First Break All the Rules

A stock photo as edgy as the title of this book.

First Break All the Rules (FBAR) is a book that claims to have found what great managers do in order to be great. The authors work for Gallup and their secret sauce is that they are able to compile results from tens of thousands of manager interviews that were conducted by the company.

The first part of the book explains how they found great managers and the questions they asked these managers and their employees. The rest of the book touches on key themes that they found. I have not been a manager long enough nor do I have enough data to verify if what they say is trye, but I wanted to share the ideas that I found most interesting and which I hope to use to improve my management style.

Retention

There is a Freakonomics episode about managers that stands out to me. One of the take aways was that only thing that studies have shown managers can affect is retention (despite the fact that everyone seems to think its productivity). I have taken this to heart and make retention something important to my management style. That is why the following quote from FBAR stings,

“people leave managers, not companies”

This, like other ideas in the book, is not an opinion of the authors but is instead a distillation of the countless interviews they conducted. In my time as a manager, I have had four people leave my teams and each time was a painful experience and this quote explains why. I think I know that people are primarily moving to find another manager and when they leave it makes me reflect on how I could have better served that person.

Micromanaging

“Imagine an expert — a well-intentioned expert. He wants to help all employees rise above their imperfections. He looks at all the fumbling inefficiency around him, and he knows, he just knows, that if only people would learn his simple steps, the world would be a better place. And everyone would thank him. This expert believes that there is one best way to perform every role. With time and study, he will find this one best way and teach it to all employees. He will make them more efficient and more successful. You, the manager, will simply have to monitor each person to ensure that everyone is sticking to the regiment.”

Good lord, I hope this quote never describes me. I think it is an excellent condemnation of the type of behavior we see from poor leadership. Management is too messy and nuanced of a space to perfectly prescribe what to do in all the possible states like an engineer would do with a binary decision tree to test all the states of a traffic light. Instead, FBAR describes an alternative,

Defining the right outcomes does expect a lot of employees, but there is probably no better way to nurture self-awareness and self-reliance in your people.

The book suggests that we should not try to prescribe a priori every possible step our team should take; instead we should define the outcomes our team should achieve. This gives employees freedom and responsibility to solve things their own way and lets them use their own intelligence and expertise to achieve those outcomes. The book has a final warning for folks who want to try the prescriptive approach.

“You can’t make anything happen. All you can do is influence, motivate, berate, or cajole in the hope that most of your people will do what you ask of them. This isn’t control. This is remote control. And it is coupled, nonetheless, with all of the accountability for the team’s performance.”

This is super true and resonates with my experience. We greatly overestimate the amount of control we have over our projects and especially individuals and the sooner a manager accepts it, the sooner they can stop wasting their time.

Talents v. Skills

“The best way to help an employee cultivate his talents is to find him a role that plays to those talents.”

This is where we finally get to the biggest theme of the book: talents and skills.

The book defines skills as things that can be learned on the job. I work in software engineering so examples I can think of are: learning Python, getting Java readability, or pretending you know what deep learning is. These are things that can be picked up by most folks in a few weeks to months.

On the other hand, a talent is not something that someone is going to learn anytime soon. It is something like: being extremely organized, being an expert negotiator, or being a pitch perfect musician. Some people would describe these as things people are simply ”born with.” I however would liken it to the 10,000+ hour phenomenon Malcom Gladwell discusses in Outliers. It doesn’t seem to be widely accepted, but the idea is that someone who invests 10,000 hours in practicing something achieves unparalleled expertise in that thing. Thus, someone who has spent 10+ years practicing being organized will have a super human ability to be organized at work, i.e., will have a talent for being organized.

“Skills, knowledge, and talents are distinct elements of a person’s performance. The distinction among the three is that skills and knowledge can easily be taught, whereas talents cannot.”

Whether its something a person is born with or not, the book argues that talents are simply not something that a manager can impart on a report so its best not to even try. Instead, a great manager works to discover the talents each report has:

“One of the signs of a great manager is the ability to describe, in detail, the unique talents of each of his or her people — what drives each one, how each one thinks and how each one builds relationships. In a sense, great managers are akin to great novelists. Each of the “characters” they manage is vivid and distinct. Each has his own features and foibles. And their goal with every employee is to help each one play out his unique role to the fullest.”

A great manager should then

“define a productive team as one in which each person knows which role he plays best and is cast in that role most of the time.”

I think this is a cute metaphor and it makes me think of a manager as the casting director. The goal is to spend time auditioning folks and learning about what they are good at and then fitting them with a role where they get to shine the most.

Overall, this book was a blast to read and had a great of ideas I am excited to put to practice. I listed my favorites here, but there is plenty more to dig into and its a quick read.