From Marcus Buckingham’s The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success:

The chief responsibility of a great manager is not to enforce quality, or to ensure customer service, or to set standards, or to build high-performance teams.

Each of these is a valuable outcome, and great managers may well use these outcomes to measure their success. But these outcomes are the end result, not the starting point. The starting point is each employee’s talents.

The challenge: to figure out the best way to transform these talents into performance. This is the job of the great manager.

To say that again:

The [chief responsibility of a manager] is to figure out the best way to turn each employee’s talents into performance.

If you are a manager, that is the one thing you need to do.

In Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, Jim Collins has a great section on how a bureaucratic death spiral turns exciting, high-potential start-ups into mediocre companies:

Few successful start-ups become great companies, in large part because they respond to growth and success in the wrong way.

Entrepreneurial success is fueled by creativity, imagination, bold moves into uncharted waters, and visionary zeal. [Then] as a company grows and becomes more complex, it begins to trip over its own success — too many new people, too many new customers, too many new orders, too many new products.

What was once great fun becomes an unwieldy ball of disorganized stuff. Lack of planning, lack of accounting, lack of systems, and lack of hiring creates constant friction. Problems surface — with customers, with cash flow, with schedules.

The professional managers finally rein in the mess. They create order out of chaos, but they also kill the entrepreneurial spirit [emphasis added].

Members of the founding team begin to grumble, “This isn’t fun anymore. I used to be able to just get things done. Now I have to fill out these stupid forms and follow these stupid rules. Worst of all, I have to spend a horrendous amount of time in useless meetings.”

The creative magic begins to wane as some of the most innovative people leave, disgusted by the burgeoning bureaucracy and hierarchy. The exciting start-up transforms into just another company, with nothing special to recommend it. The cancer of mediocrity begins to grow in earnest.

How do you avoid the bureaucratic death spiral? You create a culture of discipline instead of a bureaucracy. Collins continues:

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline – a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place [emphasis added].

Most people build their bureaucratic rules to manage the small percentage of wrong people on the bus, which in turn drives away the right people on the bus, which then increases the percentage of wrong people on the bus, which increases the need for more bureaucracy to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which then further drives the right people away, and so forth.

… An alternative exists: Avoid bureaucracy and hierarchy and instead create a culture of discipline. When you put these two complementary forces together — a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship — you get the magical alchemy of superior performance and sustained results.

The rest of the chapter is about how to create this culture of discipline. In fact, the whole book is really about that: disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and then take disciplined action. That’s how you avoid a bureaucracy and create a great company.

The following is very good insight into the role of a manager and why it is important, from Marcus Buckingham’s First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently (pp 58-59).

Conventional wisdom of late has tended to diminish the value of the manager:

Conventional wisdom tells us that the manager role is no longer very important. Apparently managers are now an impediment to speed, flexibility, and agility. Today’s agile companies can no longer afford to employ armies of managers to shuffle papers, sign approvals, and monitor performance. They need self-reliant, self-motivated, self-directed work teams. No wonder managers were first against the wall when the reengineering revolution came.

Besides, continues conventional wisdom, every “manager” should be a “leader.” He must seize opportunity, using his smarts and impatience to exert his will over a fickle world. In this world, the staid little manager is a misfit. It is too quick for him, too exciting, too dangerous. He had better stay out of the way. He might get hurt.

But conventional wisdom has led us astray:

Conventional wisdom has led us all astray. Yes, today’s business pressures are more intense, the changes neck-snappingly fast. Yes, companies need self-reliant employees and aggressive leaders. But all this does not diminish the importance of managers. On the contrary, in turbulent times the manager is more important than ever.

This becomes clear when you understand what a manager really is:

Why? Because managers play a vital and distinct role, a role that charismatic leaders and self-directed teams are incapable of playing. The manager role is to reach inside each employee and release his unique talents into performance. This role is best played one employee at a time: one manager asking questions of, listening to, and working with one employee. Multiplied a thousandfold, this one-by-one-by-one role is the company’s power supply. In times of great change it is this role that makes the company robust — robust enough to stay focused when needed, yet robust enough to flex without breaking.

In other words, the manager plays a critical catalyst role:

In this sense, the manager role is the “catalyst” role. As with all catalysts, the manager’s function is to speed up the reaction between two substances, thus creating the desired end product. Specifically the manager creates performance in each employee by speeding up the reaction between the employee’s talents and the company’s goals, and between the employee’s talents and the customers’ needs. When hundreds of managers play this role well, the company becomes strong, one employee at a time.

John Kotter, author of the recent book A Sense of Urgency, has a good interview discussing good urgency vs. bad urgency and how to lead in a recession.

Tom Peters is well-known as a proponent of doing WOW projects. Here’s how he describes them in Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age:

The road to success is paved with … WOW Projects. Project: a task that has a beginning and an end, as well as deliverables along the way. WOW Project: one that has “goals and objectives” that inspire.

WOW Projects are:

• Projects that Matter.
• Projects that Make a Difference.
• Projects that you can Brag About … forever. [I really, really, really dislike bragging, but you see the point. Very interesting spin if you interpret this in a God-centered way and take “forever” literally…]
• Projects that Transform the Enterprise.
• Projects that Take Your Breath Away.
• Projects that make you/me/us/”them” Smile.
• Projects that Highlight the Value that You Add … and Why … You Are Here on Earth. (Yes. That Big.)
• WOW Projects are … not hype.
• WOW Projects are … a necessity. (New necessity.)

Yesterday I posted on Tom Peters list of how to attract talent to your organization from his book Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age. But how do you identify talent? Peters covers that as well. He argues that a “true exemplar of talent:

1. Displays passion.
2. Inspires others.
3. Loves pressure.
4. Craves action.
5. Knows how to finish the job.
6. Thrives on WOW.
7. Exhibits curiosity.
8. Embodies “weird.”
9. Exudes a sense of fun.
10. Thinks at a high level.
11. “Gets” talent.

A good point from Tom Peters’ Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age:

To attract, retain, and obtain the most from Awesome Talent, organizations will need to offer up … an Awesome Place to Work: A place where people not only get paid “their due,” but also … get to initiate and execute great things.

Peters then offers up his “Talent 25” for how to do this (he expands on each of these points; I won’t do that here, but do recommending getting the whole book):

1. Put people first! (For Real.)
2. Be obsessed!
3. Pursue the best!
4. Weed out the rest!
5. Focus on intangibles!
6. Change the profile of HR!
7. Forge a bold HR strategy!
8. Take reviews seriously!
9. Pay up!
10. Set sky-high standards!
11. Train! Train! Train!
12. Cultivate leadership aspirations from the get go!
13. Foster open communication!
14. Lead by “winning people over”!
15. Reward “people skills”!
16. Show respect!
17. Embrace the whole individual!
18. Measure for uniqueness!
19. Honor youth!
20. Create opportunities to lead!
21. Relish diversity!
22. Liberate women! (There is a talent shortage — do not overlook 50% of the population.)
23. Celebrate the weird ones!
24. Provide a setting for adventure!
25. Revealing the big secret! (Although Malcolm Gladwell might want to nuance this [see his Outliers: The Story of Success], Peters puts it this way: some people are more talented than others in an area, and some are way more talented in that areas.)