Book Summary Preview : The One Thing You Need to Know

The Big Idea
Everyone wants sustained success. Unfortunately, only few are able to attain this so longed for success. This is not because of a lack of effort or lack of determination; if anything, a good number of people even expend large amounts of effort and display overwhelming determination but still don’t quite make it there. A majority of people don’t experience sustained success because they don’t know where to focus their time, energies and resources on.

These focal points are exactly what you need to know to succeed. “The One Thing You Need to Know” will let you in on the single thing you need to know and focus on as a manager, a leader, or simply, as an individual in order to reach great heights and stay there.  

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The One Thing You Need to Know: Sustained Organizational Success

Managing and Leading: What’s the Difference?
Leading and managing are two completely different roles altogether. But can someone be both, and be successful at that? The answer is yes. However, he or she will need certain distinct skills and talents for each of the roles in order to, at the very least, not fail in them.

Excellence is pretty much impossible to explain without noticing the role of the leader in it. According to Warren Bennis, “Leadership accounts for, at the very least, 15% of the success of any organization.” And this is probably why there exists such a strong demand for “leadership training” books and seminars. Everyone wants a piece of the pie and wants the glory and recognition of having been able to bring their organizations to such heights.   

Conveniently, conventional wisdom holds that everyone, that each employee, can and should be leaders. It claims that leaders, apparently, are made by training and diligence; that leader’s are not born. To quote Michael Useem, director of the Center of Leadership and Change Management at the Wharton School, “everybody should be good at leading, whatever their level in the hierarchy.”

However, not only is it inaccurate to say that everyone, regardless of his or her place in the hierarchy, must be a leader, it is also unhelpful. Logically, if everyone were to play the role of the leader, they will loose focus on their primary roles in the organization, and, quite quickly, the organization will crumble.

Leaders play a distinct, discreet and enormously difficult role within an organization thus certain natural talents are required and expected of them. Fact is, no matter how appealing the concept might be at first glance, not everyone can be a leader.

The same can be said for great managers.

Obviously, one can improve his or her performance as either leader or manager through practice, experience and training. But without the core talents, they won’t be able to excel consistently in either.

A View From The Middle
“What do great managers actually do and what talents do you need to do it?”

The job of great managers is to excel at converting their employees’ talents into performance and, at their best, speed up the reaction between each employee’s talents and the company’s goals.

A talent most characteristic of great managers is the ability to derive satisfaction from the incremental growth of others. They are sincere when they say that your progress is their primary goal. Great managers, as compared to mediocre ones, never see people as a means of a performance end. For them, people are always an end unto themselves. As such, the focus of great managers is the success of each and every individual working under him or her. This talent is known as the Coaching Instinct.

Although the focus of great managers is their people, they are very well aware that they are not the employees’ agent; they are the company’s. This is no dilemma on the manager’s part. They instinctively know that for them, to serve the companies they work, for they must first, in the words of Dr. Donald O. Clifton, “get  people done through work.” 

Ultimately, a manager’s unique contribution (and his basis for success or failure) to the company is to make other people more productive working with him or her than working with anybody else. And the only way this can be pulled off is if the employees genuinely believe that their success is their manager’s primary goal.

A View From The Top
“What great leaders actually do and what talents do you need to do it?”

Great leaders rally people to a better future. They are fascinated by it: they see it so vividly, so distinctly, that they can’t get it out of their heads. Leaders are restless for change, impatient for progress and deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. No matter how intense the present is, the possibilities of the future, for them, will always overshadow the intensity of the present.

Great managers start with the individual employee and focus on his success. Great leaders, on the other hand, start with his image, his vision, of the future.  This future is what he thinks about and focuses on. 

If the core talent of great managers is an instinct to coach others towards success, then optimism and ego are the core talents of all great leaders.

Optimism
In saying that leaders are optimistic, it means that nothing can undermine their instinct, their deep belief, and their unwavering faith that things can get better. Leaders are unfailingly, unrealistically, and even irrationally optimistic.

Like it or not, this optimism is not learnable. They are either born with an optimistic disposition or they are not. True, people can be made less pessimistic through repeated coaching and counseling, but the fact remains that less-pessimistic is not, and will never be, synonymous with optimistic. The opposite then of a leader is not a follower: the opposite of a leader is a pessimist.

Ego
A powerful ego, properly defined as a need to stake grand claims, is the second half of a leader’s core talents. As such, leaders don’t set humble goals, don’t have humble dreams, don’t have humble assessments of their abilities. Leaders not only envision a better future, they also believe that they are the ones who can make this future come true.

This, however, doesn’t mean that leaders are egomaniacal. The main difference between a leader with a powerful ego and an egomaniac is how their egos are channeled. Leaders, effective ones at that, take their self-belief, self-assurance, and self-confidence, and press them into an enterprise bigger than themselves. But for the egomaniac, there is no bigger enterprise than himself; he is the enterprise.

To explain the fall of great leaders as a result of too much ego is a misdiagnosis. Leaders fail not because their egos are overwhelming but because their principles are weak. They run low on integrity.

 

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