Clever Geek Handbook
29 November 2025

The Extraordinary Coach

Recommendation

Managers who try to coach their employees often make wrongheaded assumptions about what their staffers think. They offer unhelpful advice about what staffers should do to improve their work, and this is exactly what coaching should not be. Human Resource Development Hall of Famer John H. Zenger and his colleague Kathleen Stinnett spell out everything for managers who haven’t a clue about coaching or how to conduct coaching sessions. BooksInShort recommends discovering whether you need this helpful manual in much the same way that the authors suggest using when you conduct coaching sessions: by asking questions. Do your employees need coaching? Do you feel ready to coach? What can you do to learn more about being a coach? Would reading thoughtful information about coaching help? If so, this is the book for you.

Take-Aways

  • Coaching offers numerous career-building benefits to employees, such as extra self-reliance and clearer goals.
  • Often, managers do not coach their employees because they do not know how.
  • Managers generally fail to plan their coaching sessions adequately.
  • Even when they think they are coaching, most managers just conduct project reviews and status updates.
  • When most managers coach, they talk too much or ask leading questions instead of open-ended ones.
  • Managers should listen patiently to everything their staffers say.
  • Most managers think coaching is giving advice and solving the employee’s problems.
  • Real coaching helps employees learn to develop solutions on their own.
  • Coaches can use the “FUEL Coaching Framework” to structure coaching sessions.
  • “FUEL” stands for “frame the conversation,” “understand the current state” of the employee’s work, “explore the desired state” and “lay out a success plan.”

Summary

Coaching: A Win-Win for Employees and Companies

Coaching helps employees develop at work, grow professionally and become more self-reliant. It increases their accountability and makes them feel valued. Coaching helps companies by building employee engagement, reducing turnover, motivating people to work harder, and strengthening the bonds between managers and staff.

“Coaching is a highly beneficial skill set that can be applied to a variety of problems or issues.”

Coaching encourages employee behavior that is good for business, like being innovative, thinking strategically, taking chances and exercising critical thinking. Through coaching, workers learn to seize the initiative and become accountable. Coaching offers 10 significant benefits:

  1. “Giving new meaning to work” – The coaching experience signals to employees that their company and their supervisors value them, want them to do well and will take active steps to help them succeed.
  2. “Engaged and committed employees” – Coaching occurs one-on-one. Employees appreciate the time their managers take to help and support them. This makes staffers more enthusiastic about work and more secure about their place in the firm.
  3. “Higher productivity” – Coaching gives workers focus, shows them that their managers are paying close attention to their productivity and helps them set up efficient routines.
  4. “Stronger culture” – The way people treat one another and the level of mutual respect among colleagues up and down the command chain shape an organization’s corporate culture. Coaching demonstrates that higher-ups want to help the company’s employees advance.
  5. “Strengthened bonds between supervisor and employee” – Coaching sessions bring managers and employees together.
  6. “Healthier individuals” – Coaching boosts employees’ self-esteem and morale.
  7. “Resilience” – Coaching helps workers become more self-sufficient and better able to bounce back from problems.
  8. “Heightened creativity” – During coaching, employees find their own solutions to improving their work lives. This creative activity fuels positive self-discovery.
  9. “Increased risk taking and exploring” – Coaching motivates employees to investigate new pathways for achieving their goals.
  10. “Mind-set of an owner versus a hired hand” – Employees are adults, so they naturally rebel against bosses telling them what to do, how to do it and when to do it. Coaching enables employees to accept responsibility for their own activities. Through coaching, employees take ownership of their jobs.

Why Managers Don’t Coach

Despite these advantages, many managers do not coach their employees. They claim to have no time for coaching, yet coaching sessions take only 15 to 20 minutes per topic per worker. Other managers assert that their own bosses don’t coach them and that they’re just emulating their leaders. More may say their employees don’t require coaching, yet the employees who are already among the most productive often benefit most from coaching. So why do so many managers avoid coaching? Perhaps they fear discussions that might prove uncomfortable. Maybe they doubt they have the wisdom to coach. Perhaps their employees never asked for coaching. And many managers don’t coach because they don’t understand what it involves, how to do it or how much it can accomplish.

How Managers Coach Badly

Managers might say that they already offer their staffers some degree of coaching, but their employees would insist that they are not getting it. Conversations that many managers regard as coaching sessions prove to be nothing more than project-review meetings. Indeed, when managers meet one-on-one with their employees, they generally spend about 90% of their time discussing work status updates. Such meetings, while important to the work at hand, do not help employees grow in their jobs. And while most managers routinely conduct performance reviews with their employees, they seldom hold career development sessions.

“Coaching is an important tool for leaders to use to improve performance and to help people grow.”

Most managers don’t coach enough, and when they try, few do the job correctly. For example, they don’t plan or structure the “coaching conversation,” and they do all the talking instead of doing most of the listening. They tend to emphasize hard data or facts and to ignore the employee’s emotions. They try to solve problems immediately instead of framing a productive, career-building conversation.

