BUILD AND EVOLVE ORGANIZATION
- Know what your people are like and what makes them tick because your people are your most important resource.
- Regularly take the temperature of each person who is important to you and to the organization.
- Clearly assign responsibilities.
- Use daily updates as a tool for staying on top of what your people are doing and thinking.
- Probe so you know whether problems are likely to occur before they actually do.
- Communicate the plan clearly and have clear metrics conveying whether you are progressing according to it.
- Escalate when you can adequately handle your responsibilities and make sure that the people who work for you are proactive doing the same.
- Perceive and Don’t Tolerate Problems.
- Realize that the people closet to certain jobs probably know them best.
- Diagnose Problems to Get at Their Root Causes.
- Remember that a root cause is not an action but a reason.
- Distinguish between a capacity issue and a capability issue.
- Build your organizations from the top down.
- Remember that everyone must be overseen by a believable person who has high standers.
- Make sure the people at the top of each pyramid have the skills and focus to manage their direct reports and a deep understanding of their jobs.
- Make departments as self –sufficient as possible so that they have control over the resources they need to achieve their goals.
- Don’t just pay attention to your job; pay attention to how your job will be done if you are no longer around.
- Have the clearest possible reporting lines and delineations of responsibilities.
- Assign responsibilities based on workflow design and people’s abilities, not job titles.
- Use checklists.
- And for Heaven’s Sake Don’t Overlook Governance!
- Have integrity and demand it from others.
- Never say anything about someone that you wouldn’t say to them directly and don’t try people without accusing them to their faces.
- Don’t let loyalty to people stand in the way of truth and the well-being of the organization.
- Be loyal to the common mission.
- Make sure people give more consideration to others than they demand for themselves.
- Recognize that mistakes are a natural part of the evolutionary process.
- Observe the patterns of mistakes to see if they are products of weaknesses.
- Teach and reinforce the merits of mistake -based learning.
- Know what types of mistakes are acceptable and what types are unacceptable.
- Learn about your people and have them learn through frank conversations about mistakes and their root cause.
- Help people through the pain that comes with exploring their weaknesses.
- Find the most believable people possible who disagree with you and try to understands their reasoning.
- Think about people’s believability in order to assess the likelihood that their opinions are good.
- Inexperienced people can have great ideas too, sometimes far better ones than more experienced people.
- Once a decision is made, everyone should get behind it even though individuals may still disagree.
- Understands that you and the people you manage will go through a process of personal evolution.
- Evaluated accurately, not kindly.
- Make the process of learning what someone is like open, evolutionary, and iterative.
- For performance reviews, start from specific cases, look for patterns, and get in sync with the person being reviewed by looking at the evidence together.
- Don’t lower the bar at any cost.