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"The best dominate I always had." That's a phrase almost of u.s. have said or heard at some point, but what does it mean? What sets the great dominate apart from the average boss? The literature is rife with provocative writing about the qualities of managers and leaders and whether the 2 differ, only lilliputian has been said near 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 practice?

In my research, start with a survey of fourscore,000 managers conducted by the Gallup Organization and continuing during the past 2 years with in-depth studies of a few top performers, I've found that while in that location are as many styles of management as there are managers, at that place is one quality that sets truly keen managers apart from the balance: They discover what is unique about each person and and so capitalize on it. Average managers play checkers, while great managers play chess. The difference? In checkers, all the pieces are uniform and move in the same fashion; they are interchangeable. You need to plan and coordinate their movements, certainly, simply they all move at the same pace, on parallel paths. In chess, each type of slice moves in a different manner, and you can't play if yous don't know how each slice moves. More than important, you won't win if you lot don't think advisedly about how you move the pieces. Bang-up managers know and value the unique abilities and even the eccentricities of their employees, and they acquire how best to integrate them into a coordinated programme of attack.

To gather the raw cloth for my book The One Thing You Need to Know: About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, from which this article has been adjusted, I chose an approach that is rather different from the one I used for my previous books. For 17 years, I had the good fortune to work with the Gallup Organization, one of the near respected inquiry firms in the earth. During that fourth dimension, I was given the opportunity to interview some of the world's best leaders, managers, teachers, salespeople, stockbrokers, lawyers, and public servants. These interviews were a part of large-calibration studies that involved surveying groups of people in the hopes of finding wide patterns in the data. For my book, I used this foundation as the jumping-off point for deeper, more individualized inquiry.

In each of the iii areas targeted in the volume—managing, leading, and sustained individual success—I commencement identified one or 2 people in various roles and fields who had measurably, consistently, and dramatically outperformed their peers. These individuals included Myrtle Potter, president of commercial operations for Genentech, who transformed a failing drug into the highest selling prescription drug in the world; Sir Terry Leahy, the president of the European retailing giant Tesco; Manjit, the customer service representative from Jim Kawashima's acme-performing Walgreens store in San Jose, California, who sold more than than 1,600 units of Gillette deodorant in one calendar month; and David Koepp, the prolific screenwriter who penned such blockbusters as Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, and Spider-Homo.

What interested me about these high achievers was the applied, seemingly banal details of their actions and their choices. Why did Myrtle Potter repeatedly turn down promotions before taking on the challenge of turning around that failing drug? Why did Terry Leahy rely more on the memories of his working-class upbringing to define his visitor's strategy than on the results of customer surveys or focus groups? Manjit works the night shift, and one of her hobbies is weight lifting. Are those factors relevant to her performance? What were these special people doing that made them so very good at their roles?

Once these many details were duly noted and recorded, they slowly came together to reveal the "one thing" at the core of great managing, great leading, and sustained individual success.

This is the verbal opposite of what great leaders do. Smashing leaders discover what is universal and capitalize on it. Their task is to rally people toward a better hereafter. Leaders can succeed in this only when they tin can cut through differences of race, sex, age, nationality, and personality and, using stories and celebrating heroes, tap into those very few needs nosotros all share. The job of a manager, meanwhile, is to turn one person's particular talent into performance. Managers volition succeed only when they can place and deploy the differences among people, challenging each employee to excel in his or her ain way. This doesn't mean a leader tin't be a manager or vice versa. Merely to excel at one or both, you must be enlightened of the very different skills each role requires.

It'south assuming to characterize anything as the explanation or solution, so it'due south a risky movement to make such definitive assertions as "this is the one thing all smashing managers do." But with enough research and focus, it is possible to identify that elusive "one thing."

I like to retrieve of the concept of "ane thing" every bit a "decision-making insight." Controlling insights don't explain all outcomes or events; they serve every bit the best caption of the greatest number of events. Such insights help you know which of your actions volition have the nearly far-reaching influence in virtually every situation.

For a concept to emerge as the single controlling insight, it must laissez passer three tests. First, it must be applicative across a wide range of situations. Have leadership as an example. Lately, much has been made of the notion that at that place is no one all-time way to pb and that instead, the most effective leadership style depends on the circumstance. While in that location is no doubt that different situations require different deportment from a leader, that doesn't mean the nearly insightful thing you can say about leadership is that information technology's situational. With enough focus, you can place the i thing that underpins successful leadership across all situations and all styles.