“Only slightly more than one out of 10 people would turn first to their immediate supervisor if they had a problem.”

Managers who don’t know how to coach render advice instead of asking employees for their ideas and opinions. They ask leading questions instead of open-ended questions. They try to uncover information that abets their limited understanding of the employee rather than trying to learn what the person thinks and feels. They jump on the first potentially viable solution that appears instead of developing a menu of alternatives. They hope that the people they’re coaching will change and grow; instead, they should insist on personal accountability. Many managers automatically assume that the staffers they’re coaching are ready to institute change, however individuals generally work through change in stages. Most managers mistakenly focus on career development and advancement for each staffer annually, rather than as a matter of regular routine.

Core Skills, Competencies and Qualities

When managers are coaching they must not give in to certain natural tendencies or habits they may have developed over the course of their careers. For example, while most managers are proven problem solvers, they must step back and let employees develop solutions for themselves. Coaches do not work out other people’s problems; they help staffers develop, grow and figure out how to correct their own difficulties. Yet, paradoxically, coaches and managers must offer feedback and guidance. However, many people resent a boss’s counsel and almost never follow it, good or bad. Giving advice is almost always worthless, even if your recommendations prove worthwhile. So if giving advice is bad coaching, what’s good coaching? To be effective, a superior coach performs the following duties:

  • “Builds a strong relationship” – As a coach, help your staffers grow professionally. Promote trust. Foster good workplace relationships and strong collaboration.
  • “Communicates effectively” – Frame the coaching conversation. Listen attentively. Ask open-ended questions about your employees’ situations to help them gain perspective and personal awareness. Suggest multiple directions for the coaching conversation and its outcome. Give helpful feedback and welcome receiving it.
  • “Facilitates action and results” – Guide your staff members to answers to their problems. Spotlight all coaching goals. Negotiate employee expectations about coaching. Assist staffers in setting professional goals and performance benchmarks. Work with them to imagine beneficial futures. Push them to consider the many alternative consequences of various actions. Encourage your employees to innovate.
  • “Provides ongoing support” – Support your workers and give them valuable recognition. Follow up with them after your coaching sessions. Encourage them to be self-accountable for their promises to change – and accountable to you as well.

“The FUEL Coaching Framework”

Use the FUEL framework process to structure your coaching sessions. This flexible armature provides useful guidelines and directions to help you plan your coaching conversations. Work through each stage of the process by asking open-ended questions. During each stage, the employee, not the coach, must do the majority of the talking. The FUEL coaching framework has four separate aspects:

  1. “Frame the conversation” – Establish the conversational focus and context, as well as a target for the coaching session. Identify the issues you need to examine by asking, for example, “What is the most important thing for us to focus on?” Name the desired conversational outcome and set goals (“By the end of this conversation, I would like to accomplish...”). Next, secure agreement on the conversational process (“Here’s how I thought we could proceed...”). Create a contract that establishes the importance of the sessions. That will help you avoid nonproductive chatting or complaining. Make sure your employee – not you – selects the discussion topics.
  2. “Understand the current state” – Establish the employee’s point of view (“How do you see this situation?”). Discuss the consequences workers face if they don’t change (“What are the long-term implications?”). Depending on the circumstances, discuss your viewpoint of the issues at hand, but tread lightly. This is the toughest phase of the FUEL process. The purpose of this phase is to help your employee develop a new awareness of the issues under discussion. Let your staffer find his or her own way. Avoid digging for too many details; let them emerge naturally from the conversation.
  3. “Explore the desired state” – When establishing goals for the coaching session, bigger is always better. Ask, for example, “What would you like to see happen here?” Discuss various options (“What might be some approaches you can take?”). Another productive question for this stage is, “What else might work?” Always try to develop at least three options. Discuss any potential roadblocks (“Where would the biggest resistance to this change come from?”). Make sure that your employees develop their own solutions in these individual sessions. The worker and the coach should never settle on the first solution they come up with. As the coach, you should not give directions; instead, you should open pathways and act as a brainstorm sounding board for your staffer.
  4. “Lay out a success plan” – Develop action and follow-up plans regarding all the goals you and your staffer established during coaching. Ask, for example, “What specific actions will help you achieve your goal?” At this stage, details and specificity will help clarify the way forward. Establish a timeline for all actions and discuss how your employees can secure support for achieving their goals. Set progress milestones. Personal commitment and accountability are crucial.

Some Additional Thoughts

Your employee must assist your coaching efforts by supplying useful feedback, and both of you should strive to develop individual self-awareness. You can turn to a variety of “feedback mechanisms” such as a 360-degree “multirater” process. Here, the coached person and his or her “direct reports...peers and...manager” fill out a confidential, anonymous questionnaire about the staffer’s leadership abilities. The report of the compiled results gives the staffer a thorough, thoughtful leadership skills assessment.

