This is an article by Marcus Buckingham, best selling author and thought leader.

What sets a great boss apart from an average boss? Research on this is rife with provocative writing about the qualities of managers and leaders and whether the two differ, but little has been said about what happens in the thousands of daily interactions and decisions that allows managers to get the best out of their people and win their devotion. What do great managers actually do?

In our research, beginning with a survey of 80,000 managers conducted by the Gallup Organization and continuing during the past two years with in-depth studies of a few top performers, we’ve found that while there are as many styles of management as there are managers, there is one quality that sets the best managers apart from the rest: they discover what is unique about each person and then capitalise on it. Average managers play draughts, if you like, while great managers play chess.

What does the chess game look like in action? When I visited Michelle Miller, the manager who opened Walgreens’ 4,000th store, I found the wall of her back office papered with work schedules. Miller’s store in Redondo Beach, California, employs people with sharply different skills and potentially disruptive differences in personality. A critical part of her job is to put people into roles and shifts that will allow them to shine - and to avoid putting clashing personalities together. At the same time, she needs to find ways for individuals to grow.

A manager’s approach to capitalising on differences can vary from place to place but it is a tremendously powerful tool that leads to three outcomes. First, it saves management time; second, it makes each person more accountable; and third, it builds a stronger sense of team because it creates inter-dependency. It helps people appreciate one another’s particular skills and learn that their co-workers can fill in where they are lacking.

When you capitalise on what is unique about each person, you introduce a healthy degree of disruption into the workplace. You shuffle existing hierarchies, existing assumptions about who is allowed to do what, and existing beliefs about where the true expertise in a company lies. These questions will challenge the orthodoxies of companies like Walgreens and help them become more inquisitive, more intelligent, more vital and, despite their size, more able to duck and weave into the future. At some point, however, managers need to rein in their inquisitiveness, gather up what they know about a person, and put the employee’s idiosyncrasies to use. To that end, there are three things you must know about someone to manage them well: their strengths, the triggers that activate those strengths, and how they learn.

Great managers spend a good deal of time outside the office walking around, watching each person’s reactions to events, listening, and taking mental notes about what each individual is drawn to and what each person struggles with. There’s no substitute for this kind of observation, but you can obtain a lot of information about a person by asking a few simple, open-ended questions and listening carefully to the answers. Two queries in particular have proven most revealing when it comes to identifying strengths and weaknesses.

To identify a person’s strengths, first ask: “What was the best day at work you’ve had in the past three months?” What were they doing and why did they enjoy it so much? Remember: a strength is not merely something you are good at. It might be just a predilection, something you find so intrinsically satisfying that you look forward to doing it again and again and getting better at it over time.

To identify a person’s weaknesses, just invert the question: “What was the worst day you’ve had at work in the past three months?” Probe for details about what they were doing and why it grated on them so much. You might be quite competent at a weakness but it drains you of energy, you never look forward to doing it and when you do do it, all you can think about is stopping.

Although you’re keeping an eye out for both strengths and weaknesses, your focus should be on an employee’s strengths. Conventional wisdom holds that self-awareness is a good thing and that it’s the job of the manager to identify weaknesses and create a plan for overcoming them. But research by Albert Bandura, the father of social learning theory, has shown that self-assurance (labelled “self-efficacy” by cognitive psychologists), not self-awareness, is the strongest predictor of a person’s ability to set high goals, to persist in the face of obstacles, to bounce back when reversals occur, and, ultimately, to achieve the goals they set. By contrast, self-awareness has not been shown to be a predictor of any of these outcomes, and in some cases, it appears to retard them.

Always remember that great managing is about release, not transformation. It’s about constantly tweaking your environment so that the unique contribution, the unique needs, and the unique style of each employee can be given free rein. Your success as a manager will depend almost entirely on your ability to do this.

You’ve come to the right place to find out about Lord Vader. Last year I discussed the value of failure in an article entitled “Leadership Lessons from Darth Vader“. Darth Vader is the man, and he has some valuable lessons to teach us. It’s especially relevant to remember now that we’re talking about initial lessons from Atma Yoga.

We are going to absorb the Star Wars trilogy into the Vedic tradition, along with Lord of the Rings, and give them a Vaisnava conclusion. Just watch over the next few generations, if you’re sticking around for them.

Building Church Leaders.com has a great article by Ken Blanchard, author of The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do.

I once asked Don Shula, longtime coach of the Miami Dolphins, “What are your goals next year?”

He said, “I think goal-setting is overrated.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everybody in professional football has a similar goal,” he answered. “If they have halfway decent players, they want to win the playoffs. If they have good players, they want to win the Super Bowl. So I haven’t won more games because I have better goals. I’ve won more games because I’m willing to roll up my sleeves and do whatever it takes to make it happen.”

Leadership demands that we have the ability to realize our goals—to turn vision into reality. Those who have given themselves to leadership know how difficult this is. But effective leaders have a way of getting to the real issues.

