Figure 3.1 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Figure 3.2 The management hierarchy of needs

Figure 3.3 Maslow reduced

Greed

Greed corresponds to Maslow’s growth needs: everyone wants something and, when they get it, they want something more. To start with, they may want money. But greed is not just about money. People want other things. People like to be recognised. It may be something as simple as praise in public for a job well done. Or it can be the ambitious business person seeking political recognition and public honour through good works and political donations. Persuasion does not start with what you want: it starts by finding out what the other person wants.

In daily management practice, greed can be translated into the everyday hopes of colleagues. They have goals and deadlines to meet. They want to look good and to succeed. It does not matter how brilliant your idea may be – if it does not help your colleagues with their agendas you can expect a lukewarm response. Your idea may look great to you, but it could look like more work for them.

Fear

Fear is the other side of the coin to greed. It can be a very compelling way of gaining compliance with your idea. In many cases, the proposal is simple: ‘If you do not do this the consequences will be…’ At the first mention of regulatory, legal, health and safety concerns, many managers give up. It is not worth taking the risk of letting these things go wrong, even if the risk is very small, but the cost is very large. Playing to fear is also used by IT consultants: if you do not implement our very expensive project, then all your mission-critical programmes are at risk. Many senior executives lack the technical expertise or will to argue against such fear-based selling.

Fear is also relative. Cost-cutting programmes normally increase fear, not reduce it. That is one reason why they are resisted overtly or covertly. To build support for cost-cutting programmes, senior executives play up the even greater fear of what happens if we do not cut costs now: ‘If we do not cut costs now, we might all lose our jobs as the company goes bankrupt: better to lose a few people now than to lose everyone later.’

Idleness

There are many things we would like to do. But life is busy. We might want to learn Spanish, get fit, become a painter and get involved in the community. But these things take effort and, in the meantime, we have the bills to pay, the dog to feed and the car has broken down again. At work, you have your great idea. But everyone else has other problems to attend to: budgets, meetings, deadlines and crises. Your idea is one more item on an already overcrowded list. Colleagues may like your idea, but not enough to stop working on their priorities to help you achieve yours.

You have to make it easy for people to accept your idea. Show how your idea will make it easier for them to achieve their goals by showing the opposite scenario: opposing your idea will take up huge amounts of their time and will result in lost opportunities. Make it difficult for them to say no.

Risk

Risk is the iceberg that sinks many ideas. It is often unseen and unspoken. Most people are naturally risk-averse. Any new idea inevitably carries all sorts of risks with it: it may not work, it may divert resources from other things, it may have unintended consequences, or it may lead to a change in the power structure. At any meeting, listen to what happens when any new idea is raised (unless the idea comes from the boss). Immediately, people will start asking helpful questions along the lines of ‘Have you thought of this or that…?’ These helpful ideas have the effect of:

• showing that the questioner is listening and smart because they can identify problems fast
• killing the idea, because everyone sees how risky it is
• killing off innovation, because now everyone realises that to have an idea is to invite being shot down in public by intellectual questioning.

This is an unproductive outcome that could be avoided if people focused on the benefits and opportunities of an idea, before focusing on all the risks and problems, unhelpfully disguised as asking helpful questions.

Risk comes in three main flavours:

1. Rational risk: how will this affect the business? People are encouraged to discuss this openly, because business people are meant to be rational.
2. Political risk: how will this idea affect my department? Will it lose or gain resources, priorities and influence as a result of this idea?
3. Emotional risk: how will this idea affect me? Will I have to work harder, be marginalised, or have to work with a new boss or develop new skills? People will never raise these risks in public. Instead, they will raise ever more persuasive rational and business objections, which are a cover for their personal and emotional objections.

It pays to know what sort of risk you are dealing with. Many arguments become increasingly bitter over apparently logical issues. When this happens, both sides start digging ever deeper holes, using logic to defend political and emotional positions. The best solution is to stop digging. Stop the discussion and find some time in private when the real issues can be raised and dealt with.

As with idleness, it pays to reverse the risk equation. Like fear, risk is relative. Show, if possible, that the risks of doing nothing significantly outweigh the risks of doing what you propose. Risk avoidance is a powerful way of gaining compliance. Insurance is sold entirely on the idea of risk avoidance. Government cannot persuade us to pay taxes or wear seat belts, but it makes the risks of not doing so high enough so that most people comply.

Preparation

Preparation is about asking some basic questions:

• What are the benefits of my idea to the other person?
• What are the risks from their perspective?
• How can I make it easy for them to agree?
• What is their style of working, and how can I get along with them best?
• What is the best time to approach them?
• Have I got all the material I need to support my discussion with them?
• Do I know the logistics of the meeting: where, when and how to get there?

These are very obvious questions. They are very rarely asked, and you can look surprisingly smart by asking them when a team member comes and seeks your advice on how to plan an influencing meeting. Although the questions may be obvious, the answers often are not. Many of them are about understanding the other person’s hopes, fears, needs and wishes. If you do not understand this, you do not understand what you are selling.

Alignment

A truism among sales people is that you have to sell yourself before you can sell your idea. We buy only from people we trust. You also need to make sure that the other person is in the right frame of mind to listen: if they are frantically trying to put out fires in their area, they may not want to listen to your great idea.

The process of alignment can take a few seconds if you already know each other well. In this case, alignment is complete when you know the following:

• You are meeting at a convenient time.
• You have anchored the meeting around the core topic.
• You have built some trust and rapport with the other person.

This social start needs only a few questions and statements, such as:

• ‘Thank you for meeting me. Is this still a convenient time?’
• ‘You look as busy as ever’ (inviting them to download their problems for a moment to an empathetic ear: if they are too busy, you will find out now).
• ‘As promised, I have come to ask your advice about…’ You have now anchored the conversation, and you have not put yourself into selling mode: you are asking for advice and help.

If you are meeting someone for the first time, alignment will take longer. You will need to build some rapport and trust. You can do this by finding a common interest, common acquaintances or common professional background. The purpose of such social chat is to build a basic level of trust by finding common experiences, values and outlooks.

Situation: agree the problem or opportunity

This is where most persuading goes wrong or right. You cannot get to the right solution if you do not know what the question is.

As with exams, it pays to know what the right question is. The classic mistake is to think that your problem or opportunity is the problem or opportunity that the other person wants to deal with. In reality, they have many other things to worry about. Buying the dog food may be more important to them than dealing with your issue.

Good influencing does not start with your idea. It starts with what the other person wants. You can preach as much as you want about your brilliant and urgent idea, but you may as well preach to the wall if you do not understand where the other person is coming from. So, if you want to influence well, start by listening and not by preaching.

The purpose of agreeing the problem is to force attention and gain legitimacy for the issue. These can be:

• Rational: there is a big challenge for the whole organisation and we have the numbers to show it.
• Emotional: I can help you with your agenda and challenges.
• Political: we have to sort this out for our common boss.

To make the problem compelling, you have to show that it is important, urgent and that the other person has a role to play in sorting it out.

