My manager recommended First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently to me a couple of months ago. I finally got to it last week (I keep a queue of stuff I'm waiting to read) and finished it this afternoon. The book is a summary of an enormous study done by the Gallup organization into what makes excellent managers excellent. Throughout the book, I found my preconceptions challenged on a regular basis (which I found disconcerting), but then those challenges were backed up with lots of hard data. As an employee who doesn't manage people, the book gave me some great insight into the kinds of things great managers do to generate excellence from their teams.

Buckingham and Coffman have a long list of the traits of great managers, including a number of sections talking about how their results contradict the common wisdom. A good example directly from the book is: You have a mediocre manager and an outstanding manager. You also have a territory performing well, and a territory performing poorly (though neither has reached its potential). Which manager do you put in charge of which territory? My immediate reaction was to put the mediocre manager in charge of the territory performing well and the put the outstanding manager in charge of the territory performing poorly. My reasoning was that the outstanding manager would bring the poorly performing territory up to perform well, leaving me with two good territories. The book suggests the opposite: put the outstanding manager in charge of the good territory, under the assumption that you'll be left with a fantastic territory. Fire the mediocre manager, and then get a turnaround expert to handle the poor performer. Their response to my first instinct was that you'll be left with the higher-performing territory still not performing at its peak, and the lower-performing territory may break the spirit of your excellent manager. At that point, you've set both managers up to fail, and you may lose the excellent manager

The book is packed with examples (backed by hard data) that go against what I think of as the common wisdom. What I was pleasantly surprised to find is that Microsoft actually does many of the things that they suggest companies should do. For example, one common problem in some companies is that people feel they need to move into management to move their career forward. Microsoft (and this book) rejects that, saying you'll just end up with a bunch of managers who shouldn't be managers. Instead, you need to set up career paths that allow people to move forward without moving away from their core talents. Microsoft does this by separating title from level, which allows an individual contributor developer to make more than their manager (or their manager's manager) if they really perform that well as a developer. I love this part of our culture, but it's still nice to see some research backing it up.

The book also spends a lot of time talking about the differences between skils, knowledge and talents. Specifically, these are things that get mixed up in common usage. That's unfortunate, because talents aren't really something that can be taught. So companies that spend time trying to teach their managers to be visionary innovators are really just focusing on their people's weaknesses. Mostly, this made me want to read the next book based on the Gallup study, which is Now, Discover Your Strengths. Hopefully, with a better idea of what I'm good at, and what gives me satisfaction, I can keep working on a career that really makes me happy.