Book SummaryFirst, Break All the Rules, by Gallup Press

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of First, Break All the Rules

Only 13% of the world’s workforce is actively engaged at work. This is because employees become unmotivated or resentful when their relationship with immediate management is inefficient or hostile. As a manager, how can you find strong employees and keep them motivated, focused, and productive without creating frustration through constant micro-managing? Successful managers throw out the rules of conventional management and create an individualized approach that focuses on the talents, weaknesses, and personalities of their employees.

Measuring the Strength of Your Workplace

Most organizations know that their ability to find, engage, and maintain strong employees is essential to their success. However, few know how to gauge how well they’re doing at that task.

The Q¹² Items

To determine how well you’re finding, engaging, and maintaining employees, you need a precise and thorough way to gauge the strength of your organization. The Q¹² Items are 12 question items to give to your employees that help you determine the strength of your organization.

Employees respond to the Q¹² on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The items are as follows:

1. I know what my company expects from me.
2. I have the tools to effectively do my job.
3. I have the opportunity to put my best talents to use every day.
4. In the past week, I have been recognized for strong work.
5. My manager, or someone else at work, cares about me as a human being.
6. Someone at work promotes my development.
7. My opinion matters.
8. My company’s mission makes me feel like my job matters.
9. My fellow employees commit to doing good work.
10. I’ve made a best friend at work.
11. Someone has talked to me about my development in the last six months.
12. In the last year, I’ve had learning opportunities at work.

To improve your Q¹² scores and become a stronger manager, develop the four keys of management:

1. Hire Employees for Their Talents, Not For Their Skills or Knowledge
2. Define Goals, Not Processes
3. Build Up Talents and Navigate Around Weaknesses
4. Guide Employees Towards the Right Fit

Key One: Hire Employees for Their Talents, Not For Their Skills or Knowledge

Talent is not a magical gift. Talent is a recurring feeling, thought, or behavior that can be used in an effective way. Every job lends itself to a unique set of talents and, therefore, requires a person with those talents to fill the role. For example, great lawyers have a talent for debating. Great accountants have a talent for organizing. Great caregivers have a talent for empathy.

Talent can’t be taught. Talents are developed at a young age and can’t be changed after your teenage years because of the way the brain works. Therefore, while you can give someone the tools to grow in their talents, you can’t teach talents like empathy or confidence. You need to hire people that already possess the necessary talents for the position.

Skills vs. Knowledge vs. Talents

While talent is fixed at a young age, skills and knowledge come through experience and education. They can be taught at any age and provide employees with the tools and information they need to use their talents.

Skills are the abilities an employee uses to do their job such as performing basic tasks on a computer. Knowledge is information that informs how you do your job such as information gained through a textbook or through personal experience.

You can teach skills and knowledge after you bring someone on-board. With this in mind, you should always focus on a candidate’s talents over their skill-sets or education. For example, if you’re hiring an accountant for your organization, you can teach them to use Excel and build reports. However, you can’t teach them the striving talent of accuracy or the thinking talent of organization.

Types of Talents

There are three basic categories of talents: striving, thinking, and relating.

• Striving talents inform your motivations. They include talents such as ambition, altruism, competitiveness, and mastery. They reveal why you do what you do. For example, if you’re competitive, your desire to improve likely comes from an internal need to best your competitors, and you may excel in a position such as an attorney or salesperson.
• Thinking talents inform your thought and decision-making processes. They include talents such as discipline, flexibility, focus, and logic. They reveal how you come to conclusions and decisions. For example, if you’re organized, your decision-making process likely reflects your need for everything to be in its place, and you may excel in a position such as an assistant or accountant.
• Relating talents inform your relationships. They include talents such as socializing, empathy, trust, and confrontation. They reveal how you create relationships and why you make them with the people that you do. For example, if you’re empathetic, your ability to understand the emotions of others will inform the way that you interact with them, and you may excel in a position such as a teacher or a nurse.

