What Great Managers Do: Survival Guide for Leaders

Article Review: Survival Guide for Leaders
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Article Review: Survival Guide for Leaders
A quality that sets great managers apart is their ability to discover and capitalize on people's uniqueness. Buckingham likens typical managers to the game of checkers while great managers to chess players. In checkers, all pieces are exchangeable and move similarly and uniformly. There is coordination and plan in the movement of components, but they all move at similar speeds in equal ways. On the other hand, In chess, each piece moves differently, and you cannot play if you don't have the foggiest idea of how each piece moves. Equally important, you will not win if you do not consider how you move the pieces (Marcus, 2005). Therefore, great managers know and evaluate their workers' exceptional capacities and peculiarities, and they figure out how best to incorporate them into an organized game plan.
Buckingham expounds on the difference between leaders and managers. Leaders have to march people toward a superior future. Leaders achieve the above objective when they slice through contrasts of sex, race, age, character, and identity and tap into the needs that are common to all individuals. Contrarily, managers' responsibility is to turn a person's ability into performance (Marcus, 2005). As a result, managers succeed when they can distinguish and deliver the discrepancies among people, inciting every representative to grow in their particular means.
Michelle and Jim are examples of great managers revealed in the journal of Buckingham. Michelle is the manager of Walgreens' 4000th store. Her store in California employs individuals with varying skills and possibly problematic contrasts in character. Michelle's responsibilities are to abstain from assembling conflicting personalities and to place individuals into shifts and roles that will permit them to excel. Jim is also a manager of a Walgreens store in San Jose, California (Marcus, 2005). Unlike Michelle, Jim does not use work schedules but has a wall with sales statistics and figures of the best employee circled with a red pen. Jim has also mounted the pictures of sales competition winners.
Michelle and Jim employ the technique of chess in their management. For instance, Michelle used Jeffry to cover the "hard to cover" night shift. After a while, Michelle realized that Jeffry would take long to complete vague assignments. Moreover, he would do them poorly. However, Jeffry was excellent with more specific tasks. As a result, Michelle shifts Jeffry to reset/ revisions and later promotes him to the assistant manager position. She also combines Jeffry's qualities with another employee (Marcus, 2005). Generally, Michelle's continuous revision of tasks based on employees' strengths proved successful.
On the other hand, Jim identifies his workers' idiosyncrasies and translates them to performance. For example, Jim recognized that Manjit was always thrilled by the measured challenge. Therefore, Jim began keeping records on the wall and marking the best scores to encourage Manjit, and after a while, Manjit began outperforming other employees (Marcus, 2005). Jim also evaluates other employees based on their strengths, so Jim's store rank...