are a few more examples beyond the 17 percent more productive and 21 percent more profitable stats I offered above.
Copyright © 2022 by Russ Laraway