How to Find Talent

How do you find talent to fit the positions that you need filled? When searching for new employees, clearly define the talents that describe the ideal worker for the position you’re trying to fill. Think about the following tips as you’re creating your list:

Tip #1: Think about the structure of your company. The talents associated with any given role will change based on the way your company is run. This is because your expectations and the way you interact with the person in that position are both unique to your organization.

Tip #2: Think about your current team members. Consider what talents you can add to your team to increase performance. Make sure that the people you hire have the appropriate talents to interact with your team...

First, Break All the Rules Summary Chapters 1-2: Measuring the Strength of Your Workplace

Only 13% of the world’s workforce is actively engaged at work. This is because employees become unmotivated or resentful when their relationship with immediate management is inefficient or hostile. As a manager, how can you find strong employees and keep them motivated, focused, and productive without creating frustration through constant micro-managing? Successful managers throw out the rules of conventional management and create an individualized approach that focuses on the talents, weaknesses, and personalities of their employees.

Most organizations know that their ability to find, engage, and maintain strong employees is essential to their success. However, few know how to gauge how well they’re doing at that task. Some companies offer concierge services such as flower delivery or dog-walking to their employees to try to keep them happy. Others offer stock options and financial incentives. However, these services benefit good employees and bad employees alike. It may help them find and maintain employees, but it doesn’t incentivize engagement or reward strong performance.

To reward strong performance, you need to determine effectiveness. To do this, many...

First, Break All the Rules Summary Chapter 3: Key One—Hire Employees for Their Talents, Not for Their Skills or Knowledge

Historically, organizations have hired based on three criteria: experience, intelligence, and determination. This is because:

• An experienced candidate has spent time in the workforce and learned lessons along the way. When compared to someone with no experience, this candidate has likely already dealt with obstacles and figured out how to navigate them.
• An intelligent candidate has the ability to adapt to different positions. Because they possess the brainpower, they’re able to figure out how the position works and how to most effectively handle the task.
• A determined candidate has the drive to work effectively. Even if they don’t possess the talents necessary for the position, they possess a passion that can’t be taught. Their determination creates a willingness to learn and adapt.

However, when you look at a pool of employees that were hired using these criteria, there is often a high range in the quality of their work. Some employees work efficiently and without issue. Others work slowly and cause problems.

If they all meet the standards of these criteria, what is the reason behind these discrepancies? The answer is differing talents. **If a...

Shortform Exercise: Hire for Talent

When hiring, you need to focus on talent. This requires that you consider both the talents necessary for the role and the talents of your candidates.

Think about a specific role that you’re currently searching to fill or recently filled. Describe the position.

First, Break All the Rules Summary Chapter 4: Key Two—Define Goals, Not Processes

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have direct control over your employees as a manager. While you can suggest specific ways to approach the work, your employees ultimately decide how they’re going to do their jobs based on their talents. However, despite the differing approaches, you need to ensure that everyone is performing to standard.

With this in mind, how do you get people to meet expectations without becoming overbearing? You need to define your team’s goals, then allow each employee to discover the best way to get there. This allows your employees to use their specific set of talents to work in a way that is most efficient for them while still holding them accountable.

For example, you manage a large sales department that consists of three teams. Each team has its own unique way of working. To ensure that they deliver, you set a clear goal for the department. You tell each team that they need to create two pitch packets by the end of the month. This allows the teams to work in a way that feels effective and comfortable to them while giving them a clear deadline by which they need to achieve a set goal.

Don’t Micro-Manage

**Many managers make the...

Shortform Exercise: Define Your Team’s Goals

When defining your team’s goals, you need to ask yourself three questions. These questions help you define your goals based upon the needs of your customers, your company, and your employees.

What do your customers need? Think about the services you provide and the needs of your average consumer.

