Great Managers

"It takes time and effort to gain a full appreciation of an employee's strengths and weaknesses," writes Marcus Buckingham in The Essential Guide to Leadership (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review, 2009).  He continues....

"The great manager spends a great deal of time outside his office walking around, watching each person's reactions to events, listening, and taking mental notes about what each individual is drawn to and what each person struggles with.  There's no substitute for this kind of observation, but you can obtain a lot of information about a person by asking a few simple, open-ended questions and listening carefully to the answers....

"To identify a person's strengths, first ask, 'What was the best day at work you've had in the past three months?'  Find out what the person was doing and why he enjoyed it so much.  Remember:  A strength is not merely something you are good at.  In fact, it might be something you aren't good at yet.  It might be just a predilection, something you find so intrinsically satisfying that you look forward to doing it again and again and getting better at it over time....

"To identify a person's weaknesses, just invert the question:  'What was the worst day you had at work in the past three months?'  And then, probe details about what he was doing and why it grated on him so much.  As with a strength, a weakness is not merely something you are bad at. ...  It is something that drains you of energy, an activity that you never look forward to doing, and that when you are doing it, all you can think about is stopping."

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