Second, a controlling insight must serve every bit a multiplier. In any equation, some factors will take only an condiment value: When you lot focus your actions on these factors, you run into some incremental improvement. The decision-making insight should exist more powerful. It should show you how to get exponential improvement. For case, good managing is the result of a combination of many deportment—selecting talented employees, setting clear expectations, catching people doing things right, and then on—simply none of these factors qualifies as the "one affair" that great managers do, considering even when done well, these actions merely prevent managers from chasing their best employees away.

Finally, the controlling insight must guide activity. Information technology must point to precise things that tin be done to create better outcomes more than consistently. Insights that managers can act on—rather than simply ruminate over—are the ones that tin can brand all the departure.

The Game of Chess

What does the chess game look like in activeness? When I visited Michelle Miller, the director who opened Walgreens' four,000th store, I found the wall of her dorsum office papered with work schedules. Michelle's store in Redondo Beach, California, employs people with sharply different skills and potentially disruptive differences in personality. A critical part of her task, therefore, is to put people into roles and shifts that will allow them to smoothen—and to avert putting clashing personalities together. At the same time, she needs to observe ways for individuals to grow.

At that place'southward Jeffrey, for example, a "goth rocker" whose pilus is shaved on ane side and long enough on the other side to cover his face. Michelle nigh didn't hire him considering he couldn't quite look her in the center during his interview, but he wanted the hard-to-cover night shift, and then she decided to give him a run a risk. After a couple of months, she noticed that when she gave Jeffrey a vague assignment, such as "Straighten up the merchandise in every aisle," what should have been a two-hr job would take him all dark—and wouldn't be washed very well. But if she gave him a more specific task, such as "Put up all the risers for Christmas," all the risers would be symmetrical, with the right merchandise on each one, perfectly priced, labeled, and "faced" (turned toward the customer). Give Jeffrey a generic task, and he would struggle. Requite him one that forced him to be accurate and belittling, and he would excel. This, Michelle concluded, was Jeffrey'south forte. So, as whatsoever good director would do, she told him what she had deduced about him and praised him for his practiced piece of work.

And a practiced director would accept left information technology at that. But Michelle knew she could get more out Jeffrey. And so she devised a scheme to reassign responsibilities across the entire store to capitalize on his unique strengths. In every Walgreens, there is a responsibility called "resets and revisions." A reset involves stocking an alley with new merchandise, a chore that usually coincides with a anticipated change in customer ownership patterns (at the stop of summertime, for example, the stores will replace sun creams and lip balms with allergy medicines). A revision is a less time-consuming simply more frequent version of the aforementioned affair: Replace these cartons of toothpaste with this new and improved variety. Display this new line of detergent at this end of the row. Each alley requires some form of revision at to the lowest degree once a week.

In well-nigh Walgreens stores, each employee "owns" i aisle, where she is responsible not only for serving customers but also for facing the merchandise, keeping the alley clean and orderly, tagging items with a Telxon gun, and conducting all resets and revisions. This arrangement is simple and efficient, and it affords each employee a sense of personal responsibility. But Michelle decided that since Jeffrey was so good at resets and revisions—and didn't enjoy interacting with customers—this should be his full-time job, in every single aisle.

Information technology was a challenge. Ane week'due south worth of revisions requires a binder three inches thick. But Michelle reasoned that not but would Jeffrey be excited by the challenge and get amend and better with practice, merely other employees would be freed from what they considered a chore and have more than time to greet and serve customers. The store's performance proved her right. After the reorganization, Michelle saw not only increases in sales and turn a profit but also in that about critical performance metric, customer satisfaction. In the subsequent iv months, her shop netted perfect scores in Walgreens' mystery shopper program.

Then far, and so very proficient. Sadly, it didn't final. This "perfect" system depended on Jeffrey remaining content, and he didn't. With his success at doing resets and revisions, his conviction grew, and 6 months into the job, he wanted to move into direction. Michelle wasn't disappointed past this, nevertheless; she was intrigued. She had watched Jeffrey's progress closely and had already decided that he might do well equally a manager, though he wouldn't be a particularly emotive ane. Besides, like any good chess player, she had been thinking a couple of moves ahead.