Do not even start to suggest a solution until there is hard agreement about the nature of the challenge. Invite them to talk about it: hear and understand their perspective. As you listen, you can work out how to pitch your idea so that it hits all the right buttons and avoids the red flags, which might stop the idea from their perspective.

You need to identify not just the problem, but who owns the problem. If you are helping the other person with one of their challenges, you are more likely to find an open door and an available diary than if you are solving your own problem.

Size the prize: outline the benefits of resolving the problem

In business, the most compelling business case is financial. It is very hard to argue against a credible and compelling business case: £1,000 invested now will save £2,000 tomorrow. The critical issue is whether anyone believes your claim. Your claim must be credible. This can be achieved through a combination of rigorous analysis and, more importantly, validation by trusted third parties: finance validates the financial numbers, marketing validates the customer and market assumptions, and operations and IT validate their parts of the equation. Line up the technical experts in support of your claim: use their credibility to support your case.

Not all benefits are financial. Non-financial business cases can be both quantifiable (‘we will recruit more top graduates next year’) and qualitative (‘this is important for morale’).

At this point, there still should be no mention of your idea or solution. Once the other person has agreed to both the problem and the benefits of solving the solution, then the only discussion is ‘How do we best get there?’ Then they are ready to hear your idea. Even if they do not like it, they are now in a position where they are not just trying to evaluate your idea, but they are helping you find a path from the problem to the solution.

Idea

Provide a simple explanation of your idea. Keep it short. Show that you do not need them to do everything: you need a limited amount of support in one critical area to progress. Then quickly move on to the next stage.

If you have listened well in the first four steps, you will be able to frame your idea in the language of the other person, and you will be able to show how it helps them. Suggest your idea only when you are confident that you understand the other person and that they are ready to agree with you.

Overcome objections

If you have done your preparation well, and you listened to them when you were discussing the original problem, this should be easy: you should know exactly what their concerns are. Do not hide from these objections: use them as a chance to shine. If you now say: ‘I think there are three real concerns with this approach…’ and these concerns reflect the major concerns of the other person, suddenly you will have them on your side. They are no longer going to have to challenge you with their objections. You are inviting them to work with you on solving the concerns. The nature of the discussion has changed completely. You have changed your role from being a pesky sales person to being an impartial and trusted partner.

If the objections start to flow at this point, do not engage in fighting each objection in an ever bloodier version of corporate trench warfare. Go back to step three: check that you both agree on the problem, then agree on the benefits of solving the problem. You need to create a problem-solving atmosphere, not a problem-generating atmosphere.

Next steps

Most people are not psychic: they will not know exactly what you want. You have to ask them for it. They expect you to ask: otherwise it will have been a pretty pointless meeting. But this is where many executives fail. They are too self-effacing to ask for the next steps. There are four simple ways of asking for the next steps that make it quite difficult for the other person to refuse:

1. The direct close: ‘Will you buy the special widgets?’
2. The alternative close: ‘Would you like to buy the widgets in one big order or split the order?’
3. The assumed close: ‘So we are agreed that the order is for 100,000 yellow widgets.’
4. The action close: ‘I will raise the widgets order and send it over to you.’

The weakest close is the direct one, because you invite people to say ‘no’. The sneakiest, and often most effective, is the alternative close. You are not giving them the option of saying no to the widget order, but are inviting them to choose only how they should be ordered. The assumed close is a power close because it takes quite a strong person to speak up, especially in a public meeting, and disagree.

At this stage, your preparation is often vital. Over the course of your meeting, you may discover that your plan A is not viable. If you have prepared properly, you will have a plan B and plan C, which will allow you to find a way forward rather than finding a dead end.

Summary of the PASSION principle

Preparation: understand what you want and what motivates the other person.

Alignment: build trust and rapport and make sure the other person is ready to talk.

Situation: make sure you both agree the problem, opportunity or exam question.

Size the prize: jointly agree the benefits of solving the problem you have agreed.

Idea: suggest your idea in the language of the other person.

Overcome objections: do not fight them, agree with them and work jointly to solve them.

Next steps: be clear about what happens next, be ready with your plan B.

The listening rule

All great persuaders and sales people share a common characteristic: they have two ears and one mouth. If you have this, then you are halfway to becoming very good at persuasion. Good influencers and leaders not only have two ears and one mouth, they also use them in that proportion. Persuasion is not about selling and telling. It is about listening well. If you listen twice as much as you talk, you are well on the way to success.

The partnership rule

Bosses and clients are used to acting as judges: they judge all the ideas coming before them. This is not a constructive relationship. Typically, it involves the plaintiff pitching his case with a stack of PowerPoint slides and memos to impress the judge. The judge then picks a few holes in the presentation to show she is smart and decides for or against the plaintiff.

A much better way is to turn the boss or client into a partner and a coach. Show that you are there to help with their problem or opportunity, not just to advance your own agenda. Throw away the PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint slides are the badge of shame that junior staff and sales people have to wear. Colleagues do not talk to each other over a stack of slides: they talk to each other over a cup of coffee. By throwing away the slides you:

• avoid getting locked into the logic flow of the slides
• can react flexibly to what colleagues are saying
• create the opportunity to listen and discuss like colleagues, rather than present like a plaintiff
• are forced to prepare very closely around the logical and emotional flow of the discussion you want to have
• avoid getting trapped into arguments about detail and data.

Do not worry about the data. Have a few killer facts in your mind. Then you can offer to send across the detail later.

If you listen really well, you can convince the other person that the big idea was theirs all along. You reinforce the useful things they say and ignore the unhelpful things. Do not argue if it is not necessary. Build agreement where possible. When you have enough agreement, summarise what they were saying and thank them for their insight. Your idea is now theirs and you have succeeded: no one argues against their own idea.

Objectives

Step one is to understand the problem we are solving. This is the same logic as the persuasion model outlined above:

What is it that you want to focus on, achieve, review today?

Overview

The next step is to gather all the facts before forming a view or making a judgement. This takes some gentle probing, in which you encourage discussion of different perspectives. Do not get locked into the world view of the person being coached: you have to help them see a broader perspective.

• Why is this important to you?
• What is the current situation?
• How do other people see this?
• How do you know they see it that way?

What are the potential consequences, good or bad, of this?

Options

This is where you get them to take responsibility and control. By this stage, you may think you know the answer. Stop yourself. They will value a solution they discover more than a solution which you impose. That means they are more likely to act on it with conviction.

Push them to think of more than one option. In very difficult situations, there may not be much they can control: urge them to find something they can control. The more people feel a sense of control over their destiny, the less anxious they will feel. Then get them to evaluate the options they have generated:

• What choices do you have?
• What can you control or influence?
• Have you seen anyone face anything like this before? What did they do?
• How would you evaluate the benefits, risks and consequences of each option?

As they evaluate each option, they will gravitate naturally towards one solution. If in doubt, back their solution not yours. You want them to be committed. They will be committed to making their idea work. If you impose your solution, they will be committed to showing it does not work.

Obstacles

This is your reality check. Ask simple questions:

• What will prevent you doing this?
• What support will you need?
• What obstacles do you see?

