The Debrief w/ Jocko and Dave Berke #32: Is The Minimum "Okay"?

Only 13% of the world’s workforce is actively engaged at work. As a manager, how can you find strong employees and keep them motivated, focused, and productive without creating frustration through constant micro-managing? Gallup interviewed over 80,000 managers and more than 1,000,000 employees to find out. They found that most great managers recognize one core truth: successful employees have the proper talents to excel in their position.

In First, Break All The Rules, learn to use the Four Keys of management to navigate people’s talents and weaknesses. These lay out a roadmap that will help you hire the right people, create a productive working environment, and guide employees to success.

Becoming a manager for the first time can be challenging. In The First-Time Manager, organizational risk expert Jim McCormick argues that to succeed in your new management role, you must shift your focus from tasks to people and build a strong team of empowered employees capable of achieving exceptional results. Whether you’re freshly promoted or looking to brush up on your management skills, McCormick provides the ultimate guide to successfully navigating the role and responsibilities of a manager, including tips for winning the trust of your team, managing performance, and delegating tasks.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how to transition into your new managerial role, win the trust of your employees, and build an empowered team that takes initiative and produces great results. We’ll also explore ways to handle your responsibilities as a manager effectively and prepare yourself for future opportunities. Along the way, we’ll provide insights from other business and management experts and supplement McCormick’s methods with actionable tips that can help you navigate your new role with competence and confidence.

Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world. In Principles: Life and Work, he shares the guiding principles powering his success and Bridgewater’s.

Principles is a manual for rational thinking. The main theme is that finding truth is the best way to make decisions, and that ego, emotion, and blind spots prevent you from discovering the truth. Dalio shares his major strategies to circumvent these weaknesses, including total receptivity, extreme honesty and transparency, productive conflict, and credibility-centered decision making.

In our Principles guide, you’ll learn how to get past your ego in pursuit of your goals, why you need other people to improve your probability of being right, and the five-step process for getting what you want out of life.

Good leaders should be well-rounded, right? In Strengths Based Leadership, Tom Rath and Barry Conchie argue instead that the best leaders invest in their personal strengths while building a diverse team to fill in for their weaknesses. This way, each individual contributes unique strengths to create a well-rounded team.

Rath is a workplace researcher who spent more than a decade in charge of leadership consulting at Gallup, a business research and consulting company. Conchie is a business consultant and the former Senior Scientist for Gallup’s leadership consulting program. Together, they examine research on successful leaders and their teams from around the world and conclude that the best teams are those that maximize individual strengths. In this guide, we’ll compare Conchie and Rath’s strengths-based leadership approach to other leadership books, such as Jocko Willink’s Leadership Strategy and Tactics. We’ll also explore the nuances of Gallup’s strengths-focused philosophy and suggest actionables to help you maximize your strengths.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable explores how teams fail to work cohesively together through a dynamic, five-part model of dysfunction. The five dysfunctions are 1) absence of trust, 2) fear of conflict, 3) lack of commitment, 4) avoidance of accountability, and 5) inattention to results. Through identifying these root causes of poor teamwork, teams can develop specific strategies for overcoming each of them. By doing this, they will become comfortable with one another, be willing to engage in constructive debate, achieve clarity and buy-in around team priorities, hold one another to high standards, and focus on team results instead of individual ambition.

Every modern business is in the technology game in some way. In Empowered, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones explain how technology and product development are the fundamental drivers of every successful business. Therefore, to thrive in the modern business world, companies must empower their product development teams to use technology to meet customer needs and drive business growth.

Cagan and Jones have a wealth of experience in product leadership, having worked at multiple high-profile technology businesses. In this guide, we’ll discuss the roles of product leaders and their technology teams, as well as how they measure their collective success. We’ll describe how to empower product teams to work with autonomy and enhance innovation. In addition, we’ll explain the authors’ key concepts, show how other writers expand on their ideas, and explore how some experts arrive at similar conclusions using slightly different approaches.

Only 13% of the world’s workforce is actively engaged at work. As a manager, how can you find strong employees and keep them motivated, focused, and productive without creating frustration through constant micro-managing? Gallup interviewed over 80,000 managers and more than 1,000,000 employees to find out. They found that most great managers recognize one core truth: successful employees have the proper talents to excel in their position.

In First, Break All The Rules, learn to use the Four Keys of management to navigate people’s talents and weaknesses. These lay out a roadmap that will help you hire the right people, create a productive working environment, and guide employees to success.

What’s the secret to being a great leader? Whether you’re in a warzone or on the front lines of a corporate battle, Extreme Ownership argues that the best leaders take full responsibility for everything in their world: not only their actions, decisions, and failures, but also those of everyone on their team. By practicing Extreme Ownership, great leaders achieve victory by prioritizing the team above all else and focusing on constant improvement—and in this guide, we’ll show how you can, too.

Authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin are former US Navy SEAL officers who served in one of the most dangerous areas of Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. They honed the principles of Extreme Ownership on the battlefield, then applied the same tenets to the corporate world as business consultants. In this guide, we’ll add broader context from other leadership books such as Built to Last and Team of Teams to better illustrate how to apply Willink and Babin’s leadership principles to your life.

If you want to be a good leader, you have to put your team before yourself. Jocko Willink explains exactly how to do this in Leadership Strategy and Tactics. By learning to practice humility, build good relationships, and take responsibility for your team’s mistakes, you’ll elevate your team to success and empower them to become leaders themselves.

Willink is an author, speaker, and podcaster who served for 20 years as a US Navy SEAL. Through his military and leadership experience, he’s acquired a series of leadership principles and advice that he shares in this field manual. We’ll examine Willink’s leadership principles, comparing them to Principles: Life and Work, The Obstacle Is the Way, and more. We’ll also explore Willink’s advice through the lens of other leadership experts and psychologists to add nuances and actionable tips that will help you implement his ideas into your daily life.