First Break All the Rules asserts that the status quo is counter productive, and encourages management to adopt innovative approaches to employee engagement. 
 There are four keys for unlocking potential in your employees: select for talents, suggest outcomes rather than direct control of process, focus on employees strengths and work around weaknesses, and finally find the right fit for your employees.

Breaking The Status Quo

<ul><li>Striving talents explain the ‘why’ of a person: what motivates them, do they want to stand out, and is ‘good enough,’ good enough for them?</li><li>Thinking talents explain the ‘how’ of a person: how they think, their decision making processes, are they focused, disciplined, strategic or non-linear in thinking?</li><li>Relating talents the ‘who’ of a person: who do they trust, who they build relationships with, do they avoid confrontation or have a desire to win people over? Do they love or hate surprises?</li></ul>

The Three Types Of Talent

<ul><li>What did you enjoy most about your previous work experience? </li><li>What brought you here? what keeps you here?</li><li>What do you think your strengths are? Your weaknesses?</li><li>What about your goals for your current role?</li><li>Do you have any personal goals or commitments you would like to tell me about?</li><li>What is the best praise you have ever received? what made it so good?</li><li>Have you had any really productive partnerships or mentors? why do you think these relationships worked so well for you?</li></ul>

Basic Routine Questions

Great managers know that every role in a workplace requires talent because there are recurring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Managers that are able to select for these patters will have more harmonious results on their team. 
One of the biggest mistakes managers make is selecting for other factors like experience or intelligence, and ignore required talents (for example, empathy is a required trait for nurses).

Empathy And EQ Over Experience

High performing managers understand that trying to achieve direct control of employees is futile and that trying to change people’s natural talents will not work. The solution is both simple and elegant: define a required outcome and then let the employee find their own way forward, through a path of least resistance.The most efficient way to turn someone’s talents into performance is to help him find his own path of least resistance towards the desired outcome.

Helping And Empowering

<ul><li>Talent interview should stand alone</li><li>Ask open-ended questions and keep quiet</li><li>Listen for specifics and top of minds</li></ul>Clues to talent:<ol><li>Rapid learning: which roles have you been able to learn quickly? What comes easy now?</li><li>What do you find fulfilling?</li></ol>Know what to listen for. Know what the top answer is (e.g. top salespeople hate to be doubted, top teachers love it)

Interview For Finding Talent

<ul>
<li>Do I know what is expected of me at work?</li>
<li>Do I have the equipment I need to do my work right?</li>
<li>Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?</li>
<li>Have I received recognition for good work?</li>
<li>Does anyone care about me as a person?</li>
<li>Does anyone encourage my development?</li>
<li>Do my opinions matter?</li>
<li>Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my work is important?</li>
<li>Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?</li>
<li>Do I have a best friend at work?</li>
<li>Have I talked to someone about my progress recently?</li>
<li>Have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?</li>
</ul>

Workplace Strength: The 12 Questions

Develop a performance management routine to keep focused on the progress of each person's performance.Routines are:Simple.<ul><li>Frequent (not all criticism at once; recent examples; results and problems fresh in memory).</li><li>Focused on the future.</li></ul>Ask the employee to keep track of his own performance and learnings in a private document.

Managing Performance

<ul><li>Select people. Differentiate between talent, skills and knowledge</li><li>Set accurate performance expectations</li><li>Motivate (recognition and care)</li><li>Develop the employee </li></ul>Managers look inward, leaders look outward.

What Great Managers Do

<ul><li>Create “perfect people”  by imposing a “best way” attitude and that you have the right answers. This is disempowering, demeaning and prevents self-exploration and learning.</li><li>Believe that employees don’t have enough talent, which can be true, but not if your hiring criteria is critically based on talents rather than selecting for other strengths.</li><li>Believe that “trust is precious it must be earned.” Great managers must reject the concept of earning trust.</li><li>Believe that “some outcomes defy definition” such as abstracts like employee satisfaction and customer feedback.</li></ul>

The Four Temptations That Hinder Growth

We all possess talents within the contexts of these categories. It is important to recognize that talents can’t be taught, they can only be cultivated and encouraged within the work roles assigned to that person. Skills, on the other hand, can be taught (i.e. typing speed, surgical techniques, software etc.). This does not mean entirely that people can’t change over time, but as managers, we need to be aware of underlying talents and work with them rather than against them.