If you fail to ask these questions, you run the risk that they will give up when things start to get tough. But, if you have both predicted the challenges, you will be better prepared for them and you will be able to keep going.

Outcome

Finally, check for understanding. The big risk here is that you both feel happy and confident, but have different understandings about what happens next. Do not ask if they understand: a mumbled ‘yes’ often means ‘not really’. The best way to check for agreement is to ask them what they think happens next. They should say what you expect: if they say something different, you will have averted disaster by catching the misunderstanding early.

By now, you will have noticed some familiar themes running through both persuasion and coaching:

• Listening is more important than talking.
• Questions are at least as important as answers.
• Understand the question before offering the answer.

These may seem very obvious lessons. The reason for spelling them out is that very few managers consistently follow these principles. By following them, you will start to stand out from the crowd.

Work out what you can delegate

Don’t ask ‘What can I delegate?’ because that will result in a very short list. Ask ‘What can I not delegate?’ In practice, there is very little you cannot delegate: evaluations, promotions, disciplinary procedures, resource allocation and team formation are all your responsibility. Everything else you can delegate. That creates a much longer list of items you can delegate, and it will include not only fairly routine administrative and maintenance activities, but also a few more stretching and engaging initiatives.

Know your team

Think carefully about who is best for which tasks. Balance their current capabilities versus their ability to learn and grow by doing the task. If a person is 60 per cent ready, then trust them. This can be nerve-racking, as you see them struggle with stuff that would be easy for you. But that is the best way they will learn. Once they have learned, they become more productive and valuable members of your team. Balance out the workload across the team. Given the ambiguous nature of managerial work, it is very difficult to estimate workloads in advance. In practice, you know which team members are shirkers and which are heroes who never complain about workloads.

Set clear objectives

When briefing a team member, you need to give clarity and certainty to four things:

1. The expected outcome.
2. When the outcome must be achieved.
3. The reasons behind the goals you have set.
4. Intermediate objectives that let both of you know if things are on track.

Explaining why the goal matters gives vital context and meaning. ‘Why’ may be obvious to you, but not to your team. If your team understands why you are making a request, they will be in a much better position to respond to questions and challenges as they arise, instead of having to refer back to you. Investing time now will save much more time later by avoiding misunderstandings and re-work.

Discuss the process

You can be clear about the goals, but you need to be flexible over the means.

This becomes a negotiation around several key topics:

• How many resources (people, skills, budget) will be available to the team?
• How much decision-making authority will it have?
• How often will it be necessary to report?
• What is the best approach to take?
• Who else needs to be involved?
• How can the manager help in removing roadblocks and dealing with the politics?

This may be more than one conversation. The objective of this step is partly to set your team up for success. Equally, discussion gives your team a sense of ownership over the process. It might even come up with a really smart way of tackling the task that you had not thought about before.

A huge trap here is vagueness. If a team member says ‘I hope to… I will try… I will look into it…’, they are making vague promises that mean nothing. Misunderstanding inevitably follows. Be very clear about who does what by when. Do not ask your team if they understand because they will say ‘yes’, even if they do not understand. Ask them to summarise who will do what when. This quickly reveals any misunderstandings, before it is too late.

Follow-up

Managers delegate, never abdicate, responsibility. You are still responsible for the final outcome. Three key elements of the follow-up are:

1. Be available to coach, as required.
2. Check up on progress formally and informally, as discussed with the team at the start of the task.
3. Recognise the team’s contribution and success when it has completed the task.

Some managers try to steal the limelight at the end of a successful effort by their team. This demoralises the team and does not help the manager. You look much better to your bosses if you can show that you can build and manage a great team, than if you pretend to do all the hard work as a one-man band.

Principle one: know which battles to fight

Sun Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, wrote The Art of War about 2,350 years ago. Perhaps his most useful insight was in knowing when to fight. He gave three rules for fighting:

1. Only fight if the prize is worth fighting for. Most corporate battles are over small things: save your ammunition and personal credibility for the big battles. On small things, it is often easier to do a trade: concede one point and gain another in return.
2. Only fight if you know you are going to win. On Wall Street, the saying goes: ‘If you don’t know who the fall guy is, you are.’ The last thing you want is a good clean fight: you want a completely unfair fight where you are sure to win. This is not just about having the best arguments. It is about having all your allies lined up well in advance.
3. Only fight if there is no other way of achieving your goal. Enemies are not good for your career. Find a way of co-opting people on to your agenda; align your goals with theirs; get an intermediary to broker a deal; do a trade with them over interests, timing, priorities or resources. To turn Clausewitz (a military philosopher) on his head: ‘Diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.’ Diplomacy is the bloodless way of achieving your goals.

All three of these conditions need to be in place to make it worth fighting. But, when you do fight, fight hard. Remember the words of Colonel Tim Collins to his troops as he sent them into war during the second Iraq conflict: ‘If you are ferocious in battle, remember to be magnanimous in victory.’ You will need to win the peace as well as the war.

Principle two: from FEAR to EAR

Human instinct trumps human reason, especially at moments of stress and conflict. The natural reaction to danger is the flight or fight reaction, spurred on by a good deal of fear. In the context of your organisation, these are deeply unhelpful instincts. Running away or fighting the CEO at the first hint of a challenge could become a career limiting move. We have to find a way of managing our feelings.

The FEAR instinct can be summarised as:

Fight furiously

Engage enemy emotionally

Argue against all-comers

Retaliate, refute reason

Like flight and fight, the FEAR reaction is not helpful. It is, however, a potentially memorable way to spend your last day with an employer. The first step in overcoming the FEAR reaction is to recognise it. Once you recognise it, you can start to control it. In training sessions, we ask managers how they deal with the FEAR reaction. Some of the more original ways of managing personal stress include:

• Become a fly on the wall. Watch yourself and decide on the best course of action from this out-of-body position.
• Imagine what the person you most admire would do in this situation, and try it.
• Imagine the other person as a baby throwing its toys out of the pram. It is hard to get angry with a baby in a tantrum.
• Imagine the other person wearing a tutu. Becoming angry with a fat 50-year-old in a tutu is very difficult.
• Focus on breathing – breathe deeply and slowly, regain control of your body and emotions.
• Count to ten before replying. Give yourself time to think, avoid inflaming the discussion any more and let the other person’s storm blow itself out.
• Go to your happy place. Everyone has a place in their heads that is safe and secure. Go there, take stock and then proceed.

All these tricks help achieve the essential first three goals:

1. Regain personal control.
2. Buy time to think.
3. Let the storm blow itself out.

It is extraordinarily difficult to sustain anger for more than two minutes, although those two minutes can feel like an eternity. The only way to sustain the anger is to give it some more fuel. Give the angry person no fuel, and they will run out of steam fast. Fuel comes in several forms, including:

• engaging with them emotionally
• justifying and defending your position, which will lead to them arguing even more intensely about why you are wrong
• using body language to show how angry, upset or dismissive you feel.

