This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "When They Win, You Win" by Russ Laraway. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What’s the difference between a leader and a manager? Should managers bother to develop leadership skills? If so, which ones?
Employee experience expert Russ Laraway laments the widespread problem of bad management. But, he has good news. He believes anyone can become a better manager by learning and practicing basic leadership skills: setting and reaching goals, coaching, and helping employees with career development.
Continue reading to learn what Laraway thinks are essential leadership skills for managers.
Leadership Skills for Managers
Laraway says that, by developing a few key leadership skills, you as a manager can greatly improve your team’s morale and performance. Suggesting that you can become a better manager by practicing leadership skills may sound strange; modern business theory often draws a line between management (controlling how people do their work) and leadership (inspiring people to do their best work). Supposedly, leadership results in more productivity and employee engagement.
However, Laraway disagrees with this distinction. Instead, he believes that leadership skills are really just people skills, and they’re something that any good manager should develop.
So, how do you become an effective manager and boost employee engagement? Laraway says you should focus on three leadership skills for managers, which he calls The Big Three.
(Shortform note: Some business experts (the ones whom Laraway disagrees with) say that in addition to people skills, leaders must also have vision and foresight: the ability to plan ahead, anticipate business opportunities, and take those opportunities as they arise. In other words, “leader” isn’t just another way of saying someone’s a good manager—a leader makes large-scale and long-term decisions, while managers handle day-to-day business functions.)
Leadership Skill #1: Setting & Reaching Goals
The first area of focus for an effective manager is setting clear goals for your employees: Your workers should know exactly what’s expected of them and when. We’ll examine several tiers of goals that managers can set for their employees, and then we’ll explain how to evaluate your effectiveness in this area.
Tier 1: Daily and Weekly Goals
The foundational tier of goals is what Laraway calls priorities—what workers get done daily or weekly. For example, a manager at a health insurance company might set a daily or weekly goal for each worker to process a certain number of claims.
Tier 2: Monthly, Quarterly, or Yearly Goals
The second tier is what Laraway terms Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). This is what a person or team achieves in a somewhat longer timeframe: monthly, quarterly, or yearly. For many employees, an OKR may just be an extension of a daily or weekly goal. For instance, if their daily goal is to process a certain number of insurance claims, then their monthly goal might be to process that number of claims on average each day for a month.
Tier 3: Long-Term, Multiyear Goals
The third tier is what Laraway calls the company’s vision—the specific thing it’s trying to achieve. This is a major undertaking, often lasting for multiple years and requiring the entire company to work together. There might not be an obvious connection between an average employee’s day-to-day tasks and a company’s long-term goals—if that’s the case, then you should explain to your workers how and why their work is crucial in meeting those goals. In other words, explain to your employees exactly what you need them to do to support these long-term goals.
Tier 4: The Company’s Ultimate Aspiration
Finally, the highest tier of goals is the company’s ultimate aspiration, which Laraway calls its purpose or mission—in other words, the reason the company exists in the first place. Ideally, the company’s mission statement spells out this goal so that every employee knows what they’re ultimately working toward. This is a goal that’s likely to take many years to reach, possibly decades.
Measuring Your Effectiveness With This Skill
To see how well you’re doing at setting clear and reasonable goals as a manager, Laraway suggests sending an anonymous survey to your team. Ask your team members to rate you in the areas of goal communication and collaboration.
Leadership Skill #2: Coaching
Laraway says that setting clear goals is only the first part of being an effective manager—you also need to coach your workers on how to reach those goals. Not only does effective coaching make your employees better workers, but it also helps build bonds of trust and mutual support between you and your team. Those bonds, in turn, make your employees feel more comfortable and happier at work; in other words, they become more engaged.
Encourage What’s Working
Many people think that coaching employees means correcting their mistakes, but it’s just as important to provide positive reinforcement for the things your employees are doing well. Laraway says that the majority of your coaching should be encouragement and praise. People like to hear when they’re doing well, so positive feedback factors heavily into employee engagement and retention.
Fix What’s Wrong
Another important part of being a manager is correcting your employees’ mistakes and helping them improve. However, people tend to feel threatened when managers tell them what they could improve, so they may become upset and defensive. Therefore, Laraway recommends that you limit yourself to one piece of negative feedback per five pieces of positive feedback. Doing so will reassure your workers that their jobs aren’t in danger and keep them in a positive mindset where they’ll be able to learn from their mistakes.
Measuring Your Effectiveness
Again, Laraway says that the best way to judge your effectiveness as a coach is to survey your team. To see how well you’re doing as a teacher, ask your employees to rate you on helpfulness, approachability, and care.
Leadership Skill #3: Helping Your Employees With Their Career Development
Laraway’s third and final focus area for managers is career development: helping employees to plan and realize their long-term career goals, not just their current job goals. Notably, this focus area includes helping your workers advance their careers even if doing so means they eventually leave your company.
The Three Meetings
Laraway recommends setting three meetings with each of your employees:
- At the first meeting, ask your employee how they got to their current job role.
- At the second meeting, ask about their goals and their aspirations.
- At the third meeting, work with the employee to create what Laraway calls a Career Action Plan (CAP). In short, this is a plan to get the employee from their current position to the dream position that they described in the second meeting.
Measuring Your Effectiveness
To find out how effectively you’re helping your workers with their career development, Laraway suggests asking employees to rate you on constructiveness and care.
Exercise: Boost Your Leadership Skills
Now that you’ve read Laraway’s advice on how to become a more effective manager and leader, think about how you could start improving your leadership skills. Remember: Engaged employees are productive employees, and good management is a crucial factor in employee engagement.
- Which of the three management focus areas (goals, coaching, and career development) do you think you need the most work in? Why?
- What’s one thing you could do today to start improving in that area? For example, if you want to improve your career development skills, perhaps you could start by creating or refining a career plan for yourself.
- Which of the three focus areas do you think you’re the strongest in? Why?
- What’s one thing you can do to leverage that strength in the workplace? For example, if you know that you give effective feedback, you could start scheduling monthly coaching sessions with your employees to further boost their performance.
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Here's what you'll find in our full When They Win, You Win summary:
- Why managers are to blame for employees' lack of engagement
- How to improve your team's morale and performance
- Tools for gauging your effectiveness as a manager
