As leaders, we are always searching for the best management practices. The internet has thousands of articles, videos, and resources on “how to be a better manager” with various rules and tips to follow. But, with so much information out there, what really works?
At EII, we have done that work for you and put it into an easy to understand tool that we use to coach our clients! The skills we help our clients develop can have a seismic impact on organizational success. Even some of the biggest companies have struggled with leadership and have been researching these concepts for years in order to perfect their management. Let’s take Google for example.
In 2009, the people analytics team at Google launched Project Oxygen in their quest to find exactly how to build better bosses (the summary below uses the data from that research and the New York Times’ reporting). Leadership skills are abstract concepts and finding a way to measure them is essential, but difficult to define. What better company to analyze this than a data giant with skilled expertise in creating algorithms?
Project Oxygen
The people analytics team analyzed over 10,000 observations across over 100 variables including manager reviews, feedback surveys, nominations for top-manager awards, etc., and correlated them with phrases, words, praise, and complaints.
The team had a deep first analysis of this data to create some working theories, then conducted interviews with managers to gather more data. Finally, through coding and synthesizing the results they were able to create the final list of the 8 most important qualities a manager should have.
When Google’s vice president of people operations, Laszlo Bock, first received the list he said, “my first reaction was, that’s it?”. The list seemed so apparently obvious that it was shocking.
At EII Consulting, our work focuses on exactly how to develop skills that look so simple and easy on paper. That’s exactly where we can help you and what Google realized is so important to understand as a leader! Because the hard part is implementing them into practice. Leaders must realize they might need training for these “obvious” skills. The simplicity of abstract leadership qualities is what makes perfecting it so hard because we rarely teach them.
So what are these 8 rules?
The 8 Rules for Effective Management
After reading this list (that took Google’s extremely talented team countless hours and over 400 pages of notes) what do you think?
Does it seem anticlimactically obvious and simple to you?
Were you surprised?
Does this list align with your own experiences?
(Let us know what you think!)
The goal of creating this list was to create an understanding for their employees to see what works, what doesn’t and identifying potential bias. A problem within many organizations is they will urge their employees to be great managers rather than tell them how to be a great manager.
Google’s Key to Management
Bock and his team tackled this problem by ranking the list by importance. Note the point ranked least important was technical expertise. (Yes, even those of you in the engineering world or health care industry where technical expertise is at the forefront of your job!)
Being an expert in your field does not mean you can effectively lead. There is a big difference! Leaders with high professional experience must also have the ability to effectively coach the skills to their team.
Where in your education have you been taught to coach or teach others?
The New York Times highlights an example of this: Google saw a lack of training with one of their worst-rated managers. Employees wanted to leave his team as they found him bossy, arrogant, political, and secretive. Bock describes him as “brilliant, but he did everything wrong when it came to leading a team”. Through one-on-one leadership coaching within six months, employee surveys were acknowledging the improvements.
Overall, Bock found that through training and coaching, Google achieved statistically significant improvement in manager quality for 75% of the worst-performing managers.
Many organizations make this same mistake. No matter the background of deep technical expertise or managerial position you may have, odds are leadership training is needed!
So what are you waiting for? Call us!
At EII we help leaders differentiate themselves with the proper skills to coach their employees. Leadership training develops more value to managers and their employees than any amount of technical skill expertise could offer.
Organizational Success Starts with Leadership
In fact, managers are a big variable in how employees feel about their job! The research is clear: good leadership can improve trust, increase employee satisfaction and improve the overall office environment. The better the manager, the better the team performance, the happier they are. Even more importantly this is a self-reinforcing cycle: the more you do these things the more you will see trust, satisfaction and behaviors improve (yes, more research shows this)!
Google’s own research reiterates that the qualities that employees valued the most were managers who were accessible and actively making connections with their employees. You can do this by:
Leading by Example for Years to Come
Google’s data-driven approach has instilled what years of research has been shown to be effective at other companies truly works! Scott DeRue, a management professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan was quoted by the New York Times saying that “although people are always looking for the next new thing in leadership, Google’s data suggest that not much has changed in terms of what makes for an effective leader”.
So, we are anxiously awaiting your call. Notice that Google’s research is well over 10 years old. Note also that the other research cited is decades old. Why are we still talking about these same challenges today!?
Contact EII today and we will help get you out of this rut and up your leadership skills!
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