It is better to win a friend than win an argument. Winning a friend is the best way to win the argument. A friend is more likely to listen to reason and compromise than an enemy. A simple way of doing this is to remove the F from FEAR. What remains is EAR, which is what you should be using. Listening is a far better way of gaining agreement than talking and persuading. EAR stands for:

Empathise

Agree the problem

Resolve the way forward

Empathise

Some people appear naturally empathetic. The rest of us have to learn the skill. Fortunately, it is quite easy. You do not have to become a fully qualified shrink, a neuro-linguistic programming expert or an agony aunt to become empathetic. Here are three simple ways in which you can become more empathetic in your dealings with colleagues:

• Stop talking at them. Instead, let them hear the voice of perfect reason and harmony: their own voice. Do not feel the need to fill a silence. Let them fill the silence with their own wisdom. Listening is a wonderful way of letting opponents talk themselves into submission, buyers talk themselves into buying and lovers talk themselves into bed.
• Listen actively. Show that you are listening by paraphrasing back what you heard them say. Do not repeat what they said: this appears artificial. Show that you have absorbed what they said and have interpreted it. If you misinterpreted, they will tell you quickly and you avoid any misunderstanding. If you interpreted correctly, they will think that you are wonderful for hearing their wisdom so well.
• Ask open questions. Open questions encourage people to talk more. A closed question encourages a yes/no answer, which kills the conversation and has the potential to create conflict if the answer is no. Open questions often start with a what, how or why. These are difficult to answer with a yes or no.

Agree the problem

Many conflicts are about different agendas and priorities. Finance is focused on cost control, and marketing is focused on revenue generation. The result can be a dialogue of the deaf about decreasing costs versus raising revenues, there is no rational discussion to be had. So the two sides need to agree a common way of looking at the challenge. In reality, both marketing and finance should want to increase the profitability of the organisation. Once both sides agree a common challenge, they can agree a common way forward: marketing investment needs to show an adequate return to shareholders. There is still plenty of discussion and debate, but at least both sides are now working towards the same goal and share the same language.

This is a stunningly obvious point, which is why it is normally missed. There is a real art form in changing the nature of the conflict from a win/lose to a win/win. Costs versus revenues is a win/lose argument. Increasing profitability can become a win/win for both sides.

Resolve the way forward

This rational discussion can happen only when both sides have got past the emotional problems of the hot war and when they have agreed the common problem. In practice, this is often the easiest part of the discussion. If you are jointly trying to find a way through, you are likely to succeed. If you are trying to fight your way past each other in opposite directions, you will find it difficult to make progress.

This is, hopefully, a rational discussion based on emotionally and politically stable foundations. Because it is a rational discussion, it is covered in detail in Chapter 2: Solving problems: prisons and frameworks – and tools.

By now you may have noticed that IQ, EQ and PQ have reared their ugly heads again. The EAR process of resolving a hot conflict pulls together the three core management skills:

• EQ: empathise, remove the emotional heat of the moment.
• PQ: agree the common problem, align agendas.
• IQ: solve the problem and agree the way forward.

Importantly, deploy EQ, PQ and IQ in that order: EQ first and IQ last. Many managers start with IQ and land up having endless logical arguments that go round in circles. Deal with the person first and the problem will melt away.

Principle one: give positive feedback

Positive feedback is not simply about being nice to people. Positive feedback helps because it:

• encourages the right sort of behaviour
• builds the confidence of the recipient of the feedback
• opens up a non-threatening dialogue about performance, making coaching easier
• raises both individual and team morale.

There are good and bad ways of giving even positive feedback. Essentially, the principles are the same as when giving effective constructive feedback, outlined next.

Principle two: make constructive feedback constructive

Constructive feedback is the art of changing perspectives and behaviours. There are some tried and tested ways of doing this well and poorly. The four basic steps of giving constructive feedback are:

1. Find the right time and the right place.
2. Be specific, not general, and focus on behaviour not the person.
3. Pause.
4. Solve the problem and move to the next steps.

Find the right time and the right place

Constructive feedback requires a change in perspective or behaviour: that implies criticism of current behaviour. People do not like criticism, especially in public.

Give the feedback in private, not in public. Do not force someone to defend themselves in public or shame them in public: it will get a negative reaction.

Give the feedback near enough to the actual event for it to be fresh in the memory, but not if the person is still upset or angry about what has just happened. Let them calm down first: reassure them that you are not going to bite their head off. Then they may start to transition from an emotional state to a more rational state.

The clear difference with positive feedback is that often it is best given in public. People like public recognition, and it sends a signal to the rest of the team about the sorts of behaviours that you believe are important to the success of the team.

Be specific, not general, and focus on behaviour not the person

Telling someone that they are unprofessional is, in itself, unprofessional. It is very general and it is an attack on the person. It invites a fight rather than a change in behaviour. Take the concern and ask yourself why you made that judgement. Then focus on the specific behaviours that led to that comment. For instance, ‘I noticed you have turned up late to work four days in a row’ is a factual description of behaviour. If they agree with this, you may be ready for the next step.

The same principle applies with positive feedback. Saying, ‘I think you are a wonderful person’ is unhelpful: it is not actionable and probably sounds insincere. Saying, ‘That solution you came up with on customer service was very creative, and it has worked’ is specific.

Choice of language is important here. Generalisations such as never, always and everyone are unlikely to be accurate and will inflame things.

Pause

Give the other person a chance to react. There are several ways of doing this:

• Shut up. There is no need to fill the air with your opinions. Give them space to respond.
• Ask an open question or invite a response: ‘Lateness is not like you. I don’t understand why it is suddenly happening.’
• Reflect on how it affects you personally: ‘It has made life difficult for me because…’ Use reflection as a prompt only if the first two options are not generating a response.

At this point, you may find they have a domestic crisis, or they have been working exceedingly late, or there may be some other reason that you can work on together. You are inviting the other person to become a partner in solving a joint problem, rather than being a boss that is going to scold a team member like a parent scolding a child. You are trying to construct an adult-to-adult conversation, not a parent-to-child script.

Do not move to the next stage unless you can:

• agree the problem, or at least the symptoms of a problem (e.g. lateness)
• agree that the problem needs to be solved: it is important and relevant
• agree the causes of the problem.

If you do not have these agreements in place, you may find the discussion going round in circles, from symptoms to causes to facts to solutions and who is to blame.

In this pause, let the other person reflect on why things are happening the way they are. Simply saying ‘I never expect to see you late again’ is unhelpful. You may be addressing the symptom of a problem (lateness) not its cause (domestic crises, late-night working and disenchantment with work). Trying to remove the spots from a child’s face with spot remover is not going to work if the child has measles: to cure the symptoms you have to cure the cause of the problem.

Solve the problem and move to the next steps

The trick here is to make it their solution: you want them to feel a sense of commitment to an idea that they own. If you have done the groundwork properly, you will now be able to go into coaching mode, rather than feedback mode. Follow the principles outlined earlier in this chapter under Coaching: no more training.

Questions, not answers, lie at the heart of good coaching. Let the other person discover the answer for themselves. If they discover the answer they will be more committed to their answer than an answer you impose on them. There is a risk that their answer may be better than the one you originally had in mind. It is a risk worth taking.