Over in the cosmetics aisle worked an employee named Genoa. Michelle saw Genoa as something of a double threat. Non only was she adept at putting customers at ease—she remembered their names, asked good questions, was welcoming yet professional when answering the phone—simply she was likewise a neatnik. The cosmetics department was always perfectly faced, every product remained aligned, and everything was arranged just so. Her aisle was sexy: It fabricated yous want to reach out and touch the merchandise.

To capitalize on these twin talents, and to accommodate Jeffrey's desire for promotion, Michelle shuffled the roles inside the store again. She dissever Jeffrey's reset and revision job in two and gave the "revision" part of it to Genoa so that the whole shop could at present do good from her ability to arrange merchandise attractively. But Michelle didn't want the store to miss out on Genoa'due south gift for customer service, and so Michelle asked her to focus on the revision function only betwixt 8:thirty am and 11:xxx am, and subsequently that, when the store began to fill with customers on their lunch breaks, Genoa should shift her focus over to them.

She kept the reset role with Jeffrey. Banana managers don't usually take an ongoing responsibleness in the store, but, Michelle reasoned, he was now so skillful and so fast at tearing an aisle apart and rebuilding it that he could easily finish a major reset during a v-hour stint, so he could handle resets along with his managerial responsibilities.

Past the time you read this, the Jeffrey–Genoa configuration has probably outlived its usefulness, and Michelle has moved on to design other constructive and inventive configurations. The ability to continue tweaking roles to capitalize on the uniqueness of each person is the essence of great management.

A managing director's arroyo to capitalizing on differences can vary tremendously from identify to place. Walk into the dorsum office at another Walgreens, this one in San Jose, California, managed by Jim Kawashima, and you lot won't come across a single piece of work schedule. Instead, the walls are covered with sales figures and statistics, the best of them circled with reddish felt-tip pen, and dozens of photographs of sales contest winners, most featuring a customer service representative named Manjit.

Too by this author

Manjit outperforms her peers consistently. When I first heard most her, she had just won a competition in Walgreens' suggestive selling programme to sell the nigh units of Gillette deodorant in a calendar month. The national average was 300; Manjit had sold one,600. Disposable cameras, toothpaste, batteries—you lot name it, she could sell it. And Manjit won competition after contest despite working the graveyard shift, from 12:30 am to viii:thirty am, during which she met significantly fewer customers than did her peers.

Manjit hadn't always been such an exceptional performer. She became stunningly successful only when Jim, who has made a addiction of resuscitating troubled stores, came on lath. What did Jim practice to initiate the modify in Manjit? He quickly picked up on her idiosyncrasies and figured out how to translate them into outstanding operation. For example, back in India, Manjit was an athlete—a runner and a weight lifter—and had always thrilled to the challenge of measured performance. When I interviewed her, one of the first things out of her oral fissure was, "On Saturday, I sold 343 low-carb candy confined. On Sunday, I sold 367. Yesterday, 110, and today, 105." I asked if she always knows how well she's doing. "Oh yes," she replied. "Every solar day I cheque Mr. K'south charts. Even on my day off, I make a point to come in and check my numbers."

Manjit loves to win and revels in public recognition. Hence, Jim'southward walls are covered with charts and figures, Manjit's scores are ever highlighted in red, and in that location are photos documenting her success. Another manager might have asked Manjit to curb her enthusiasm for the limelight and give someone else a chance. Jim establish a manner to capitalize on it.

But what near Jim's other staff members? Instead of beingness resentful of Manjit's public recognition, the other employees came to empathize that Jim took the time to come across them every bit individuals and evaluate them based on their personal strengths. They also knew that Manjit'southward success spoke well of the unabridged store, so her success galvanized the team. In fact, earlier long, the pictures of Manjit began to include other employees from the store, as well. After a few months, the San Jose location was ranked number one out of 4,000 in Walgreens' suggestive selling program.

Neat Managers Are Romantics

Think back to Michelle. Her artistic choreography may sound like a concluding resort, an endeavor to make the all-time of a bad hire. It's not. Jeffrey and Genoa are not mediocre employees, and capitalizing on each person's uniqueness is a tremendously powerful tool.

