Читать книгу The Leader Lab - Tania Luna - Страница 9

Consider this: in a 10-minute exchange with one person, a manager uses hundreds of words, microexpressions, and gestures. Which of these behaviors result in a team member who's productive and engaged and which result in the opposite? When we began our mission to help people become great managers faster, we couldn't separate the signal from the noise. So we thought back to the Martas, Johns, Bernardos, and Nikos. We wondered: can we learn directly from these leadership legends? Thanks to this insight, we assembled our first group of research participants.

At LifeLabs Learning, we had the unique opportunity of training people at many different companies around the world. So, every time we went into a company to lead workshops, we asked, “Who here is a great manager?” The people who were named again and again had the most engaged teams and a track record of achieving results. We also compared these “greats” with average managers. Our initial plan was to conduct interviews with the greats and the average, and look for differences in their answers. To make a long story short, this approach was mostly … a flop. When we asked managers which behaviors led to their success, the answers of the great and average folks were not predictive of performance. For example, guess which type of manager (average or great) most often said, “I think it's important to be a good listener.”

The answer? Nearly every manager talked about the importance of listening. So what actually made the greats different? We interviewed the managers’ teams to see if we could gather more helpful data. This approach yielded some interesting insights. For example, we learned there was no correlation between managers believing they were good listeners and their team members rating them as good listeners. But we were still no closer to understanding the behaviors that distinguished great managers.