I have the best job in the world. I can sit and read books—now granted they are business books. Every once and awhile, someone writes something that I especially like and want to share and I have the entire blogsphere to share it with. Does it get any better than that—for an ex-disc jockey?
Buckingham’s next book The One Thing You Need to Know : ... About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success is due in March and I was reading it and came to this description of what is a great manager:
“The chief responsibility of a great manager is not to enforce quality, nor to ensure customer service, nor to set standards, nor to build high performance teams. Each of these is a valuable outcome, and great managers may well use these outcomes to measure success. But the outcomes are the end result, not the startling point. The starting point is each employee’s talents. The challenge: to figure out the best way to transform these talents into performance.
That is the job of a great manager.
I confess to a fondness for the new Buckinghman book--like many useful books it takes a simple idea with strong common sense and applies it by telling good stories.
Of course I can't help but read the money quote with a sense of Drucker deja vu (which so many biz books prompt.) Here's his take on this topic: "The job of a professional manager is not to like people. It is not to change people. It is to put their strengths to work."
We are all not worthy.
Posted by: Tom Ehrenfeld at February 8, 2005 03:48 PMThis is absolutely, hands-down, my favorite business book I've ever read. I spent many years in Big 4 consulting orgs and they were, like everyone else, focused on fixing people's weaknesses instead of trying to leverage and grow their strengths.
Posted by: Scott Jones at February 17, 2005 03:44 PM