First, identifying and capitalizing on each person'due south uniqueness saves time. No employee, however talented, is perfectly well-rounded. Michelle could take spent untold hours coaching Jeffrey and cajoling him into grinning at, making friends with, and remembering the names of customers, but she probably would have seen little result for her efforts. Her time was much better spent carving out a office that took advantage of Jeffrey's natural abilities.

2nd, capitalizing on uniqueness makes each person more answerable. Michelle didn't just praise Jeffrey for his ability to execute specific assignments. She challenged him to make this ability the cornerstone of his contribution to the store, to take ownership for this ability, to practise it, and to refine it.

3rd, capitalizing on what is unique almost each person builds a stronger sense of squad, because information technology creates interdependency. It helps people appreciate ane anothers' particular skills and acquire that their coworkers can fill in where they are defective. In short, it makes people need i another. The old platitude is that there's no "I" in "team." But as Michael Jordan one time said, "There may be no 'I' in 'team,' simply at that place is in 'win.'"

Finally, when you capitalize on what is unique about each person, yous introduce a healthy caste of disruption into your world. You shuffle existing hierarchies: If Jeffrey is in charge of all resets and revisions in the store, should he now command more or less respect than an banana manager? You also shuffle existing assumptions most who is allowed to do what: If Jeffrey devises new methods of resetting an aisle, does he take to ask permission to try these out, or tin can he experiment on his own? And you lot shuffle existing behavior about where the true expertise lies: If Genoa comes upwards with a mode of arranging new trade that she thinks is more appealing than the method suggested by the "planogram" sent down from Walgreens headquarters, does her expertise trump the planners back at corporate? These questions will claiming Walgreens' orthodoxies and thus volition aid the company go more inquisitive, more intelligent, more vital, and, despite its size, more able to duck and weave into the future.

All that said, the reason great managers focus on uniqueness isn't just because it makes practiced concern sense. They do it because they can't help it. Similar Shelley and Keats, the nineteenth-century Romantic poets, great managers are fascinated with individuality for its ain sake. Fine shadings of personality, though they may be invisible to some and frustrating to others, are crystal articulate to and highly valued by great managers. They could no more ignore these subtleties than ignore their own needs and desires. Figuring out what makes people tick is just in their nature.

Fine shadings of personality, though they may be invisible to some and frustrating to others, are crystal clear to and highly valued by great managers.

The Iii Levers

Although the Romantics were mesmerized by differences, at some point, managers need to rein in their inquisitiveness, gather upwards what they know about a person, and put the employee's idiosyncrasies to use. To that end, in that location are iii things you must know about someone to manage her well: her strengths, the triggers that activate those strengths, and how she learns.

What You Need to Know About Each of Your Straight Reports

Make the near of strengths.

It takes time and try to gain a full appreciation of an employee's strengths and weaknesses. The neat managing director spends a good bargain of time exterior the part walking around, watching each person's reactions to events, listening, and taking mental notes well-nigh what each individual is drawn to and what each person struggles with. There's no substitute for this kind of ascertainment, but you can obtain a lot of data well-nigh a person by asking a few simple, open up-ended questions and listening carefully to the answers. Two queries in particular have proven most revealing when information technology comes to identifying strengths and weaknesses, and I recommend asking them of all new hires—and revisiting the questions periodically.

To identify a person'due south strengths, first ask, "What was the all-time 24-hour interval at work you lot've had in the by three months?" Find out what the person was doing and why he enjoyed it and so much. Remember: A strength is not merely something you are good at. In fact, information technology might be something you aren't good at nonetheless. Information technology might exist merely a predilection, something you discover and so intrinsically satisfying that you look forrad to doing it once again and once more and getting better at it over fourth dimension. This question will prompt your employee to first thinking virtually his interests and abilities from this perspective.

To identify a person's weaknesses, but invert the question: "What was the worst day y'all've had at work in the past three months?" And then probe for details about what he was doing and why it grated on him so much. Equally with a strength, a weakness is not merely something you are bad at (in fact, you might be quite competent at it). It is something that drains you of energy, an activeness that y'all never look forward to doing and that when you lot are doing it, all you lot can think about is stopping.