In 2001 Vrajadhama and I spent the night in Don Shula’s resort in Miami (it’s a long story). Don wasn’t there, but I must say I was very impressed with his digs.

I like this point of his too. If we don’t set any goals, we’re not even in the game. People who actually have goals are on the playing field. Doing the work needed to achieve those goals is where the real differentiation comes in.

One thing that I noted in Prema Padmini’s recent presentation on Bhakti-vrksa (we have a podcast on that coming up), is that there was definite goal setting - there were statistics of performance, targets, and then measurement of success or failure in achieving those targets.

On Geoff’s recommendation I obtained a copy of First XI: Winning Organisations in Australia. The first section of this book is entitled “Effective Execution”. The top performing organisations in Australia all have in common that they pre-announce their goals, then get them.

I’m sure that there are organisations that pre-announce and then fail on execution, but the fact of the matter is that you have to have goals, and you then have to achieve them.

Here’s a quote that I read recently:

A vision without a task makes a visionary
A task without vision makes for drudgery
A task with a vision makes a missionary

Now that you’ve read my ten cents worth, check out the full text of Ken’s article Turning Vision into Reality, in which he talks about the practicalities involved in turning vision into reality, with reference to church and business situations.

If you are responsible for people, then here are 12 questions that you should review. These twelve questions come from the Gallup Q12 survey. The Gallup Q12 survey is the result of extensive research into what questions in organizational cultural surveys actually produce results that match up with the output of the organization.

If you take a ranking of organizations in terms of their effectiveness, and then try to look inside them to see whether the employees or integrants of the organization are actually happy and well engaged there are questions that will give you meaningful insight, and others that won’t.

For example, if you ask: “Do you get paid enough?” in effective and ineffective organizations you’ll find people who’ll say yes, and people who’ll say no.

In contrast, with the following questions, integrants of effective organizations will answer yes. If a person answers no to the majority of these questions then they are not happy where they are, and will not produce their best work - in fact they may even become alienated from the organization, its management, and its mission to the point where they begin to work against its interests. When the answers are overwhelmingly “no” to these questions retention is low and staff turnover is high.

As a manager these questions give insight into what the priorities need to be to create an engaging culture where people can find their fit and produce their best work. I’ve put the questions that managers need to ask themselves under each Q12 survey question.

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?

Are there clear goals set for the group? Are there clear expectations for individuals? Are their tasks and the outcomes suitably defined?

2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?

Do your people have what they need to get the job done, or are they frustrated through a lack of resources?

3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?

Are your people “only doing what only they can do”? Are they engaged 80/20 in their strength zone? Do they know what their strength zone is?

4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?

Do we have a culture of appreciation? Are we appreciating people enough?

5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?

Are we working alongside people, thinking about their development, and giving them tasks for their development, or are we just using them as a means to an end?

6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

Are we working on empowering and building up our people?

7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?

Have we implemented any suggestions from this person? Where can we action input from this person?

8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?

Are we clear in linking the mission of the organization with the tasks that our people are performing? Are we casting the vision?

9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?

What standard are we accepting, what standard are we setting? Are we creating a culture of excellence where people can contribute to the creation of excellence, or are we allowing that to be eroded?

10. Do I have a best friend at work?

Are we making efforts to team people up in compatible arrangements, and giving time and space for friendships to form?

11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?

Are we committed to developing our people? Is that being felt? Are we communicating that?

12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

Are we aligning, empowering, and releasing our people, or trying to keep them under control?

Hmmm.. a while ago I posted a link to an article by Pastor Brian McLaren on the subject of constructing a response to the question of homosexual marriage. A lot of what he said, and especially his sensitive approach, resonated with me.

Shortly afterwards, another pastor whose blog I read, Mark Driscoll of Mars church, posted a response to that, laying down the smack on Brian’s approach. The comments to this posting are very interesting and informative about the different mentalities of the living entities.

Today Mark posted an apology. He hasn’t changed his views, but he’s gotten some nice realizations about how to coexist with other preachers. Brian doesn’t lay down the smack on Mark, and now Mark realizes that he shouldn’t lay down the smack on Brian. Isn’t that nice.

I respect both of these men, for what they do, for what they think, and for the way they handle themselves. This is one good example of all three of these.

The sign, and the title of this post, are a little self-deprecating humour by Mark in his apology. Gotta love that self-deprecating humour.

If you thought that I sometimes think too big - think again. I felt the people around me stretching when we launched our ten year plan to build an organization that can faithfully steward a yearly budget in excess of $1 million (nine years and counting at Gaura Purnima). Then Krishna helped me put that goal into perspective when shortly afterwards I read about the Billion Soul Campaign - to plant five million churches in the next 10-15 years, in order to win 1 billion souls for Christ. The goal? “No-one Left Behind”.

To plant five million churches what do you need? Five million leaders (at least). So there is the program to create 1 million leaders by 2008 - The Million Leader Mandate. John C. Maxwell is involved in this. When I met with him in Sydney last year at The Leadership Effect, he said that they had already reached their goal of one million leaders trained in their network leadership development program, and they were now aiming for one million leaders per year.

