In the end, accuracy and kindness are the same thing.
Put your compliments and criticisms in perspective.
Think about accuracy, not implications.
Make accurate assessments.
Learn from success as well as from failure.
Know that most everyone thinks that what they did, and what they are doing, is much more important than it really is.
Recognize that tough love is both the hardest and the most important type of love to give (because it is so rarely welcomed).
Recognize that while most people prefer compliments, accurate criticism is more valuable.
Don’t hide your observations about people.
Build your synthesis from the specifics up.
Squeeze the dots.
Don’t oversqueeze a dot.
Use evaluation tools such as performance surveys, metrics, and formal reviews to document all aspects of a person’s performance.
Make the process of learning what someone is like open, evolutionary, and iterative.
Make your metrics clear and impartial.
Encourage people to be objectively reflective about their performance.
Look at the whole picture.
For performance reviews, start from specific cases, look for patterns, and get in sync with the person being reviewed by looking at the evidence together.
Remember that when it comes to assessing people, the two biggest mistakes you can make are being overconfident in your assessment and failing to get in sync on it.
Get in sync on assessments in a nonhierarchical way.
Learn about your people and have them learn about you through frank conversations about mistakes and their root causes.
Understand that making sure people are doing a good job doesn’t require watching everything that everybody is doing at all times.
Recognize that change is difficult.
Help people through the pain that comes with exploring their weaknesses.
Knowing how people operate and being able to judge whether that way of operating will lead to good results is more important than knowing what they did.
If someone is doing their job poorly, consider whether it is due to inadequate learning or inadequate ability.
Training and testing a poor performer to see if he or she can acquire the required skills without simultaneously trying to assess their abilities is a common mistake.
Recognize that when you are really in sync with someone about their weaknesses, the weaknesses are probably true.
When judging people, remember that you don’t have to get to the point of “beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
It should take you no more than a year to learn what a person is like and whether they are a click for their job.
Continue assessing people throughout their tenure.
Evaluate employees with the same rigor as you evaluate job candidates.
Train, guardrail, or remove people; don’t rehabilitate them.
Don’t collect people.
Be willing to “shoot the people you love.”
When someone is “without a box,” consider whether there is an open box that would be a better fit or whether you need to get them out of the company.
Be cautious about allowing people to step back to another role after failing.
Remember that the goal of a transfer is the best, highest use of the person in a way that benefits the community as a whole.
Have people “complete their swings” before moving on to new roles.
Don’t lower the bar.
Manage as Someone Operating a Machine to Achieve a Goal
Look down on your machine and yourself within it from the higher level.
Constantly compare your outcomes to your goals.
Understand that a great manager is essentially an organizational engineer.
Build great metrics.
Beware of paying too much attention to what is coming at you and not enough attention to your machine.
Don’t get distracted by shiny objects.
Remember that for every case you deal with, your approach should have two purposes: to move you closer to your goal and to train and test your machine (i.e., your people and your design).
Everything is a case study.
When a problem occurs, conduct the discussion at two levels: the machine level (why that outcome was produced) and the case-at-hand level (what to do about it).
When making rules, explain the principles behind them.
Your policies should be natural extensions of your principles.
While good principles and policies almost always provide good guidance, remember that there are exceptions to every rule.
Understand the differences between managing, micromanaging, and not managing.
Managers must make sure that what they are responsible for works well.
Managing the people who report to you should feel like skiing together.
An excellent skier is probably going to be a better ski coach than a novice skier.