First, Break All the Rules Summary Chapter 5: Key Three—Build Up Talents and Navigate Around Weaknesses

Once you’ve hired for talent and defined your goals, build up the talents of your employees and figure out how to navigate around their weaknesses. Instead of trying to fix your employees, focus on the unique talents they bring to the table. Be specific and develop a fleshed-out idea of who they are and how they work. To develop a stronger workplace, you have to reject the concept of “transformation,” build up talents, and navigate around weaknesses.

The Falsehood of “Transformation”

In Hollywood, you see the trope of transformation all the time: the hero discovers their weakness and fixes it for the better. While this story is sentimental and engaging, it creates a false narrative. It says that you can make yourself whatever you want to be by fixing your weaknesses and creating new talents to take their place. This concept of “transformation” is problematic for the following reasons:

Problem #1: If everyone has unlimited potential, then nothing makes you unique

If everyone could truly be anything they wanted to be, then no one would have a distinct identity. While you could define yourself through goals or achievements, you wouldn’t possess any unique...

Shortform Exercise: Break the Golden Rule

To develop efficiency in your workplace, you need to treat each employee differently according to their talents.

Think about a specific employee. What are their talents? Think about their striving, relating, and thinking talents.

Shortform Exercise: Navigate Around Weakness

Though you can’t directly fix your employees’ weaknesses, you need to navigate around them to keep the workplace productive. You can do this by creating a system of support, pairing people together based on talents and weaknesses, and promoting individual roles within teams.

Think about a specific employee’s weakness. What’s one way that you can navigate around that weakness using a tool or system? (For example, think of the employee who struggled to remember dates having a calendar downloaded on their computer.)

First, Break All the Rules Summary Chapter 6: Key Four—Guide Employees Towards the Right Fit

After you've completed the first three keys, the final key for maintaining a strong organization is guiding employees towards the right fit according to their talents. Employees want to develop in their careers. This has traditionally been associated with the concept of “climbing the ladder.” They feel the need to move up the chain of command in order to be seen as successful.

However, employees who excel at one position often don’t have the talents to excel in a management or leadership role. For example, an accountant who excels at analyzing data and compiling reports may not have the talents to excel at managing a team of accountants. Though they have a talent for attention to detail and organization, if they don’t have the talents of communication or problem-solving, they won’t be a successful manager.

How do you keep people in roles they excel in and give them the feeling of accomplishment without promoting them into roles they don’t fit? You have to change people’s perspective on success, assure them that changing careers doesn’t make them a failure, and navigate people away from positions without destroying their morale.

Changing Perspectives on...

First, Break All the Rules Summary Chapter 7: Working With Managers

The first six chapters addressed how to create an environment for talented employees to thrive from a manager’s perspective. In this chapter, we’ll explore how to work with managers from an employee and leadership perspective.

When working with managers, you need to consider their strengths and weaknesses just as much as you consider your own. Your relationship with management will determine both personal success and the success of your organization. The way you deal with managers depends on your position within the organization. If you’re a lower-level employee, you need to know how to navigate your manager’s weaknesses. If you’re a leader creating standards and processes, you need to develop a structure that allows great managers to thrive.

Employees

Managers expect a lot from their employees. Their expectations include a willingness to reflect, a desire for self-discovery, an effort to build relationships, a commitment to tracking progress, and an ability to make the workplace better.

When a manager helps their team use their talents, employees feel supported as they work towards these expectations. **However, when a manager gets in the way of their...

Shortform Exercise: Use Keys One and Two

The first two keys focus on hiring for talent and defining goals over process.

Interviewing for talent relies on using open-ended questions to allow candidates to reveal their talents. List 3-5 open-ended questions that you could use for your interview process. When developing your questions, think about the specific needs of your organization and the signposts of talent.

Shortform Exercise: Use Keys Three and Four

The last two keys focus on building strength instead of trying to fix weakness and guiding employees to the roles that best suit their talents.

One of the best ways to help develop the talents of your employees is studying your best. Think about a stellar employee. Now, think about a particular time when you watched this employee handle an obstacle extremely well. Describe the situation and the outcome. What did they do? What talents did they use? What skills and/or knowledge did they use?