Although y'all're keeping an eye out for both the strengths and weaknesses of your employees, your focus should be on their strengths. Conventional wisdom holds that self-awareness is a practiced thing and that it's the chore of the manager to identify weaknesses and create a programme for overcoming them. Merely research by Albert Bandura, the father of social learning theory, has shown that self-balls (labeled "self-efficacy" by cerebral psychologists), non self-awareness, is the strongest predictor of a person's ability to set up high goals, to persist in the face up of obstacles, to bounce back when reversals occur, and, ultimately, to accomplish the goals they set. By contrast, self-sensation has not been shown to be a predictor of whatever of these outcomes, and in some cases, information technology appears to retard them.

Swell managers seem to sympathise this instinctively. They know that their task is not to arm each employee with a dispassionately authentic understanding of the limits of her strengths and the liabilities of her weaknesses just to reinforce her self-assurance. That'south why smashing managers focus on strengths. When a person succeeds, the great manager doesn't praise her hard piece of work. Even if there's some exaggeration in the statement, he tells her that she succeeded because she has become so good at deploying her specific strengths. This, the director knows, will strengthen the employee's self-assurance and make her more optimistic and more resilient in the face of challenges to come up.

The focus-on-strengths approach might create in the employee a modicum of overconfidence, but great managers mitigate this past emphasizing the size and the difficulty of the employee'southward goals. They know that their primary objective is to create in each employee a specific state of mind: one that includes a realistic assessment of the difficulty of the obstacle ahead but an unrealistically optimistic belief in her ability to overcome it.

And what if the employee fails? Bold the failure is not attributable to factors across her control, always explain failure as a lack of effort, fifty-fifty if this is just partially accurate. This will obscure self-doubt and give her something to work on as she faces upwards to the next challenge.

Repeated failure, of course, may indicate weakness where a office requires strength. In such cases, there are four approaches for overcoming weaknesses. If the problem amounts to a lack of skill or noesis, that's easy to solve: But offer the relevant training, allow some time for the employee to contain the new skills, and expect for signs of comeback. If her performance doesn't get improve, y'all'll know that the reason she'due south struggling is because she is missing certain talents, a arrears no amount of skill or knowledge training is likely to fix. You'll take to find a way to manage around this weakness and neutralize it.

Which brings us to the 2nd strategy for overcoming an employee weakness. Can y'all find her a partner, someone whose talents are strong in precisely the areas where hers are weak? Hither's how this strategy can wait in action. As vice president of merchandising for the women's clothing retailer Ann Taylor, Judi Langley found that tensions were ascension between her and one of her merchandising managers, Claudia (not her real proper noun), whose analytical mind and intense nature created an overpowering "need to know." If Claudia learned of something before Judi had a chance to review it with her, she would become deeply frustrated. Given the speed with which decisions were made, and given Judi's busy schedule, this happened frequently. Judi was concerned that Claudia's irritation was unsettling the whole product team, non to mention earning the employee a reputation every bit a malcontent.

An average manager might have identified this behavior as a weakness and lectured Claudia on how to command her demand for data. Judi, however, realized that this "weakness" was an aspect of Claudia's greatest forcefulness: her belittling heed. Claudia would never be able to rein it in, at to the lowest degree non for long. And so Judi looked for a strategy that would accolade and support Claudia's need to know, while channeling it more productively. Judi decided to act every bit Claudia's information partner, and she committed to leaving Claudia a voice mail at the cease of each twenty-four hours with a brief update. To brand certain nix fell through the cracks, they set ii live "affect base" conversations per week. This solution managed Claudia'south expectations and bodacious her that she would go the information she needed, if non exactly when she wanted it, then at to the lowest degree at frequent and predictable intervals. Giving Claudia a partner neutralized the negative manifestations of her force, allowing her to focus her analytical listen on her work. (Of course, in most cases, the partner would demand to be someone other than a director.)

Should the perfect partner testify hard to observe, try this third strategy: Insert into the employee's world a technique that helps attain through discipline what the person can't accomplish through instinct. I met i very successful screenwriter and director who had struggled with telling other professionals, such as composers and directors of photography, that their work was not upward to snuff. And then he devised a mental trick: He now imagines what the "god of art" would want and uses this imaginary entity as a source of strength. In his mind, he no longer imposes his own opinion on his colleagues merely rather tells himself (and them) that an authoritative third party has weighed in.

