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JAMES MANKTELOW

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW

100 WAYS TO BE A BETTER BOSS MIND TOOLS FOR MANAGERS

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Names: Manktelow, James, author. | Birkinshaw, Julian M., author.

Title: Mind tools for managers : 100 ways to be a better boss / James Manktelow, Julian Birkinshaw.

Description: Hoboken : Wiley, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017060281 (print) | LCCN 2018008034 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119374404 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119374374 (epub) | ISBN 9781119374473 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Leadership. | Success in business. | Personnel management. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Management. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Leadership. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Careers / General.

Classification: LCC HD57.7 (ebook) | LCC HD57.7 .M3556 2018 (print) | DDC 658.4/09—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017060281

This book is dedicated to Rachel Thompson Manktelow and Laura Birkinshaw for their help and support, and for their professional insights.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Alex Cook, Charlie Swift, Emily Watson, Geoff Drummond, Jason Byers, Jo Malone, Keith Jackson, Loran Douglas, Martin Reeves, Melanie Dowding, Natalie Benfell, Natalie McLeod, Nick Adams, Nick Payne, Ollie Craddock, Peter Longton, Rachel Salaman, Rosie Robinson, Serena Chana, Sharon Utting, Simon Nevitt, Stephen Rochester, Tim Armstrong, Tim Hart, Yolandé Conradie, and Zoe Cornish at MindTools.com for their help on different aspects of the book.

Thank you to Jeanenne Ray, Heather Brosius, Danielle Serpica, Peter Knox and Jayalakshmi Erkathil Thevarkandi at John Wiley & Sons for commissioning this book and for working with us to deliver it.

Finally, thank you to the 15,000 wonderful managers and professionals who shared their thoughts with us on what it takes to be a better boss. (Space doesn't allow us to show their names here, but you can see these online at http://mnd.tools/thankyou.)

Author Biographies

James Manktelow is founder and CEO of MindTools.com, an award-winning online learning and development company that helps tens of millions of people each year improve their management, leadership, and personal effectiveness skills.

His first career was in software development, during which time he served in a variety of development, business analysis, project management, and leadership roles, culminating with serving on the board of CQ Systems Ltd. He earned his executive MBA at London Business School in 1999 and 2000.

In 1996, his passion for excellence in the workplace led him to establish a blog he called MindTools.com, where he shared the management and personal effectiveness skills he was learning as he developed his career. By 2003, MindTools.com was receiving a million visitors per year, forming the basis of the thriving company it is today.

Mind Tools now reaches more than 20 million users each year in 160 countries, providing high-quality management, leadership, and career skills training to individual and corporate clients worldwide.

In recognition of this success, Mind Tools has won Queen's Awards for Enterprise twice – in 2012 and 2017. The company also received the prestigious Investors in People Gold standard in 2017, reflecting its commitment to developing and supporting its people.

In his time at Mind Tools, James has written, edited, or contributed to more than 1,000 articles, more than 60 workbooks, and 7 books and e-books on management and leadership, published through MindTools.com, Dorling Kindersley, and now John Wiley & Sons.

Julian Birkinshaw is professor of strategy and entrepreneurship, deputy dean for programs, and academic director of the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the London Business School.

After a brief career in the IT world, Julian went back to school, gaining MBA and PhD degrees from the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western University in Canada. He worked briefly at the Stockholm School of Economics before moving to London Business School in 1999, where he has been ever since. He is a fellow of the British Academy, the Academy of Social Scientists, and the Academy of International Business.

He has researched and consulted extensively in the areas of business strategy, corporate change, organization design, management, and leadership. He is the author of 14 books, including Fast/Forward (2017), Becoming a Better Boss (2013), Reinventing Management (2010), Giant Steps in Management (2007), Inventuring: Why Big Companies Must Think Small (2003), and Entrepreneurship in the Global Firm (2001), and more than 90 articles in journals such as Harvard Business Review. He was ranked forty-third in the 2015 “Thinkers 50” list of the top global thinkers in the field of management and is regularly quoted in international media outlets, including CNN, BBC, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, Bloomberg Business Week, and The Times.

Introduction

It can be hard to be a good boss.

Many of us are promoted into our first management position because we've been highly effective individual performers. But when we start to manage others, we find that the new skills we need to succeed are completely different from the ones we needed beforehand.

If we're lucky, we get a few days of management training before we start. But for many, it's straight into the deep end. There are new areas of work to get up to speed in and deadlines to meet. There are poorly performing team members who need help, and there are people to hire. With all these new calls on our time, from above and below, it's hard to know where to start.

And it isn't just when we're first promoted that we need to learn new skills. With each promotion, the work becomes more complex, the criteria for success become more subtle, and our time is increasingly spent on people-related issues. Our ability to develop and learn as an individual becomes central to our further success.

