Scott Jeffrey Miller - Everyone Deserves a Great Manager: The 6 Critical Practices for Leading a Team

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Copyright 2019 by Franklin Covey Co.

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition October 2019

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miller, Scott, 1960 author. | Davis, Todd (Chief people officer), author. | Roos Olsson, Victoria, author.

Title: Everyone deserves a great manager : the 6 critical practices for leading a team / Scott Miller, Todd Davis, and Victoria Roos Olsson.

Description: New York : Simon & Schuster, [2019] | Includes index. | Summary: From the organizational experts at FranklinCovey, an essential guide to becoming the great manager every team deserves-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019028983 (print) | LCCN 2019028984 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982112073 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982112080 (paperback) | ISBN 9781982112097 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Leadership. | Executive ability. | Teams in the workplace--Management.

Classification: LCC HD57.7 .M5424 2019 (print) | LCC HD57.7 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/092--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028983

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028984

ISBN 978-1-9821-1207-3

ISBN 978-1-9821-1209-7 (ebook)

Want a guaranteed conversation starter? Ask someone if theyve ever had a bad manager. And then brace yourself, because almost all of us know what its like to work for a soul-crushing, morale-killing, please-dont-make-me-go-to-work kind of manager.

But if were fortunate, weve also worked with a great managerone who cared about us, believed in us, and helped us do our best work.

Legendary Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen believes management is one of the most meaningful roles in the world. In How Will You Measure Your Life? he writes, If you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management is among the most noble of professions. You are in a position where you have eight or ten hours every day from every person who works for you. You have the opportunity to frame each persons work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home living a life filled with motivators.

And the data proves it. According to Gallup, Managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement scores across business units.

Being a great manager is one of the most influential rolesand one of the hardest. When I led a team for the first time, I struggled to learn on the job. What I wouldnt have given for a Wikipedia for managers, or even better, a WebMD for my leadership aches and pains. It didnt exist; so my cofounder and I set out to create one in a drafty San Francisco basement eight years ago.

The resulting company, Jhana, was founded on the idea that everyone deserves a great manager. (While there are impassioned arguments around the terms leader and manager, the authors and I will use them interchangeably in this book for ease of reading.) Jhana now serves as an online learning resource that provides bite-size training for leaders, and our research confirmed how universally hard it was to transition into leadership, how often new managers werent set up for success, and how little direction they received from their bosses. Our team of PhDs, researchers, writers, and technologists dove into the academic research and built a panel of managers to validate or refute their findings in the real world. What emerged was some of the best, most practical solutions for the challenges all managers face: delegating, leading people, setting the right goals, supporting people, hiring, firing, and motivating.

Apparently, I wasnt the only new manager who could use the help, because Jhana took off. Managers used our practical solutions in tech companies, professional services, financial services, hospitals, manufacturing, schools, universities, and governments. To increase our impact, we joined up with FranklinCovey, one of the most respected leadership-development companies in the world. Beginning with its cofounder, Dr. Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, FranklinCovey has nearly four decades of experience around these fundamental leadership issues:

• How could we help people make one of the most difficult transitions of their careers, from individual contributor to manager, giving them the confidence to overcome their self-doubt?
• How could we help managers fulfill their potential and continue to learn and develop over time?
• How could we help them manage the often crushing stress that comes with the job?

With FranklinCoveys principle-based leadership legacy and Jhanas innovative Silicon Valley approach, we built a leadership solution that combined the best of both worlds: the 6 Critical Practices for Leading a Team, used by hundreds of thousands of managers in countries all over the world.

Although created primarily for managers leading teams of individual contributors, the practices in this book apply to leaders at any level:

If youre a new manager: Youll uncover the proven best practices to lead and develop your people into a high-performing team.

If youre an experienced manager: Focus on the practices that fill the gaps in your management training, and check out the tools for your most critical interactions such as conducting 1-on-1s, setting goals, and leading through change.

If youre a leader of leaders: Youll find practical ways to sharpen your managerial skills. This book can also serve as a guide to mentor new managers who report to you.

If youre a human resource, learning and development, or organizational development professional: Use this book to coach experienced managers and develop new/emerging leaders.

If youre a C-level executive: Use this book to model the practices so they manifest on the front line. If youre not using these practices, your managers probably wont either.

Along with Scott, Todd, and Victoria, I have found leadership to be especially challenging but also very rewarding. But if youre not there yet, the practices in this book will help you get there. Enjoy this journey that will inspire managers at any level to make an impact with their teams and leave a lasting legacy.

Rob Cahill

Cofounder and CEO, Jhana

Vice President, FranklinCovey

.

I hate powdered sugar.

It all started when I was twenty-seven years old, and three months into my new career with the Covey Leadership Center (what would become FranklinCovey) as a frontline salesperson for K12 schools. After an entire life in Florida, including four years with the Walt Disney Company, I was excited about my new start in Utah, with its wide-open career opportunities and delightful absence of parking-lot alligators. Imagine my surprise when the vice president asked if I would take on the additional role of managing a team of client-service coordinators.