Book Summary Preview : Equipped to Lead

The Big Idea

Unless you manage a hook-and-ladder company, your workday shouldn’t be spent putting out fires. Yet leaders often spend most of their time running from crisis to crisis.

In his groundbreaking New York Times bestseller Built to Serve, United Supermarkets CEO Dan Sanders showed how putting profits before people encourages organizational chaos, saps motivation, stifles innovation, and undercuts competitiveness. He also unveiled a revolutionary people-centered business model championed by United and challenged other business leaders to put the human factor first.

In this follow-up to that inspirational bestseller, Dan and coauthor Galen Walters provide the tools needed to put the people-first model to work in your company. You’ll master the 4Ps critical to long-term success: People, Process, Partners, and Performance. And you will create an organization that puts front-line people before bottom-line profits, allowing you and your organization to profit more than you ever thought possible.

Why You Need This Book

This book will arm you with the tools and insight to help you reach new heights of achievement – financially, personally, and spiritually – by teaching you to place your people before your bottom line.

Introduction

Simply put, order will emerge when leaders subscribe to good values. Without values and adherence to natural laws and principles, order cannot serve as an organization’s foundation.

Similarly, without adequate focus on four universal components that are common to all organizations, balance cannot take shape. These four components are collectively known as the 4Ps Management System:

• First, leaders must never neglect their employees – the talented people who represent the lifeblood of productivity and innovation within every sustainable organization.
• Second, leaders must devote adequate time to the processes by which work flows through the organization – the system of inputs and outputs that people use to drive productivity.
• Third, leaders must acknowledge they cannot survive without partners – both the people who supply the organization and the people who purchase goods and services from the organization.
• And, fourth, leaders must deliver superior performance – based on the realized potential of the organization, not the historical trend.

The 4Ps Management System begins and ends with human beings connected by processes.

People, Human Beings

The order of the 4 Ps is crucial. People come first for good reason: they are the single greatest asset in any organization. Ask any CEO of any company; staffing is the single biggest challenge to long-term success.

The people issue is enormous for all industries. Understanding the well-being of employee – physically, mentally, and spiritually – is essential to realizing the full potential of an organization.

Consider this short list of tactical action steps, and then make deliberate efforts to implement them immediately:

1. Acknowledge that every employee is worthy of dignity and respect by everyone inside the organization – starting with you.
2. Embrace the concept that long-term superior performance cannot be achieved without a genuine commitment to the physical, mental, and spiritual well-being of every employee.
3. Never begin a staff meeting with a financial report. Instead, always ask each leader in the room about people first.
4. Schedule blocks of time during every week when you can leave your office and engage employees in their space.
5. Try beginning conversations with employees with a question regarding their personal interests rather than to a question regarding business.

Too many companies today fail to provide an understanding of the next opportunity. Employees deserve to know the treatment they can expect. Answering these questions publicly sets the rules of accountability internally for those who lead.

When people come first, the organization and its success follow naturally.

 

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