I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou
Becoming the Boss
Lessons on management, leadership, and productivity
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Eight core beliefs of extraordinary bosses
Geoffrey James wrote an article this week on Inc.com about the eight core beliefs of extraordinary bosses.
He says, “The best managers have a fundamentally different understanding of workplace, company, and team dynamics. See what they get right.”
Thanks Troy Dayton for sharing this!
What really motivates workers
Which of the following is most motivating to workers?
- Recognition
- Incentives
- Interpersonal support
- Support for making progress
- Clear goals
If you guessed #1, you are like most managers, but you are WRONG. A multi-year motivation study with hundreds of subjects found that it is actually #4. On 76% of subjects’ best days, progress was mentioned (compared to on only 25% of their worst).
The study warns managers and leaders to “…Scrupulously avoid impeding progress by changing goals autocratically, being indecisive, or holding up resources. Negative events generally have a greater effect on people’s emotions, perceptions, and motivation than positive ones, and nothing is more demotivating than a setback…”
Read more information about this study here.
Google’s Quest to Build a Better Manager
Google’s Project Oxygen set out to quantify what makes a great manager by gathering more than 10,000 data points from performance reviews, feedback surveys, and other reports. The list of qualities that they found was not at all surprising, but the order in which they were ranked was not what they expected.
Google’s simple management approach has been: Leave people alone. Let the engineers do their stuff. If they become stuck, they’ll ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management into the first place.
However, technical expertise was ranked lowest of the eight qualities. The first three–be a good coach, empower your team, be a good communicator–are all key leadership abilities that can be used in any field.
