Book Summary: First, Break All the Rules - By Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
The right people make all the difference in the world.
Question - How do you train people to be happy? Answer - You hire happy people.
This piece of advice makes everything so much easier because you're highly selective upfront and invest time matching skill sets to the job at hand.
Why is this important to me? I am not doing this summary to waste your time.
It is my vision to provide concise action steps that you can adopt right now to enhance your life.
According to Gallup, 9% of employees are ENGAGED, 71% are DISENGAGED and 20% are ACTIVELY DISENGAGED.
This costs companies billions of dollars per year in revenue.
Why do people leave their jobs? Research shows that the number one reason people leave is because of their direct supervisor.
Common sense solidifies this notion.
People are spending 40% of their lives at work.
If you have a neighbor that you hate, would you invite them over for dinner or avoid them? The same holds true for crappy supervisors.
First, Break all the rules is broken down into 7 chapters based on significant research from Gallup.
For the sake of time I want to point out the What, Why and How on four key points that will help you and your organization.
1.
Focus of Great Managers - The key to driving profitable growth is customer engagement and loyalty.
In order to have customer engagement, you need employee engagement.
The authors profile 12 questions based on the basics that great managers focus on.
These are important because it focuses on the relationships to their direct reports and if they have the tools to do their jobs effectively.
These simple questions are worth asking in your organization and I am going to do it in ours.
2.
Leverage Strengths - People have inherent strengths and great managers know to pair those strengths with the right jobs.
Traditional thinking focuses on the negatives and working on the weaknesses of your employees.
Great mangers leverage the talents and strengths and manage around the weaknesses.
In order to do this, you need to understand the weaknesses and help these employees work around them.
This requires reciprocation and team work.
Remember that people don't change that much.
You see this in relationships all the time, one person tries to change the other person and it never happens.
It is much better to simply pick the right person.
This also means you have to know what you want.
Talents can be defined as recurring behaviors that can be productively applied to defined outcomes.
3.
Focus on Performance - It is human nature to compete and want to excel at tasks.
The 2012 Superbowl was watched by 116 million people in America.
This is almost half the population.
Question - would people watch if they did not keep score? Absolutely not.
This is why it is imperative to have your people keep score.
They have to know who the adversary is and why they are keeping score on those items.
When the right people are doing the things that come natural to them and that gels with the outcomes, profitable growth will happen.
People's nature and productive habits are their talents.
The great mangers hunt for talents in their people.
To get people to do their best you need a firm understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, goals and dreams.
4.
The Peter Principle - This principle basically says that people get promoted to their level of incompetence.
Here is an example: You have a top salesperson and you promote him to sales manager.
Next thing you know they fail at it.
They just left their talent zone and moved to their weakness zone.
The goal here is to recognize it and help people become more of what they already are.
First, Break all the rules is a good book if you manage people.
This will help you understand and reorganize your focus.
This book will help me personally in two ways.
One, we will be doing the 12 question survey of our people to see where we are at and two; we will realign and focus on strengths and manage around weaknesses.
I hope you have found this short summary useful.
The key to any new idea is to work it into your daily routine until it becomes habit.
Habits form in as little as 21 days.
One thing you can take away from this book is focus on strengths.
Investing in strengths and spending time with your most productive people will magnify your results.
Most managers invest their time with the people who are under-performing.
The key is to focus on your out-performers.
Question - How do you train people to be happy? Answer - You hire happy people.
This piece of advice makes everything so much easier because you're highly selective upfront and invest time matching skill sets to the job at hand.
Why is this important to me? I am not doing this summary to waste your time.
It is my vision to provide concise action steps that you can adopt right now to enhance your life.
According to Gallup, 9% of employees are ENGAGED, 71% are DISENGAGED and 20% are ACTIVELY DISENGAGED.
This costs companies billions of dollars per year in revenue.
Why do people leave their jobs? Research shows that the number one reason people leave is because of their direct supervisor.
Common sense solidifies this notion.
People are spending 40% of their lives at work.
If you have a neighbor that you hate, would you invite them over for dinner or avoid them? The same holds true for crappy supervisors.
First, Break all the rules is broken down into 7 chapters based on significant research from Gallup.
For the sake of time I want to point out the What, Why and How on four key points that will help you and your organization.
1.
Focus of Great Managers - The key to driving profitable growth is customer engagement and loyalty.
In order to have customer engagement, you need employee engagement.
The authors profile 12 questions based on the basics that great managers focus on.
These are important because it focuses on the relationships to their direct reports and if they have the tools to do their jobs effectively.
These simple questions are worth asking in your organization and I am going to do it in ours.
2.
Leverage Strengths - People have inherent strengths and great managers know to pair those strengths with the right jobs.
Traditional thinking focuses on the negatives and working on the weaknesses of your employees.
Great mangers leverage the talents and strengths and manage around the weaknesses.
In order to do this, you need to understand the weaknesses and help these employees work around them.
This requires reciprocation and team work.
Remember that people don't change that much.
You see this in relationships all the time, one person tries to change the other person and it never happens.
It is much better to simply pick the right person.
This also means you have to know what you want.
Talents can be defined as recurring behaviors that can be productively applied to defined outcomes.
3.
Focus on Performance - It is human nature to compete and want to excel at tasks.
The 2012 Superbowl was watched by 116 million people in America.
This is almost half the population.
Question - would people watch if they did not keep score? Absolutely not.
This is why it is imperative to have your people keep score.
They have to know who the adversary is and why they are keeping score on those items.
When the right people are doing the things that come natural to them and that gels with the outcomes, profitable growth will happen.
People's nature and productive habits are their talents.
The great mangers hunt for talents in their people.
To get people to do their best you need a firm understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, goals and dreams.
4.
The Peter Principle - This principle basically says that people get promoted to their level of incompetence.
Here is an example: You have a top salesperson and you promote him to sales manager.
Next thing you know they fail at it.
They just left their talent zone and moved to their weakness zone.
The goal here is to recognize it and help people become more of what they already are.
First, Break all the rules is a good book if you manage people.
This will help you understand and reorganize your focus.
This book will help me personally in two ways.
One, we will be doing the 12 question survey of our people to see where we are at and two; we will realign and focus on strengths and manage around weaknesses.
I hope you have found this short summary useful.
The key to any new idea is to work it into your daily routine until it becomes habit.
Habits form in as little as 21 days.
One thing you can take away from this book is focus on strengths.
Investing in strengths and spending time with your most productive people will magnify your results.
Most managers invest their time with the people who are under-performing.
The key is to focus on your out-performers.
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