LIFT Consulting » What Great Managers Do

What Great Managers Do by Marcus Buckingham (originally published in HBR 2005)

Harvard Business Review OnPoint/Executive Edition Winter 2006

The Art of Middle Management

Reprint No: R0503D

There is one quality that sets great managers apart from the rest – they discover what is unique about each person and then capitalize on it.

Great managers know and value the unique abilities and even the eccentricities of their employees
They learn how best to integrate them into a plan of attack
Job of manager is to turn one person’s particular talent into performance
Managers will succeed only when they can identify and deploy the differences among people – challenging each employee to excel in his or her own way

The Three Levers

To manage someone well you must know three things about the person: her strengths, the triggers that activate those strengths, and how she learns. In this article Marcus Buckingham describes how to:

Make the most of strengths
Trigger good performance
Tailor to learning styles

Mediocre managers assume or hope that employees will be motivated by the same thing, driven by the same goals, desire the same kinds of relationships, learn in roughly the same way. They define behaviors they expect from people and tell them how to work on behaviors that don’t come naturally – and praise those who can overcome their natural styles to conform to preset ideas. They believe a manager’s job is to mold or transform each employee into the perfect version of the role.

Great managers don’t try to change a person’s style – they know employees differ in how they think, how they build relationships, how altruistic they are, how patient they can be, how much of an expert they need to be, how prepared they need to feel, what drives them, what challenges them, and what their goals are. Majority of differences are enduring and resistant to change. Most effective way to invest their time is to identify exactly how each employee is different and figure out how best to incorporate enduring idiosyncrasies into the overall plan. They must bring insights to their actions and interactions.