Do it right first time, every time

Rework is a time killer. It can more than double the time taken for a task. Rework means more than doing the work again. Unpicking work can be very time-consuming. It means trying to find out where things went wrong in the first place, renegotiating with people who were involved in the early work and trying to re-establish personal credibility and authority. To do it right first time means slowing down in order to speed up.

Slowing down is about planning work carefully at the start, negotiating and checking expectations with key stakeholders before starting and then checking progress at regular intervals to avoid misunderstandings later. Like the slow tortoise that moves purposefully forwards, you can beat the hare that runs in circles.

Handle each communication once

Half-doing a job is as bad as doing it wrong: both result in un-necessary rework. In the case of communications, unanswered phone calls and emails simply add to the mental logjam of stuff that clutters things up. It is an unwanted distraction. There are four ways of dealing with most communications: do it, delegate it, defer it or ditch it. In order of priority, they are:

• Ditch it. File it in the number one file: the waste bin. Avoid getting sucked into fruitless activity by responding to the most insidious form of junk mail – email from colleagues who copy everyone in on everything. The waste bin is the busy executive’s best friend.
• Delegate it. Push the communication back to the sender, or on to someone else, for action. Ensure the recipient knows why they are receiving the communication and what action they are expected to take.
• Do it. Most emails and phone calls can be dealt with immediately (‘yes, I will forward that report to you’, or ‘no, I cannot come to that meeting’). Use the three-minute rule: if you can do it in three minutes, do it and get it out of the way.
• Defer it. If more work is required, be clear about what will happen and by when. This then becomes an item to sort out in your overall priorities (time effectiveness is discussed below). As this is now an addition to your workload, the ‘defer it’ option is the least attractive of the four options.

Some non-actionable items may contain useful information. Note it, file it and move on.

Do it now: avoid procrastination

Classic symptoms of procrastination are displacement activities. Instead of doing the job, people do something else like surfing the web, having a coffee, gossiping or doing a minor task. The causes of procrastination will be some combination of the following:

• Wrong time of day. Our energy levels go up and down over the day. Find easy tasks to do when your energy levels are low and tackle the harder stuff when your energy levels are up and when you are least likely to be distracted by other people and issues.
• Job too difficult or ambiguous. The hardest jobs are the easiest to delay. Break down a large job into bite-sized chunks so that you do not get indigestion even thinking about the problem. It is easier to see progress and feel motivated by tackling a series of small tasks than trying to tackle one huge problem. Like climbing a mountain, it is best done one small step at a time rather than attempting one big leap.
• Perfectionism. Waiting for the perfect conditions or the perfect outcome is as fruitless as Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett’s play). The perfect is the enemy of the good. Find an acceptable start and end point. The important thing is to move to action and do what you can, rather than worry about what you cannot do. If you worry about what you cannot do or control, you will never stop worrying and never achieve anything.
• Confusion. Lack of clarity around goals and how to get there can lead to rabbit in the headlights syndrome: you can freeze. Ask for help and guidance from the boss: get out of the headlights before the deadlines run you over.
• Chaos. This comes in two versions. The first version is the physical chaos of papers strewn all over the desk. You need to find your own preferred working environment, but chaos is rarely effective. The second version of chaos is chaos around priorities, which leads straight back to the rabbit in the headlights syndrome.

Knowing what you want to achieve

Not all of us will have the chance to transform one of the sciences. But, if we want to be effective with our time, we should think carefully about what we want to achieve. There are no simple answers, but there are some simple questions.

These are deeply irritating questions to be asked when the flak is flying. They are questions to think about at quiet moments away from the pressures of work.

• When (if) I retire, what will I tell my grandchildren I did?
• In 10 (20) years’ time, how will I remember this year?
• What are my goals for this year? Quarter? Month? Week? Day? Hour? Now?
• Are my activities now consistent with my answers to the first three questions?
• How can I create or find a context that allows me to achieve what I want in the first three questions?

Here are some things you will not remember in 20 years’ time:

• the number of emails sent, phone calls made or meetings attended
• your year-end bonus or pay rise
• your performance against your official targets
• time spent in the office or on the road.

These, however, are exactly the sorts of things that consume most management time and attention on a daily and annual basis. The point about them is that they are not ends in themselves: they are means to an end. Emails, meetings and phone calls are all essential activities, but they are relevant only if they help you achieve something meaningful – both professionally and personally. Even beating this year’s sales target is not an end in itself: it is a means to some other professional or personal goal. Personally, it pays the bills and may help you fund some long-held desire. Professionally, beating sales targets is perhaps just a stepping stone to getting that job or starting that organisation that you have always wanted.

Knowing what you want to do sounds obvious, but it is not. In George Orwell’s words: ‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.’ Many executives fail to see what is in front of their noses. Immediate challenges blind them to other opportunities. Occasionally, a sideways move to build experience, skills and networks offers a better way of achieving long-term goals than mindless focus on goals mandated from above. The courage to move sideways comes only from knowing what you are looking for.

Focusing on the important stuff

The typical management day is crammed with urgent items. The daily flood of emails and phone calls threatens to drown us if we do not deal with them. But the risk is that urgent matters crowd out important matters. The noise of activity can drown the signal of achievement. The short term always takes priority over the long term. The problem with this approach is that, at some point, the long term becomes short term and what could have been handled easily suddenly becomes a crisis.

There are three simplistic solutions to this, which in some circumstances can work:

1. Deal first with matters that are both important and urgent. The problem with this is that not all important things are urgent. Aged 65, it is too late to discover pensions are important and urgent. At age 25 they are still as important but they are not urgent, so they are easy to ignore: welcome to an impoverished old age.
2. Set aside time in the day for important matters and allow no distraction from urgent matters. This is a solution favoured by time-management gurus who do not have to live the reality of management: shutting out the external world is not a viable option in your daily routine.
3. Delay working on matters that are not important. The problem is that even unimportant things need to happen. If you build a computer, ordering the high-value processors clearly is very important. Ordering the low-value Styrofoam packaging seems much less important – until you try shipping the computer without it. Just because something appears unimportant does not make it unnecessary. It still has to be done.

The problem with many important agenda items is that they are also the most complicated, most time-consuming and longest lead-time items. Often, it is not possible to deal with them by locking the door and shutting out urgent matters for an hour or two. The more practical answer is to break down the big task into smaller bite-sized tasks, as outlined above.

Even if you cannot find two hours in the day to deal with important matters, you can find a few minutes in which to have a critical conversation with someone, to check a few facts or to ask for some advice. With important and difficult matters, thinking ahead pays big dividends. Work back from the desired end result and identify the critical path for getting there. This allows you to start things early and avoid time-consuming crises later. Start the analysis early; find out early what the approval mechanisms are; get advice, direction and support early; do some early tests. All of these things help shape and focus later work, which will save time. It also means that when, inevitably, there is a setback it does not automatically become a crisis around deadlines. You have spare time and do not need to get stressed out.

Queues and delays were invented specially for dealing with emails and phone calls, which otherwise would get in the way of dealing with the important stones in your day. The cookie jar test is a simple way of making sure you deal with the important stuff, not just the urgent and routine stuff. You can as easily fill a jar with sand and water as you can fill your day with urgent and routine stuff: do not let it take over and prevent you dealing with the important stuff.