If preparation produces no comeback, if complementary partnering proves impractical, and if no nifty discipline technique tin can exist plant, you are going to take to effort the fourth and concluding strategy, which is to rearrange the employee's working earth to render his weakness irrelevant, as Michelle Miller did with Jeffrey. This strategy will require of you lot, showtime, the creativity to envision a more effective arrangement and, 2nd, the backbone to make that arrangement piece of work. But as Michelle's feel revealed, the payoff that may come in the form of increased employee productivity and appointment is well worth it.

Trigger good functioning.

A person's strengths aren't always on display. Sometimes they crave precise triggering to plow them on. Squeeze the right trigger, and a person will push himself harder and persevere in the face up of resistance. Squeeze the wrong i, and the person may well shut down. This tin can exist tricky because triggers come in myriad and mysterious forms. I employee'south trigger might be tied to the time of day (he is a night owl, and his strengths only kick in after 3 pm). Some other employee's trigger might be tied to time with you, the boss (even though he's worked with you for more than than five years, he still needs you to cheque in with him every 24-hour interval, or he feels he's being ignored). Some other worker'southward trigger might be merely the opposite—independence (she's only worked for you for 6 months, but if you check in with her even one time a week, she feels micromanaged).

The about powerful trigger past far is recognition, non money. If yous're not convinced of this, start ignoring ane of your highly paid stars, and watch what happens. Most managers are aware that employees reply well to recognition. Peachy managers refine and extend this insight. They realize that each employee plays to a slightly dissimilar audition. To excel as a manager, yous must be able to match the employee to the audience he values almost. Ane employee's audience might exist his peers; the best way to praise him would exist to stand him upwardly in front of his coworkers and publicly celebrate his accomplishment. Another'south favorite audience might exist you lot; the most powerful recognition would be a ane-on-1 chat where you tell him quietly but vividly why he is such a valuable fellow member of the team. Nonetheless another employee might define himself past his expertise; his near prized form of recognition would be some blazon of professional or technical award. Yet another might value feedback only from customers, in which case a picture of the employee with her best customer or a alphabetic character to her from the customer would exist the best form of recognition.

Given how much personal attention it requires, tailoring praise to fit the person is mostly a manager's responsibility. But organizations can take a cue from this, likewise. At that place'southward no reason why a large company can't take this individualized approach to recognition and utilize it to every employee. Of all the companies I've encountered, the N American division of HSBC, a London-based banking company, has done the all-time chore of this. Each year it presents its acme individual consumer-lending performers with its Dream Awards. Each winner receives a unique prize. During the yr, managers ask employees to identify what they would like to receive should they win. The prize value is capped at $10,000, and it cannot be redeemed equally cash, merely across those two restrictions, each employee is free to pick the prize he wants. At the end of the year, the company holds a Dream Awards gala, during which it shows a video almost the winning employee and why he selected his particular prize.

You can imagine the touch on these personalized prizes have on HSBC employees. It's i matter to exist brought up on stage and given nevertheless another plaque. Information technology'southward another matter when, in addition to public recognition of your performance, you receive a college tuition fund for your child, or the Harley-Davidson motorcycle you've always dreamed of, or—the prize anybody at the company still talks almost—the airline tickets to wing you and your family back to Mexico to visit the grandmother you haven't seen in ten years.

Tailor to learning styles.

Although at that place are many learning styles, a conscientious review of adult learning theory reveals that iii styles predominate. These 3 are not mutually exclusive; sure employees may rely on a combination of two or peradventure all three. Nonetheless, staying attuned to each employee's way or styles volition help focus your coaching.

Beginning, there's analyzing. Claudia from Ann Taylor is an analyzer. She understands a task by taking it autonomously, examining its elements, and reconstructing information technology piece by slice. Because every unmarried component of a chore is important in her eyes, she craves data. She needs to absorb all there is to know nearly a subject before she can brainstorm to feel comfortable with information technology. If she doesn't feel she has enough data, she will dig and push until she gets it. She will read the assigned reading. She will attend the required classes. She will take good notes. She will report. And she will still desire more.

The all-time style to teach an analyzer is to give her ample fourth dimension in the classroom. Role-play with her. Exercise postmortem exercises with her. Suspension her performance downwardly into its component parts and then she can carefully build it back up. E'er allow her fourth dimension to prepare. The analyzer hates mistakes. A unremarkably held view is that mistakes fuel learning, but for the analyzer, this just isn't true. In fact, the reason she prepares then diligently is to minimize the possibility of mistakes. And then don't expect to teach her much by throwing her into a new situation and telling her to wing it.

