I finished this book in February 2025. I recommend this book 3/10.
Why you should read this book:
The book was written for managers specifically, not top executives. The book goes into detail about how to conduct effective one-on-ones, how to provide feedback, and how to delegate work. The book is not particularly well-written, but important information.
Get your copy here.
🚀 The book in three sentences
Your main focus should be on results and retention.
Give a lot of feedback and focus on developing your direct reports.
You have to be better at delegating the right work.
📝 My notes and thoughts
P2. So, despite how nice it sounds and how good it feels to be loved by your team, your first responsibility is NOT to your team of directs. It's NOT to your people. You do NOT worry about them first. It's popular to be a manager who is loved by her team because, well, it's nice to be popular. But a manager who is loved by her team but doesn't achieve her goals isn't doing her job. The military has a phrase that captures the connection between results and people beautifully: Mission First, People Always.
P7. So, if you want to be an effective manager, if you want to maximize your security (and we would argue your professional satisfaction), you've got to achieve these two metrics, results and retention. You've got to know how your organization measures them, and you've got to choose to spend your time on things that achieve them.
P11. The top four behaviors were essentially responsible for 75% of the results and retention value created by the entire list of 15. It's Pareto-like: approximately 80% of the value comes from 20% of the causes. And what are those top four behaviors? the four critical behaviors most correlated with improved results and retention are the following:
Get to know your people.
Communicate about performance.
Ask for more.
Push work down.
P23. The ideal place for your directs to be for maximum output/results is right on the line between distress and eustress. Almost over the line into fear, but not. Lots of anticipation and energy, but not panic. And the only way to know where that line is for each direct is to push each of your directs into moments of distress where they start to lose effectiveness.
P56.The agenda is simple: first, 10 minutes for your direct, then 10 minutes for you, then 10 minutes to talk about the future. The most important concept in the agenda is "first": the key to the agenda is letting your directs go first. We shared the story before of our very first effort with agendas, letting managers go first: disastrous. If you go first, no matter how important the stuff you want to talk about is, our data show you will not get the value out of MTO3s we've discussed here. The directs go first, and talk about...whatever they want to talk about. There is no agenda past the three 10-minute segments.
P75. Talk about performance. Answer questions. Provide feedback. Assign work. Praise. Provide coaching. Talk about relationships. Discuss development. Develop relationships. Inquire about status. Expect status reporting. Pay attention to work-family "balance." Plan. Check work. Reward. These are the things done in O3s.
P87. "When you look at the top of your organization, what you call politics, they call collaboration." Politics are inevitable in organizations because they are nothing more than relationship effects.
P108. The MT Feedback Model has four simple steps:
Step 1: Ask. (Can I give you some feedback? Can I make an observation? Can I share something with you?
Step 2: Describe the behavior.
Step 3: Describe the impact of the behavior.
Step 4: Encourage effective future behavior.
P128. From your organization's perspective, problems are most economically solved at the level at which they are created. You're a more expensive resource than your direct, so you solving their problems isn't what your organization wants from you. Your organization wants you to do your job, point out the miss, ask for better, and have your directs solve their own problems.
P131. When engineering managers tell us, "We can't use feedback; we use root cause analysis," That's like saying, "I don't want a bike; I already have a tank." Different scope, different scale, different cost, different results. And never use a tank to run an errand.
P157. How do you address encouraging feedback when you're remote? Deliver all feedback, positive and negative, in a positive tone. Think of yourself as having forgiven your direct if they've made a mistake. This will lower your fears of giving it and lower your direct's defensiveness in receiving it. And the more you give, the easier it will get.
P176. Our coaching Model has four simple steps:
Goals/Deadline-Behavior-Quality.
Resource/Brainstorm
Plan/Deliverables
Act/Reporting
P197. Then he had the realization that separates all great executives from managers: that people were what executive effectiveness was all about, and it was no longer about the technical (or other) work. And then he realized he had to make others more effective at working on problems rather than throwing himself at problems, no matter how much better he was at solving the problems than everyone else was.
P200. Politics are nothing but relationship effects in decision-making. Executive decisions are never made solely on the basis of logic and data, and rationality. Executive decisions always include the relationship effect that exists in your organization. So, this new executive has on-third of her schedule taken away. And concurrently, she's given a bunch of new responsibilities, basically tripling her workload. And this is when things start to break down. If our recently promoted executive hasn't previously learned to delegate and hasn't training her team to accept delegation, she can't pass on some of her work to them. She's been the hero, but now she cannot do it all..., and neither can her team help her.
P207. When delegating, ask yourself four questions about each of your directs to determine who gets what:
What does he want to do?
What does she like to do?
What does she need to do for her growth?
What is he good at?
P207. If your directs want to, need to, or are also good at it—and they can do it close to as good as you can—you ought to seriously consider delegating it to them.