Time management comes down to observing a few simple, practical, obvious and even boring disciplines:

Create your personal list of long-term (five-year-plus) goals. Three goals at most: one goal is better. Then look long and hard at how you will get there and how well your current situation meets your needs. To avoid death by list mania, these are goals that often are best kept in your head. Create your list of goals for this year. A good list will have the following characteristics:

• It will be short: perhaps three professional and three personal goals.
• The professional goals should fit with what your boss expects: negotiate if you can.
• Personal goals should align with your professional goals. Perhaps you want to acquire some skills or develop some new options from within your current work.
• Goals are not just financial and numeric: they can be about skills, people, life and family events.
• Test your annual goals against the 20-year rule: if I achieve these goals, will I remember this year in 20 years’ time? If you forget a year, you have lost a year of your life.

Create your list of goals for this month and this week. The weekly goals list is a quick exercise for a Sunday evening. The weekly list will:

• distinguish between important and urgent items, as described above
• support achievement of the monthly and annual goals
• break down the important items into bite-sized chunks that can be dealt with piecemeal over the course of the week.

Create your to-do list for tomorrow. Do your best to schedule the day into three major chunks:

• Committed time. This is, for example, obligatory meetings. Review them in advance to see how you can use them to progress your important agenda items. The formal meeting may not help, but it may create the opportunity for an informal conversation with a difficult-to-find colleague.
• Urgent matters. This ensures that urgent items are not dropped and do not become crisis items. Find a time of day when you enjoy dealing with this sort of stuff. Often, first thing in the day is when people are freshest and can deal with matters fast.
• Important matters. Think ahead. Buy time by getting a head start on long lead-time items. Do not worry about doing it all: focus on what you can do now, not on what you cannot do. Do not seek the perfect solution, seek to make progress. If you try to hit a hole in one, you will waste time. Get your putter out and hit the ball a few feet towards the flag, even if it is 450 yards away. You may need rather a lot of shots, but you will have got to the hole faster than the person on the tee who is still trying for the hole in one.

There is one more tip for time management: once you have made all your lists, act on them.

Dealing with the urgent stuff

Urgent stuff may be unimportant and irritating. No one needs that request from a senior manager for an urgent reworking of a standard report into some custom analysis that is nearly impossible to perform. But management reality is that if you do not deal with urgent stuff, it rapidly becomes a crisis. Dealing with urgent stuff has already been dealt with, in effect, in the section on time efficiency. The key principles are:

• Do it right first time, every time.
• Handle each task once. Complete it while you can by doing it, delegating it or ditching it. (Challenge whether the urgent custom analysis really needs to be fully customised: perhaps just one essential piece of information is needed.)
• Do it now. Avoid procrastination.

High aspirations: reach for the best, and beyond

As a good manager you will be practical and focused. You will:

• improve performance
• deal with the here and now
• focus on what you can do.

There is nothing wrong with that. But the very best managers and leaders think differently. The table below shows the difference:

The critical difference is where the best leaders start. They do not do the obvious and practical thing, which is to start from today. To think and act like the best, start with a vision of your future perfect, which you want to build, and then work back from there. Do not be constrained by where you start, focus instead on where you want to go. Then find ways to make it happen. There is an old story of a traveller in Ireland who asks for directions to Dublin and is told: ‘If I was going there, I wouldn’t start from here.’ Do not get trapped in your current position.

Courage: dare to deal with the difficult stuff, beyond your comfort zone

It is not enough to dream the dream. You have to dare to act as well, otherwise your future perfect is just a pipe dream. Obviously, you do not need the physical courage of the kings of old who led their troops into battle. You need a different sort of courage. When leaders talk about courage, this is what they mean:

• Have difficult conversations about expectations and performance.
• Make difficult decisions about costs and teams.
• Step up, not back, in a crisis.
• Take responsibility for setbacks.
• Challenge the status quo, do not accept it.

The easy route is the path of least resistance but, if you take the easy path, you will never climb the mountain. You will meander in the foothills of management. Acquiring courage does not require taking insane risks. It is about slowly building up your risk tolerance and risk awareness by regularly pushing yourself slightly outside your comfort zone. As your comfort zone grows, you slowly take on more risk. Eventually, you will be doing things that look very courageous to other people, but that will be second nature to you.

Resilience: embrace adversity

Courage is about taking risks. Not every risk can work out. By definition, some risks must go sour on you. If you have never failed, you have never taken enough risk. Learning to deal with setbacks is essential to your success: the difference between failure and success in the long term is as simple as not giving up.

You need to build two sorts of resilience: short-term and long-term.

Short-term resilience is the ability to bounce back from setbacks. The best leaders seem not to understand the word failure. They may talk about the occasional setback, which simply means that they have not succeeded… yet. Keep in mind the mantra, ‘I have not succeeded… yet’. That will drive you to the right short-term responses to setbacks:

• Focus on the future.
• Drive to action.
• Use each setback to learn and grow stronger.

Long-term resilience is about sustaining your energy and passion for a 40- or 50-year career. Fundamentally, that requires two things:

• Enjoy what you do. You excel only at what you enjoy. Enjoyment does not mean having fun: it means being so absorbed in what you do that you forget time. If each hour of the day stretches to eternity, you are probably not enjoying what you do. Only when you enjoy your work can you find the stamina to keep on going the extra mile to make things happen.
• Have a meaningful mission or goal. Various saints and martyrs down through the centuries have shown how far people will push themselves in pursuit of a cause in which they believe. If your goal is to meet some of your key performance indicators (KPIs) next year, you are unlikely to make the same level of commitment as the saints. The greater your mission, the greater your commitment.

Responsible: always the master, never the victim

Taking responsibility is a self-evident mindset. But the way the best leaders take responsibility is different from how most managers think about responsibility. You can see the responsibility difference in three areas: successes, failures and feelings.

• Successes. There are few managers who do not like taking responsibility for success. You need a claim to fame, and that means you have to stake your claim when you succeed. But the best leaders do something unexpected: instead of hogging success, they share it generously. They make sure that anyone who contributed to the success is recognised. This does two things. First, it helps create a loyal team and network around you: reciprocity is part of human nature and you will find you reap a good harvest for your generosity. Second, by giving praise, you identify yourself as the person who was at the centre of the success. Far from losing your claim to fame, sharing the success is an effective way of staking your claim.
• Failures. No one likes wearing the office equivalent of the dunce’s cap. So, when you stand up and take ownership of a setback, the whole organisation breathes a quiet sigh of relief. Instead of playing the blame game, the organisation can focus on how to move forward from the setback, and you can turn disaster into triumph. When it comes to assessment time, most bosses will recognise that you behaved well. And, if you were at fault, bosses look far more kindly on team members who recognise the problem than those who go into denial: by recognising the problem, you show you can learn from it and improve.
• Feelings. Taking responsibility for your own feelings is one of the hardest lessons for managers. Imagine you have had a bad day at the office and then a colleague comes along and decides to wind you up: they know exactly which buttons to press to get a reaction. You have every right to feel angry and upset. But there is no law that says you must feel angry and upset: you can choose how you want to feel and how you want to react. As a manager, you will not be remembered for what you did: you will be remembered by colleagues for how you were and how you behaved. Once you know this, you can make an informed choice about how you want to react. Choose well.

