Twelve Things Good Bosses Believe

I found this post by Stanford evidence-based management professor Robert Sutton and tweeted about it earlier today.  But since it’s so good, I decided to do a post about it along with some commentary.  First, here are the twelve things:

1. I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.
2. My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.
3. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day.
4. One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough.
5. My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my people from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well.
6. I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.
7. I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my people to do the same thing.
8. One of the best tests of my leadership — and my organization — is “what happens after people make a mistake?”
9. Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too.
10. Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.
11. How I do things is as important as what I do.
12. Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

And here are some thoughts on them:

1. While 360 degree feedback studies can help managers understand themselves better, I agree that, by definition, managers will always have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it’s like to work for them.  By the way, in general, I think managers always need to assume they are missing information, regardless of the topic.
2. I agree strongly with this one; I think the media puts too much emphasis on the big, breakthrough idea and virtually none on the mundane business of clarifying operational goals, getting people to agree them, and then holding people accountable for delivering them.
3. I semi-agree with this one.  I think quarterly operational goals are critical, annual goals are important, and some general sense of “where we’re headed” is important as well.  But I do agree that a big part of a manager’s job is getting those small, everyday wins that my colleague Martin Cooke refers to as “1% changes.”
4. I totally agree with this one and struggle with it every day.  On one hand you have experience and opinions and want to show leadership.  On the other you don’t want to run over your people.
5. I’ve seen myself in this way only when it came to certain constituencies (e.g., the board, bankers, analysts) and not in general.  Perhaps I should.  I’ll mull on this one.
6. Yes.  See 4.
7. I am a big believer in understanding both sides of an argument before deciding.
8. I think this is a very important point and every manager, including me, surely believes:  “it’s OK to make a mistake, just don’t make the same one twice.”  The question is does our behavior actually reinforce that view?  People listen to words, they watch behavior, and they weigh the behavior about 10x relative to the words.
9. I agree that innovation is important, and not only in large things.  I think the business media tends to equate innovation with “the next big thing.”  To me, innovation matters in all things, both large and small.  And if you agree with Sutton’s point 3, it matters perhaps more in small matters than in large ones.
10. While I’d never consciously thought about this issue that way, I do have an innate tendency to worry more about driving out the negative than collecting the positive.  Some of my philosophies (e.g., mediocrity intolerance) reflect that.
11. Yes, and it’s easy to miss this one.  As a CEO you can get so results oriented that you can forget the how whilst focusing on the what.
12. Indeed.