10.4 Know what your people are like and what makes them tick, because your people are your most important resource.
Develop a full profile of each person’s values, abilities, and skills. These qualities are the real drivers of behavior, so knowing them in detail will tell you which jobs a person can and cannot do well, which ones they should avoid, and how the person should be trained. These profiles should change as the people change.
If you don’t know your people well, you don’t know what you can expect from them. You’re flying blind and you have no one to blame but yourself if you don’t get the outcomes you’re expecting.
a. Regularly take the temperature of each person who is important to you and to the organization.
Probe your key people and urge them to bring up anything that might be bothering them. These problems might be ones you are unaware of, or they may be misunderstood by the person raising them. Whatever the case, it is essential that they be brought out into the open.
10.3 Understand the differences between managing, micromanaging, and not managing.
Great managers orchestrate rather than do. Like the conductor of an orchestra, they do not play an instrument, but direct their people so that they play beautifully together. Micromanaging, in contrast, is telling the people who work for you exactly what tasks to do or doing their tasks for them. Not managing is having them do their jobs without your oversight and involvement. To be successful, you need to understand these differences and manage at the right level.
a. Managers must make sure that what they are responsible for works well.
They can do this by 1) managing others well (as explained above), 2) job slipping down to do work they’re not responsible for because others can’t do their jobs well, 3) escalating what they can’t manage well. The first choice is optimal; the second signals that a change is needed in the people and the design; the third choice is harder still but mandatory.
b. Managing the people who report to you should feel like skiing together.
10.2 Remember that for every case you deal with, your approach should have two purposes.
1) to move you closer to your goal, and 2) to train and test your machine (i.e., your people and your design).
The second purpose is more important than the first because it is how you build a solid organization that works well in all cases. Most people focus more on the first purpose, which is a big mistake.
a. Everything is a case study.
Think about what type of case it is and what principles apply to that type of case. By doing this and helping others to do this you’ll get better at handling situations as they repeat over and over again through time.
b. When a problem occurs, conduct the discussion at two levels: 1) the machine level (why that outcome was produced) and 2) the case-at-hand level (what to do about it).
Don’t make the mistake of just having the case-at-hand discussion, because then you are micromanaging (i.e., you are doing your managee’s thinking and your managee will mistakenly think that’s okay). When having the machine-level discussion, think clearly how things should have gone and explore why they didn’t go that way. If you are in a rush to determine what to do and you have to tell the person who works for you what to do, make sure to explain what you are doing and why.
10.1 Look down on your machine and yourself within it from the higher level.
Higher-level thinking isn’t something that’s done by higher-level beings. It’s simply seeing things from the top down. Think of it as looking at a photo of yourself and the world around you from outer space. From that vantage, you can see the relationships between the continents, countries, and seas. Then you can get more granular, by zooming into a closer-up view of your country, your city, your neighborhood, and finally your immediate environment. Having that macro perspective gives you much more insight than you’d get if you simply looked around your house through your own eyes.
a. Constantly compare your outcomes to your goals.
You must always be simultaneously trying to accomplish the goal and evaluating the machine (the people and the design), as all outcomes are reflections of how the machine is running. Whenever you identify a problem with your machine, you need to diagnose whether it is the result of a flaw in its design or in the way your people are handling their responsibilities.
You reach a point in all relationships when you must decide whether you are meant for each other—that’s common in private life and at any organization that holds very high standards. At Bridgewater, we know that we cannot compromise on the fundamentals of our culture, so if a person cannot operate within our requirements of excellence through radical truth and transparency in an acceptable time frame, he or she must leave.
9.10 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.
Both affected managers should be in sync that the new role is the best, highest use or escalate up the chain to make a determination. The manager wanting to recruit the person is responsible for not causing a disruption. An informal conversation to see if someone is interested is fine, but there should be no active recruiting prior to getting in sync with the existing manager. The timing of the move should be decided by the existing manager in consultation with relevant parties.
a. Have people “complete their swings” before moving on to new roles.
There should always be follow-through, not interruption, unless a pressing reason exists (when, say, a person would be a great click for another job that needs to be filled immediately). In a company where things are evolving quickly and people are expected to speak openly, it is natural that there will be a steady stream of opportunities for employees to move into new roles. But if too many people jump from one job to another without fulfilling their responsibilities, the resulting discontinuity, disorder, and instability will be bad for managers, bad for the culture, and bad for the people moving, because they won’t be adequately tested in their ability to move things to completion.
9.9 Train, guardrail, or remove people; don’t rehabilitate them.
Training is part of a plan to develop people’s skills and help them evolve. Rehabilitation is an attempt to create significant changes in people’s values and/or abilities. Since values and abilities are difficult to change, rehabilitation is typically impractical. Since people with inappropriate values and inadequate abilities can have a devastating impact on the organization, they should be fired. If rehabilitation is attempted, it is generally best directed by professionals over extended periods of time.
Remember that is you are expecting people to be much better in the near future than they have been in the past, you are probably making a serious mistake. People who repeatedly operate in a certain way will probably continue to operate that way because that behavior reflects what they’re like. Since people generally change slowly, you should expect slow improvement (at best). Instead, you need to change the people or change the design. Since changing the design to accommodate people’s weaknesses is generally a bad idea, it is better to sort the people. Sometimes good people “lose their boxes” (they get fired from their role) because they can’t evolve into Responsible Parties soon enough. Some of them might be good in another position, in which case they should be reassigned within the company; some of them will not and should leave.
9.8 Recognize that when you are really in sync with someone about their weaknesses, the weaknesses are probably true.
When you reach an agreement, it’s a good sign you’ve arrived at truth, which is why getting to that point is such a great achievement. This is one of the main reasons that the person being evaluated must be an equal participant in the process. When you do agree, make a formal record of it. This information will be a critical building block for future success.
a. When judging people, remember that you don’t have to get to the point of “beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
Perfect understanding isn’t possible; trying to get to it wastes time and stalls progress. Instead, work toward developing a mutually agreed-upon, by-and-large understanding of what someone is like that has a high level of confidence behind it. When necessary, take the time to enrich this understanding.