Positive: believe in better

Being positive does not come from training sessions where you learn to say, ‘Have a nice day.’ Being positive comes from the heart. Research from the positive psychology movement shows that people with a positive outlook live longer and better, by a large margin.

It also shows that positive sales people outperform the rest by nearly double. For a manager, being positive is about some simple routines:

• Focus on the future, not the past. This means driving to action, not to analysis.
• Focus on what you can do, not on what you cannot do. Do not worry about what you cannot control.
• Find opportunities to praise, not to criticise.
• Look for opportunities, not problems. See the upside of an idea before assessing all the drawbacks. The biggest and best ideas often have the biggest drawbacks: do not kill them before you have found out how good the idea could be.

As a simple but dangerous exercise, recall every setback you have had today, from missed traffic lights to annoying emails. You may quickly feel quite gloomy about your day. Now recall every good thing that has happened, from waking up in a warm bed with access to clean hot and cold water. You should feel better. We can choose how we want to see the world, and how we see it affects how we feel. Your choice.

You can train yourself to think positively. One particularly positive and enthusiastic manager had an odd habit: she wore a rubber band where others might wear a bracelet. She always wore her rubber band. When challenged on this habit, she explained: ‘Every time I have a negative thought, am about to criticise, be negative or say things cannot be done, I just snap the rubber band against my wrist. It reminds me that I can think differently. I can be positive. When I first wore the rubber band, I had a very sore wrist within an hour. Now I realise that being negative and cynical is just a waste of time. I do things differently now, and people treat me better as a result.’

Collaborative: work through others

To be a manager is to make the vital transition from how to who. A team member, when faced with a task, has to ask: ‘How do I do this?’ As a manager, you have to make things happen through other people so, instead of asking ‘how?’, you have to ask, ‘Who can do this?’

The importance of collaboration is growing as fast as the world of command and control is withering. Collaboration is not about telling people what to do: it is about using influence to persuade people who you do not control to work with you and help you. The art of influence and persuasion has been covered fully earlier in this chapter under Persuading people: how to sell anything.

The main features of the collaborative mindset are:

• move from ‘how’ to ‘who’
• influence and persuade, not command and control
• build influence by building trust: align interests, do as you say and earn credibility
• give and take: support others when they need it
• listen, respect and share praise.

The collaborative mindset is hard. We all have our own window on reality: this tells us what is important for us and what we must do. The collaborative mindset recognises that there are many different windows on reality, and none is perfect. You have to understand and respect other people’s reality. Only when you understand can you influence, persuade and change their minds. Understanding is not about agreeing with others: it is about laying the groundwork for effective influence and collaboration.

Learn: always grow professionally and personally

A career is a marathon, not a sprint.

The work you do and the skills you need will change fundamentally over the course of a 45-year career. Looking back to a golden past may be fine when it comes to your taste in music or films, but is a disaster in terms of skills. Your job security does not come from your employer: in a world of technology change, globalisation and competition, loyalty between employer and employee is a one-way street. You are expected to be 100 per cent loyal until you are no longer needed. Your job security comes from your skills, track record and a strong network, which can guide you to your next opportunity.

You have to keep your skills up to date. The skills you need change at each level of the organisation, as will be outlined in Chapter 5. Using the same skills in a different context does not work: you have to learn and grow.

Skills mastery is not just about training. Most training delivers ‘know-what’ skills, which are useful but they are a commodity. Accounting, law and IT are good skills, but there are plenty of people in other countries who will deliver the same skills at a much lower cost. The skills that set the best managers apart from the rest are ‘know-how’ skills. These are tacit skills about how you deal with people, how you make things happen, how you manage your boss and how much risk you take. There is no manual for this: you have to discover the rules of survival and success for yourself. Those rules change, depending on where you work. For instance, government and investment banking have very different risk appetites, working hours and styles: what works in one place will not work in another.

Your ability to learn and grow is vital to your long-term survival and success. How you can manage your personal learning journey is covered in Chapter 5.

Figure 3.4 The zone diagram

The stress zone

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the comfort zone is the stress zone. The checklist below shows the main symptoms of life in the stress zone.

Be careful when you look at the list: it is like reading a medical dictionary and discovering that you have the symptoms of every single disease known to man. Hypochondria and paranoia quickly follow. Most managers will experience most of these symptoms at some stage: that is normal. When these symptoms persist or become acute, a death spiral starts: increased stress leads to worse performance, which leads to more stress, which leads to even worse performance.

Given that stress will happen for some periods in your career, it pays to know how to handle it.

The starting point is to recognise that the critical difference between pressure and stress is control.

If you are under pressure, you may work hard but you are also likely to thrive. Now apply the same amount of pressure and remove some of your control: your deadline is moved; you depend on critical inputs from others who may or may not deliver and you do not control; requirements and expectations keep on changing; different powerful people start demanding different things and you cannot reconcile competing and contradictory demands. Suddenly, the pressure turns to stress: the stakes are high and you have to deliver, but it is not clear what you must deliver, when or if you can deliver.

The solution is to regain control of the situation and of yourself.

Regain control of the situation

Step one is to review your situation. Clarify expectations about what is needed by whom and when. This may lead to some difficult conversations with bosses about what is, and is not, feasible. You do not want to be seen to be giving up on tasks. Instead, use these conversations to gain clarity around three things:

• Priorities. What needs to be done for whom and when. Be realistic – make sure that timings are achievable and work out what, if anything, can be pushed back or if requirements can be changed to make existing delivery dates feasible.
• Resources, support and help. Do not try to be a lone hero. If you need more support, be clear about what you need and when you need it.
• Obstacles and dependencies. If there are any obstacles to success, raise them now. If you depend on someone else to make it happen, and you are not sure they will deliver, raise the issue early. Deal with the challenge now, do not make excuses later.

Many people feel uncomfortable having these difficult conversations, which they see as a sign of weakness. Do not personalise the issue that way. The issue is not about you – it is about the nature of the work you face. Treat it as a business discussion about business issues and priorities. Have these discussions as early as possible: the earlier you have the discussion, the more actionable they become. If you leave it until the last moment, then there is little anyone can do to help you. Better to have a difficult discussion early than to make excuses later.

Step two is to review what you can do in the situation. Review the current challenges and assign them an ABC ranking:

A Important items that you can do something about. You may not be able to address the entire item, but there are a few things you can start to make progress on. Finding the early wins, building a little momentum, can quickly restore confidence both personally and with your colleagues. Focus on the few things you can do, not on the many things you cannot do.

B Items that are important and where you need help. The help may be in clearing a political logjam, clarifying goals and reordering priorities. Do not let the confusion and anxiety build up. Be proactive and seek a resolution. This is part of your conversation with your boss.

