Jim Harter - First, Break All The Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently

ISBN: 978-1-59562-041-5

Copyright 1999 Gallup, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Gallup, Q, The Gallup Path, and The Gallup Poll are trademarks of Gallup, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. The Q items are protected by copyright of Gallup, Inc., 1993-1998. All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Just 13% of the world's workers and 30% in the U.S. are engaged at work. Over the past decade, overall trends in engagement have remained flat.

But it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, many companies have bucked this pattern to achieve double to triple the percentage of engaged workers we find in the populace. Among elite organizations, those that engage nine employees for every actively disengaged employee, company performance far surpasses their peers.

This didn't happen by accident. These companies did something different and intentional. They developed a critical mass of great managers who look out for the organization's best interests while at the same time improving the lives of the people they manage. The 12 elements of great managing, which distinguish engaged and productive workplaces from their less successful counterparts, have now been measured and studied in hundreds of organizations employing more than 25 million people.

First, Break All the Rules is a summary of Gallup studies accumulated in the mid to late 1990s that resulted in findings that have withstood the test of time, massive changes in technology, and the economy. It describes what great managers do differently than average, or mediocre, managers. Since this book's publication in 1999, Gallup has conducted many additional iterations of research across the world that reveal a multitude of connections between engagement and organizational outcomes including research presented in the State of the American Workplace and State of the Global Workplace.

Engaged workers view the world differently than disengaged workers do because they have managers who develop their strengths rather than fixate on their weaknesses. The insights from the study of great managers provide a lens into how your company can keep your best performers, engage your customers, improve performance and profitability and ultimately improve the economy through authentic job growth.

Jim Harter, Ph.D., Gallup's Chief Scientist, Workplace Management and Wellbeing

November 2013

Introduction: Breaking All the Rules

The greatest managers in the world do not have much in common. They are of different sexes, races, and ages. They employ vastly different styles and focus on different goals. But despite their differences, these great managers do share one thing: Before they do anything else, they first break all the rules of conventional wisdom. They do not believe that a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They do not try to help a person overcome his weaknesses. They consistently disregard the Golden Rule. And, yes, they even play favorites.

Great managers are revolutionaries, although few would use that word to describe themselves. This book will take you inside the minds of these managers to explain why they have toppled conventional wisdom and reveal the new truths they have forged in its place.

We are not encouraging you to replace your natural managerial style with a standardized version of theirs as you will see, great managers do not share a standardized style. Rather, our purpose is to help you capitalize on your own style, by showing you how to incorporate the revolutionary insights shared by great managers everywhere.

This book is the product of two mammoth research studies undertaken by the Gallup Organization over the last twenty-five years. The first concentrated on employees, asking, What do the most talented employees need from their workplace? Gallup surveyed over a million employees from a broad range of companies, industries, and countries. We asked them questions on all aspects of their working life, then dug deep into their answers to discover the most important needs demanded by the most productive employees.

Our research yielded many discoveries, but the most powerful was this: Talented employees need great managers. The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor.

This simple discovery led us to the second research effort: How do the worlds greatest managers find, focus, and keep talented employees? To answer this question we went to the source large companies and small companies, privately held companies, publicly traded companies, and public sector organizations and interviewed a cross section of their managers, from the excellent to the average. How did we know who was excellent and who was average? We asked each company to provide us with performance measures. Measures like sales, profit, customer satisfaction scores, employee turnover figures, employee opinion data, and 360-degree surveys were all used to distill the best managers from the rest. During the last twenty-five years the Gallup Organization has conducted, tape-recorded, and transcribed one-and-a-half-hour interviews with over eighty thousand managers.

Some of these managers were in leadership positions. Some were midlevel managers. Some were front-line supervisors. But all of them had one or more employees reporting to them. We focused our analysis on those managers who excelled at turning the talent of their employees into performance. Despite their obvious differences in style, we wanted to discover what, if anything, these great managers had in common.

Their ideas are plain and direct, but they are not necessarily simple to implement. Conventional wisdom is conventional for a reason: It is easier. It is easier to believe that each employee possesses unlimited potential. It is easier to imagine that the best way to help an employee is by fixing his weaknesses. It is easier to do unto others as you would be done unto. It is easier to treat everyone the same and so avoid charges of favoritism. Conventional wisdom is comfortingly, seductively easy.

The revolutionary wisdom of great managers isnt. Their path is much more exacting. It demands discipline, focus, trust, and, perhaps most important, a willingness to individualize. In this book, great managers present no sweeping new theories, no prefabricated formulae. All they can offer you are insights into the nature of talent and into their secrets for turning talent into lasting performance. The real challenge lies in how you incorporate these insights into your style, one employee at a time, every day.

This book gives voice to one million employees and eighty thousand managers. While these interviews ground the book in the real world, their sheer number can be overwhelming. It is hard to imagine what one talented employee or one great manager sounds like. The following excerpt, from a single interview, captures something of both the tone and the content of our in-depth interviews.

As with all the managers we quote, we have changed his name to preserve his anonymity. We will call him Michael. Michael runs a fine-dining restaurant owned by a large hospitality company in the Pacific Northwest. Since Gallup first met Michael fifteen years ago, his restaurant has been in the companys top 10 percent on sales, profit, growth, retention, and customer satisfaction. From the perspective of his company, his customers, and his employees, Michael is a great manager.