Helping People Be Better Bosses

Unfortunately, although some people learn these new management skills, many do not. For example, in the US in 2016, Gallup found that only 32% of employees were fully engaged in their work – a key measure of manager performance. And in a study by tinypulse.com, only 49% of employees were “fully satisfied” with their supervisor.

These are disconcerting statistics. No manager goes to work in the morning saying, “I'm going to make my team members' lives hell today,” yet the evidence shows that there are at least as many bad bosses in the workplace as there are good bosses. Why is there such a disconnect here? We suggest there are three major factors:

  • The leadership mystique – We are all fascinated by the larger-than-life leaders in business and politics. Sometimes we are in awe of their ambition and their achievements; sometimes we are appalled at their narcissism. But whatever our reaction, it is these leaders who make the headlines. And this can seduce us into a view that being a leader is somehow more important than being a manager. Leaders, apparently, are the people who shake things up and make change happen, whereas managers sweep up in their wake, implementing a chosen course of action and tying up the loose ends.

    This is a flawed and dangerous view. It is flawed because leadership and management aren't two distinct ways of operating; they are more like two horses pulling the same cart. Leadership is a process of social influence; management is getting work done through others. Anyone who wants to succeed in the business world needs both sets of capabilities. By privileging leadership, we allow people to take the hard work of management less seriously.

  • Quick-fix solutions – Glance through the shelves in a large bookstore, and you will see hundreds of business and self-help books. Although there are many different genres, a popular approach is for the author to hone in on one important skill, such as coaching, time management, or mindfulness. “Here is the hidden factor behind business success,” the book title declares. “This is the one thing you need to do differently to succeed at work.”

    These quick-fix solutions aren't entirely wrong – the skills or attributes they focus on are always important. But they aren't the whole solution. Being effective in the workplace requires a breadth of capabilities, and it requires sufficient experience to know when to use different skills and approaches. The risk of focusing on one skill is that it gets overused and misapplied. When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

  • The knowing – doing gap – Despite the vast number of books that claim to unlock the secrets of success, the essence of effective management is actually no great mystery. Here is our quick summary of how to get the best out of your employees: Give them worthwhile and meaningful work to do, give them space to find their own way, provide support when it is needed, and offer recognition and praise for a job well done. These are intuitively sound pieces of advice, and there are plenty of theories and practical experience to support each one.

But even though most managers would nod in agreement when faced with this list, the behavior of many tells a different story: They often fail to convey clear messages, they micromanage, they hoard important information, and they don't offer feedback or praise. There is, in other words, a knowing – doing gap – people know, intellectually, what is required of them, but for some reason, they just don't do it on a day-to-day basis. Management is a somewhat unnatural act – it requires us to behave in a way that goes against our innate desire to be in control and the center of attention. And, like many other activities – golf, for example – you don't get better just by reading a book. You get better at managing by working on it and by seeking feedback and advice.

Why This Book Is Different

So what can we do to close the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of good management? This book helps you by identifying the key skills you need to be a good boss and giving you the essential information you need to start practicing them.

It is based on a body of expertise and evidence that we believe is unrivaled. Both authors have been working in the management field for more than 20 years. One of us (James) is the founder of MindTools.com, one of the most widely used sources of online advice for people in the workplace. The other (Julian) is a leading academic and writer and author of Becoming a Better Boss and Reinventing Management. And both of us practice what we preach – James as the CEO of the Mind Tools organization, Julian as deputy dean at the London Business School. Between us, we have reviewed and evaluated many thousands of tools and techniques, and we have seen how they work in a wide variety of circumstances.

And we haven't just relied on our own experience in choosing the techniques described in the book. We have tapped into the views of more than 15000 businesspeople from around the world. These people filled in a detailed survey with their views on the most important techniques in different areas. We used their ratings to help us choose the top 100 tools featured in this book. The appendix details how we did this research.

So what are the key themes in this book? What is the distinctive point of view that we offer?

First, we take a deliberately nonheroic view of the boss. Indeed, we explicitly use the word boss here to avoid the leader versus manager debate we talked about earlier. For us, a boss is simply someone who has people reporting to her and who is seeking to get things done by working through those people. She doesn't need charisma nor does she have to offer a grand vision. Instead, she is a pragmatic individual who understands the opportunities and constraints in her role and wants to get the best from the people working for her. She is thoughtful about the context in which she is working and adapts her style to the circumstances and to the needs of specific individuals.

To be clear, we have nothing against visionaries like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. The world needs these one-off genius types, but they are dangerous to use as role models. You are much better off aspiring to the nonheroic approach described here because it doesn't rely on you being a genius!