C Items that are less important that I can ditch, delay or delegate. Be ruthless in eliminating as much noise and junk from your to-do list. You will probably need to focus all your energies on the A-list items.

The ABC approach is about gaining control, moving to action and rebuilding confidence. It requires focus on the things you can do (even if there are not many of them) and getting help on items where you do not have control.

Regain control of yourself

You have two surprising, pleasant and effective ways in which you can regain control of yourself: rest and relax.

The performance zone

Sports people often talk about being in the zone. Suddenly, everything goes right. For baseball sluggers and cricket batsmen, the ball suddenly looks like a slow-moving melon wanting to be hit, not a vicious speeding curving ball of menace. When they hit the zone, everything looks easy, even though it is based on years of painful practice. It is hard to stay in the zone for long: form comes and goes.

In business, we all have moments like that, and they are equally temporary. In business, we need to find ways of sustaining the performance zone for decades, not days. You will know you are in the performance zone when the following happens:

• Time flies: you are so absorbed in your role that you do not notice how fast time passes. You may realise in mid-afternoon that you have missed lunch.
• You are stretched: you will be on the edge of what you think you can achieve. It will not look impossible (that is the stress zone), but you are pushing yourself to succeed.
• You are doing new things: you are having to learn as you go, and you are probably excited about doing so.

This is the sweet spot between relaxing in your comfort zone and breaking down in the stress zone. In practice, you have to push yourself into this zone. Most HR systems will inadvertently push you back into your comfort zone: assignments tend to go to people who already have the relevant expertise. That means you learn nothing. The reality of work pressures means that many times you will be required to leap straight from your comfort zone to the stress zone without stopping to say hello to the performance zone.

Instead, you have to manage your career. If you are in the comfort zone, start volunteering discretionary effort for things that you know will push you and seek out assignments that you know will stretch you. Do not wait until you are 100 per cent ready to take on a big new role, because no one is ever 100 per cent ready for a big new role. Go for it early, and be prepared to learn fast on the job. Have confidence and belief in your ability to learn and grow.

If you are in the stress zone, have the difficult conversations early to reset expectations and to get the help you need.

Inevitably, you will swing between zones over the course of a year, let alone a career. That is fine. Do not expect to be in the performance zone the whole time. Manage yourself so that you achieve a balance between the three zones. That way, you can learn, grow and perform without getting sidelined in the comfort zone or burned out in the stress zone.

Vision

You need a simple idea of how the future will look different and better. This is more than just setting a stretching target. Show how the team will work differently: quality, customer focus, professionalism, zero defects, as the case may be. Then construct your story in three parts:

1. This is where we are, and this is why we need to change.
2. This is where we are going, and this is why the future perfect will be better.
3. This is how we will get there, and this is your vital role in helping us get there.

This story is vital to you. It gives purpose and direction to your team. Make the story personal to each team member: show how they can make a difference and how they can benefit from your future perfect world. The more relevant it is to each team member, the more committed they will be.

Ability to motivate others

When team members say they want a leader who can motivate others, what they really mean is they want a leader who can motivate them. And teams tend to be unimpressed with the efforts of their boss to motivate them: only 37 per cent of team members think their boss does well at motivation. You will be the last person to hear that truth from your team.

A whole industry devotes itself to understanding and promoting motivation, which goes all the way from abseiling awaydays to neuroscience. For our purposes, there is just one thing you can do to help. In our research we found that one question consistently predicted whether a boss would be rated well, not just on motivation, but also on most other dimensions as well. Here it is:

My boss cares about me and my career (agree/disagree).

If you pass this test, it is likely you are seen as good on motivation, decisiveness, vision, teamwork and all the other metrics. If you struggle on this metric, you will also struggle on the others.

Like all good insights, it is obvious when it is pointed out. If you have a boss who clearly does not care about you at all, it is very dispiriting. But a boss who seems to care makes all the difference.

Caring does not mean being nice and seeking popularity. Caring means that you should know what each team member wants and needs, you can give them the right roles, you support them and, where necessary, you have difficult but constructive conversations about performance with them. Care is about building trust, not popularity.

Decisiveness

Decisiveness has been covered before under IQ. For a team, decisiveness is about clarity. As a manager, you are a peddler of hope, clarity and certainty. The last thing your team wants is uncertainty and changes of direction, which lead to rework, lost time and missed deadlines. Often, any decision is better than no decision: you create a sense of direction and purpose and remove doubt and ambiguity. If you have doubts, be wary of sharing them with your team as you will look weak and uncertain. Your little doubts can grow into a major crisis of confidence within your team. Instead of expressing doubt, you can involve your team in a structured and focused problem-solving session. This is inclusive, action-focused and will lead to the decision and clarity that your team craves.

Ability to handle crises

Crises are your opportunity to shine. Managing is easy when things are going well. The test of a manager does not come in easy street, but when things go wrong. Do not avoid crises: embrace them as an opportunity.

Deal with any crisis in two ways. First, be decisive. Do not go into denial: deal with the problem fast and early. Unlike wine, crises rarely improve with age. They tend to get worse, especially when the politics of the blame game start up. Step up, while your peers step back. Quietly, everyone will be relieved that someone has the courage to take responsibility. To start with, any decision can be better than no decision. Curiously, the worse things are, the clearer things become. In the worst crises, there may be only one way out or one thing you can do. So do it. What matters is that you drive to action, create momentum, build hope and give a sense of clarity and purpose. Even if you then have to alter course, at least you have built momentum and you are going forwards.

The second part of dealing with the crisis is about how you are. Long after everyone has forgotten the details of who did what, they will remember how you behaved. This is where you have a choice. Some people will become invisible and will stay out of the fray. Others will go into Machiavelli mode: they will do plenty of so-called helpful analysis, which happens to pin the blame on others, looks backwards and achieves nothing. Others may panic. A few will remain calm, positive, supportive and action-focused. If you look calm and in control, your team will have confidence in you. If you start an inquest into what went wrong, you will create the ideal breeding ground for in-fighting and politics.

How you behave is as important as what you do. Decide how you want to be seen, and then behave accordingly.

Honesty and integrity

Honesty and integrity have nothing to do with ethics. They are much more important than that: they are about survival and success. Without honesty and integrity, there can be no trust and no teamwork. This sort of honesty is not a politician’s honesty, which seems to mean: ‘I am honest until I am found guilty of lying in a court of law.’ Management honesty is much stronger: it means total discretion and having the strength to deal with uncomfortable situations early. If a team member is underperforming, it is dishonest and is a breach of trust not to deal with it until assessment time, when it becomes a surprise. Team members need to know where they stand, especially when they are in the wrong place.

Ultimately, honesty is about trust. No one wants to work with a boss they do not trust.

Honesty is divisive. Leaders who rate poorly on honesty tend to rate poorly on everything else. Teams will not rate someone highly if they do not trust them. Leaders who are rated well on trust are not guaranteed good ratings elsewhere, but at least they get a chance to be rated fairly.

Being honest requires courage to have difficult conversations and make difficult decisions. In the short term, these may be awkward. In the long term, they are vital to acquiring the currency of leadership: trust and respect.