The reverse is true for the second dominant learning style, doing. While the near powerful learning moments for the analyzer occur prior to the performance, the doer's most powerful moments occur during the functioning. Trial and mistake are integral to this learning procedure. Jeffrey, from Michelle Miller's store, is a doer. He learns the most while he's in the human activity of figuring things out for himself. For him, preparation is a dry out, uninspiring activity. And then rather than role-play with someone like Jeffrey, pick a specific task within his part that is unproblematic but real, give him a cursory overview of the outcomes you want, and become out of his fashion. And so gradually increase the degree of each job's complication until he has mastered every aspect of his role. He may make a few mistakes along the style, only for the doer, mistakes are the raw fabric for learning.

Finally, in that location's watching. Watchers won't learn much through role-playing. They won't larn by doing, either. Since about formal preparation programs incorporate both of these elements, watchers are often viewed equally rather poor students. That may exist true, but they aren't necessarily poor learners.

Watchers tin acquire a peachy deal when they are given the chance to run into the total operation. Studying the individual parts of a task is about as meaningful for them as studying the individual pixels of a digital photograph. What's of import for this blazon of learner is the content of each pixel, its position relative to all the others. Watchers are only able to see this when they view the complete picture.

As information technology happens, this is the mode I learn. Years ago, when I first began interviewing, I struggled to learn the skill of creating a report on a person after I had interviewed him. I understood all the required steps, but I couldn't seem to put them together. Some of my colleagues could knock out a report in an hr; for me, it would have the better office of a twenty-four hours. And then 1 afternoon, as I was staring morosely into my Dictaphone, I overheard the vox of the analyst adjacent door. He was talking so rapidly that I initially thought he was on the phone. Only after a few minutes did I realize that he was dictating a report. This was the first fourth dimension I had heard someone "in the act." I'd seen the finished results countless times, since reading the reports of others was the way we were supposed to acquire, but I'd never really heard another analyst in the act of creation. It was a revelation. I finally saw how everything should come up together into a coherent whole. I remember picking up my Dictaphone, mimicking the cadency and fifty-fifty the accent of my neighbor, and feeling the words begin to flow.

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If you're trying to teach a watcher, past far the most effective technique is to get her out of the classroom. Take her away from the manuals, and make her ride shotgun with one of your about experienced performers.• • •

We've seen, in the stories of great managers like Michelle Miller and Judi Langley, that at the very eye of their success lies an appreciation for individuality. This is not to say that managers don't need other skills. They need to be able to hire well, to set expectations, and to interact productively with their own bosses, only to proper noun a few. Simply what they practise—instinctively—is play chess. Mediocre managers assume (or hope) that their employees will all be motivated by the same things and driven by the same goals, that they will desire the aforementioned kinds of relationships and acquire in roughly the aforementioned way. They define the behaviors they expect from people and tell them to piece of work on behaviors that don't come up naturally. They praise those who can overcome their natural styles to accommodate to preset ideas. In short, they believe the managing director'due south job is to mold, or transform, each employee into the perfect version of the part.

Great managers don't try to change a person'south style. They never try to button a knight to move in the aforementioned way as a bishop. They know that their employees will differ in how they think, how they build relationships, how altruistic they are, how patient they tin can exist, how much of an adept they need to be, how prepared they need to experience, what drives them, what challenges them, and what their goals are. These differences of trait and talent are similar blood types: They cut beyond the superficial variations of race, sex, and age and capture the essential uniqueness of each private.

Differences of trait and talent are like blood types: They cut beyond the superficial variations of race, sex, and age and capture each person's uniqueness.

Like blood types, the majority of these differences are indelible and resistant to change. A manager's almost precious resource is time, and great managers know that the most constructive way to invest their time is to identify exactly how each employee is different and then to figure out how all-time to incorporate those indelible idiosyncrasies into the overall plan.

To excel at managing others, y'all must bring that insight to your deportment and interactions. Always remember that great managing is about release, not transformation. It's almost constantly tweaking your environs and so that the unique contribution, the unique needs, and the unique manner of each employee can be given gratuitous rein. Your success as a manager will depend almost entirely on your ability to practice this.

A version of this article appeared in the March 2005 effect of Harvard Business Review.