My Favorite Business Book

Via Laura Spencer: Brad Shorr at the Word Sell blog launched a Group Project asking bloggers to share their favorite business book. This is my entry to his project.

[Side note: this also happens to be the first time I've participated in a group project.]

My favorite business book is First, Break all the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. I'm not exactly sure when it was that I first read this book, but it must have been a year or two after it was first published in 1999.

The book is filled to the brim with wonderful anecdotes and stories, as well as pithy distillations of business insights gleaned from interviews with over 80,000 managers from over 400 companies.

But what made this book stand out sharply in my mind is the section that talks about how the best managers are those that build a work environment where the employees can answer 'Yes' to 12 questions.

The questions are:

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best everyday?
4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
5. Does my supervisor or someone at work seem to care about me as a person?
6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
8. Does the mission / purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
10. Do I have a best friend at work?
11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
12. This last year, have I had the opportunity at work to learn and grow?
    

These questions really hit home with me, because my management responsibilities at work had just grown significantly right around the time that I found this book. I also knew simply from reading through the questions that there was no way the people in my new division would answer "Yes" to all 12 questions.

Eager to put this idea to work, I talked to our head of HR and requested that an anonymous survey be administered to everyone in the division.

However, instead of using the questions as is, we transformed each question into a statement. For example, instead of asking "Do I know what is expected of me at work?" we turned it around and phrased it as a statement: "I know what is expected of me at work." Each respondent was then asked to indicate whether they Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, or Strongly Disagree with the statement.

The use of a four-point scale was deliberate; we wanted people to choose a side. By removing a neutral option, respondents couldn't play it safe or straddle the fence by picking an answer that's in the middle.

Unsurprisingly, the initial responses were not encouraging, but they were actually better than I expected. There was a lot of room for improvement, though, and I welcomed the results because they also served as a baseline measurement.

For the next 12 months, I had the list of 12 statements plainly visible on my desk, and every time I had an interaction with someone, I tried to turn that interaction into an opportunity to make one or more of these 12 statements a reality.

Frankly, it was challenging and exhausting work, because it took a lot of discipline and effort to shift my thinking to this framework. If there's one thing that became very obvious very quickly, it's the fact that you can't be an effective manager unless you're willing to work hard at becoming one.

It was therefore quite gratifying to see a significant improvement in my division's ratings a year later, when we repeated the survey. And while I cannot directly relate our division's performance that year to the subtle organizational changes that we introduced, I can say with certainty that using these 12 statements as a guide has made me a more effective manager, and has improved the relationships of the people within the division. Employee turnover also became much lower.

After that first year, we stopped administering the survey because by then the habit of using these 12 questions as a guide had already become a natural part of the way we work. I also reread this list of statements frequently to remind myself.

I now routinely recommend this book to friends who are growing into increasingly complex management roles, because I feel they will also benefit in the same way I have. In fact, I just bought a copy of this book last week to give to a friend.

If you're reading this, I hope you will benefit from this book too.

See also: TheManager.org which has a summary of the book's key points.