The Intangible Talents That Cannot Be Taught

Normally we associate talent with celebrated excellence. Great managers disagree with this definition of talent. It is too narrow and too specialized. 
Instead they define talent as a recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior than can be productively applied. The emphasis here is on the word recurring. Your talents, they say, are the behaviors you find yourself doing often

Identifying and Understanding Talent

As a manager, it is your responsibility that your employees reply with an emphatic “yes” to the 12 questions. Positive responses to these questions were strongly correlated to profitability, productivity, employee retention, and customer satisfaction. 
If you can generate positive responses to these questions then you have the ability to attract and retain quality employees. The importance of influential perks, pay, or a charismatic CEO was not established in the author’s research.

A Yes To All 12 Questions

<ul><li>Select for talent (not simply for the experience, intelligence, determination)</li><li>Define the right outcomes (not the right steps)</li><li>Focus on strengths (not on weaknesses)</li><li>Find the right fit </li></ul>

The Four Keys

Employees must follow certain required steps for all aspects of their role that deal with accuracy and safetyEmployees must follow steps when they are part of a company or industry standardRequired steps are useful only if they do not obscure the desired outcome.

Defining The Right Outcome: The Rules

<ul><li>How would you describe success in your current role? can you measure it?</li><li>What do you actually do that makes you as good as you are? what does this tell you about your skills, knowledge and talents?</li><li>Which part of your current role do you enjoy the most?</li><li>Which part of your current role are you struggling with? what does this tell...? what can we do to manage around this? (training? positioning? support system? partnering?)</li></ul>

Career Check Discovery Questions

This book is a result of an exhaustive study undertaken by the Gallup organization involving 80,000 managers across a large number of industries exploring the concepts of employee satisfaction, selecting and maintaining good employees, and means of measuring employee satisfaction. The approach was revolutionary when published (1999) and has become a business classic because it challenged the status quo.

Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its revolutionary study of more than 80,000 managers in First, Break All the Rules, revealing what the world’s greatest managers do differently. With vital performance and career lessons and ideas for how to apply them, it is a must-read for managers at every level. The greatest managers in the world seem to have little in common. They differ in sex, age, and race. They employ vastly different styles and focus on different goals. Yet despite their differences, great managers share one common trait: They do not hesitate to break virtually every rule held sacred by conventional wisdom. They do not believe that, with enough training, a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They do not try to help people overcome their weaknesses. They consistently disregard the golden rule. And, yes, they even play favorites. This amazing book explains why. Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its massive in-depth study of great managers across a wide variety of situations. Some were in leadership positions. Others were front-line supervisors. Some were in Fortune 500 companies; others were key players in small entrepreneurial companies. Whatever their situations, the managers who ultimately became the focus of Gallup’s research were invariably those who excelled at turning each employee’s talent into performance. In today’s tight labor markets, companies compete to find and keep the best employees, using pay, benefits, promotions, and training. But these well-intentioned efforts often miss the mark. The front-line manager is the key to attracting and retaining talented employees. No matter how generous its pay or how renowned its training, the company that lacks great front-line managers will suffer. The authors explain how the best managers select an employee for talent rather than for skills or experience; how they set expectations for him or her — they define the right outcomes rather than the right steps; how they motivate people — they build on each person’s unique strengths rather than trying to fix his weaknesses; and, finally, how great managers develop people — they find the right fit for each person, not the next rung on the ladder. And perhaps most important, this research — which initially generated thousands of different survey questions on the subject of employee opinion — finally produced the twelve simple questions that work to distinguish the strongest departments of a company from all the rest. This book is the first to present this essential measuring stick and to prove the link between employee opinions and productivity, profit, customer satisfaction, and the rate of turnover. There are vital performance and career lessons here for managers at every level, and, best of all, the book shows you how to apply them to your own situation.

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