Second, we avoid the quick-fix approach favored by most management books. As we have said, there are many different things good bosses do, so making the right choice involves breadth and perspective. To use a well-known analogy, we aren't giving you a hammer; we are providing the entire toolkit – a set of “mind tools.” And we want you to be able to figure out when to use the hammer and when to favor the screwdriver or the staple gun.

One hundred techniques might sound like a lot, but the point here is that becoming a great boss is hard work and requires a diverse set of skills. It's also worth noting that they cluster naturally into sets of complementary techniques, and the structure of the book makes it easy to navigate through these clusters.

Third, our emphasis throughout the book is on tools – ideas that you can actually put into practice. We acknowledge the academic theories that support these tools, and we provide references for those who want to know more on the background concepts, but we focus the text on practical advice and how-to steps. As you read the book, you will find some sections that seem obvious, and this should be reassuring. Every manager is familiar with some of these techniques. The challenge is to become familiar with all of them so you can use the right ones at the right time.

The Structure of the Book

The boss's job is complex and multifaceted. One useful way to make sense of it is to think in terms of three concentric sets of activities (see Figure I.1).The first (in the center) is to manage yourself – to understand your own personal needs and capabilities, use your time wisely, cope with the challenges of the job, and develop your skills over time.

Artwork not provided.

Figure I.1 Your Role as a Boss

The second is to manage your work and people. Recall that management is getting work done through other people, not doing it all yourself, so you should be devoting most of your time and effort to the activities in this circle. It is useful to split this circle into two halves. One half is task-focused: This is about getting work done efficiently, solving problems, making decisions, and fostering creativity and innovation. The other half is relationship-focused: This involves understanding what motivates others, getting the best out of them, communicating effectively, hiring and developing people, building strong teams, and dealing with difficult situations. Obviously, most situations have task and relational components, so you need to learn how to blend techniques from both halves.

The third activity is to manage your wider context. This involves developing situational awareness – an understanding of the organization you work in and the competitive business environment in which it is operating. Then it requires you to figure out how to work effectively within that context, using honest tactics for getting ahead in your organization, making change happen, and working effectively with external stakeholders, especially customers.

Cross-Cutting Themes

Although each of these circles addresses a different set of people (yourself, your immediate team, and the rest of the organization and beyond), there are some important themes that cut across them. We would like to highlight four.

  • Meaning – Research has shown that meaning, or purpose, is one of the key intrinsic motivators in the workplace. In other words, if you want to do a good job, and if you want people around you to do likewise, you need to be clear about the fundamental reason why a piece of work needs doing in the first place. For example, the best pharmaceutical firms don't just “make drugs” – they cure diseases and make people healthy.

    The search for meaning cuts across many of the techniques in the book – for example, knowing yourself better, managing your career over time, getting work done in a focused way, understanding and motivating others, and making change happen in your organization.

  • Transparency – One of the pathologies of traditional bureaucracies is the “knowledge is power” syndrome. The boss had privileged access to information, and this helped her maintain control over lower-level employees who were often kept in the dark.

    In today's business world, it is no longer possible or desirable to withhold information from frontline employees. Increased transparency helps people make better decisions, and it reduces the office politics that plague large firms. Many of the techniques in this book are about communicating more openly, encouraging people to talk more freely to each other, and building greater alignment between the top and bottom of the firm.

  • Simplicity – There is a tendency for large firms to build complex structures, with multiple reporting lines and large numbers of formalized procedures. In theory, these structures help them deal with complex business challenges. In practice, they often make the firm slow and unresponsive, and they make management work tedious and repetitive.

    One of the themes sprinkled through the book, therefore, is the value of simplicity. The most effective bosses provide simple and clear guidelines to their employees, then they get out of the way. And the best structures are often the least encumbering ones – for example, the agile methodologies and the translation of the organization's mission into simple goals.

  • Perspective – Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the hallmark of a good boss is the ability to see things from different perspectives. If you can see the world through the eyes of your employees and do things that help them get the most out of their work, you will already be on the path to success. And if you have the capacity to understand how your boss, your customers, and other stakeholders see things, then you have the potential to be a great boss. It is a fascinating little paradox: The more you emphasize helping others succeed – by enabling them to do their best work – the more you will actually succeed yourself.

The bottom line is that there is no shortcut to success. This book provides the full breadth of tools you need, but you need to be prepared to work at them. So try a few of them out, then set aside time to reflect on your own behavior, find a neutral friend or colleague to bounce your ideas off of, and seek feedback on how you are doing. Then go through the cycle again – practice makes perfect. That is the real secret to becoming a great boss.

Enjoy using this book!

Part I
Know and Manage Yourself