Here’s an update on the Billion Soul Campaign from a recent email:

Bishop Kenneth Ulmer, Faithful Central Bible Church, Inglewood, CA, spoke to the morning crowd of church and lay leaders at the all-day conference. He began by asking for a show of hands while naming more than a dozen denominations - all getting a response from attendees.

“There is a miracle in this room,” Ulmer said. “The sons and daughters of former enemies are becoming friends. Our spiritual ancestors, for all kinds of reasons, would never be in a gathering with this kind of diversity and yet, by the power of the Spirit of God, God has brought us together for the cause of the kingdom,” he said.

Ulmer was one of several speakers at the conference that aimed to further the planting of five million new churches for a billion soul harvest during the next 10-15 years. “We have found a common ground and it does not matter what your tradition is, what your style of worship is,” Ulmer continued during his message. “It does not matter what your doctrinal distinctives are. “At the end of the day, we all agree that if there was ever a time to overcome evil with good, if there was ever a season where the love of Christ is to be shared abroad, we agree it is now. At the end of the day, we are about touching the lives of a billion souls with the love of the One who loved us enough to die for us, he said.

I’m mainly focused on my local area of concern. We have 1,778,840 people living in Brisbane (as of Dec 2005). What kind of facilities do we need to be able to serve these people? I think it will take more than one building. I think it will take more than one center. I think it will take more than one public program per week. I think it will take more than one public program per day. I think it will take more than one leader. I think it will take more than one team.

People - Ideas - Hardware. That’s the prioritization. After one year of work on the Million Dollar Plan (no, it’s not about the money, it’s about measurable goals), the outcome for the year is: “it’s all about the people” (Bg. 1.7).

The goal was to work out how to spend $1 million per year. Getting the money is not the hard part. The money is out there, and we’ve seen it come and go over the years. Figuring out how to spend it wisely is the issue. We figure that if you figure out how to spend it properly, that’s 90% of the work done. Then the money can come later, and you’ll know what to do with it.

My realization is that the money should be majorly invested in people development, first and foremost. If I had to choose between money and hardware and the right people, I’d pick the people everytime.

A nineteenth-century circuit-riding preacher named Peter Cartwright was preparing to deliver a sermon one Sunday when he was warned that President Andrew Jackson was in attendance, and he was asked to keep his remarks inoffensive. During that message, he included these statements: “I have been told that Andrew Jackson is in this congregation. And I have been asked to guard my remarks. What I must say is that Andrew Jackson will go to hell if he doesn’t repent of his sin.”
After the sermon, Jackson strode up to Cartwright. “Sir,” the president said, “if I had a regiment of men like you, I could whip the world.”

Strategic Priorities for 2006:

1. Get the right people on the team
2. Create and Deepen Community
3. Leadership Development

Here’s something that we have been discussing this past week: I found it just now in a summary of Major Don Vandergriff’s Raising the Bar: Creating Adaptive Leaders to Deal With The Changing Face of War.

On a more general level, MAJ Vandergriff examines how to train leaders in any organization. Some corporate executives and HR departments still treat expenses associated with the development of leaders as costs, rather than as the investments they are. A company, after all, is its people. They use tools, and they execute strategies, but without people who will seek out and exploit opportunities, it’s all just a pile of bricks, silicon, and paper. People, ideas, and hardware—in that order!—as much in the commercial world as in the military.

This is such an important point. We have to stop seeing people as costs and trying to not spend any money on them. People are assets and money spent on them is an investment, not an expense. Get the people out of the expenses column and put them in the assets column.

Too much money spent on buildings, not enough on staff is a recipe for empty buildings.

Here is a new article that I wrote this morning on the subject of Preaching for Leadership Recruitment < - click there to read it. I’ve been thinking about it over the past month, since I was in New Zealand in early December. I finally managed to get it down in response to a process of strategic planning that we are doing here in Brisbane.

This article talks about four types of people, based on the presentation of Bhagavad-gita, and how these people are attracted to, and best engaged in an organization. I’ve written it in the language of Urban Missionary, but if you want to translate it to a business context simply use this translation table:

Preaching = Marketing
If you want to know about how to appeal to these people.

Preaching = Recruiting
If you want to know about constructing an organization based on these principles.

Get the right people, and get them in the right roles, and then everything else will take care of itself. Fail to do this as a first step and everything significant will be impossible to achieve and you’ll spend most of your time dealing with problems.

Organizational ineffectiveness stems from lack of competent leadership. Degrading organizational effectiveness is due to lack of leadership succession. Failure to expand is due to lack of leadership reproduction.

In order to be successful an organization needs a culture of leadership development and a consciousness of recruiting for leadership potential. As Srila Prabhupada explained his strategic vision for establishing varnasrama-dharma - first establish the brahmana class (visionary leaders), then the create the Varnasrama college and train the ksatriyas (directive leaders).