“People usually resist advice and seldom follow it.”

Speaking candidly to one as the coach and the coached employee also creates a constant, self-refueling loop of information and trust. The more positive and specific your data, the better, but always ask permission before offering your feedback. “Reinforcing feedback is a wonderful tool for creating greater engagement,” so express any negative feedback in a way that assures your employees that you are on their side. You might say, “I would like to share some feedback with you. It may be hard for you to hear, and it is also hard for me to deliver.” Use the “drip irrigation” technique for negative feedback: Divulge only a little at a time. As the process moves forward, schedule an increasing number of coaching sessions. When you coach, always remember that your employees have complex dimensions to their lives outside of work. Adjust your coaching accordingly.

“Even if the [employee] asks you for advice, don’t take the bait!”

At first, coaching conversations may seem unnatural or even artificial to you and your employees. Prepare for this in advance by “signaling the lane change.” Be explicit that you are purposely trying something new – coaching – and that you are working hard to improve your skills and develop expertise in this new, difficult area. Your employees will then understand how the management-staffer dynamic is about to change and will be more accepting. Be patient and open to the process: “Changing any behavior often requires a fair degree of effort, in addition to intention and commitment.”

About the Authors

John H. Zenger co-founded Zenger/Folkman, an executive education firm where Kathleen Stinnett is a senior consultant and executive coach.

Read summary...
The Extraordinary Coach

Book The Extraordinary Coach

How the Best Leaders Help Others Grow

McGraw-Hill,
 


29 November 2025

The Art of Action

Recommendation

Both business activity and military campaigns involve high-level strategy, action plans, the deployment of resources, tactical execution and opponents to be bested – either your competitors in business or your army’s enemy. The similarities resonate through all aspects of business and military operations, including the details of logistics, recruitment and staffing. Business strategy consultant and military historian Stephen Bungay considers these parallels in his intriguing work on strategic business execution. BooksInShort highly recommends his insightful reinterpreting of 19th-century tactics into 21st-century solutions to CEOs and their planning and operations staffs.

Take-Aways

  • Organizations often fail to execute their plans and strategies efficiently.
  • Such failures can stem from unclear goals, complex directions and poor communication.
  • This environment confuses employees, who don’t know what to do.
  • Executives of organizations that suffer these failures tend to issue minutely detailed – and often insulting – instructions that frustrate employees.
  • Trust can deteriorate, everyone becomes cynical and goals remain elusive.
  • The highly influential “scientific management” approach, developed in 1911 by Frederick Winslow Taylor, is a major reason modern organizations fail to execute.
  • It casts employees as unthinking robots who must follow precise plans.
  • Such detailed instructions prove dysfunctional when unforeseen events arise.
  • Two 19th-century German military strategists, Carl von Clausewitz and Helmuth von Moltke, suggested a different and more effective approach.
  • Keep goals clear, directions simple; communicate effectively and encourage your subordinates to improvise.

Summary

Can You Execute?

Organizations often find it difficult to execute their strategies. In the complicated world of business, companies inadvertently take on the confusion surrounding them and operations can devolve into opaqueness. Facing density and incoherence, employees spend extra time in analysis and discursive meetings. Decision making suffers. Frustration mounts among employees, managers and top executives. Concerned executives begin to spell out what their staff members should do in numbing and counterproductive detail. Employees naturally resent such micromanagement. Trust erodes. As a result, no one is certain how to proceed. Most importantly, no one clearly can answer that most basic question: “What do you want me to do?”

The Taylor Model

Keeping people busy is never a problem. More problematic is getting people to execute the right activities, the ones that make an organization more efficient and profitable. The old-style “scientific management” approach Frederick Winslow Taylor first suggested in 1911 bears much of the blame. He proposed developing an ideal plan and providing detailed instructions directing employees to carry it out robotically. But planners cannot predict the future, so such plans always falter.

“Executives who master the disciplines of formulating and giving good directions can explain to people what they have to achieve and why, and so make them ready to act.”

In Search of Excellence, the 1980 management bestseller, seemed to make the Taylor model less philosophically applicable. It suggested instilling “change management” and leading without managing. But those gauzy ideas proved hard to pin down. No one knows exactly what these concepts mean in practice, so the Taylor model remains dominant. Managers grouse that workers do not follow plans, and workers complain that managers’ plans are ineffective.

“The director is detached, calculating and flexible; the manager is engaged, realistic and pragmatic; the leader is committed, passionate and determined.”

Gaps develop among “plans, actions and outcomes”:

  • The gap between “plans and outcomes” – A lack of clarity pushes people to overanalyze and to meet more often to define plans and achieve the right results.
  • The gap between “plans and actions” – No one can program workers to perform perfectly. When plans and actions misalign, executives burden employees with detailed (annoying) instructions.
  • The gap between “actions and outcomes” – Managers cannot control their organizations’ external environment. The results they hope to achieve from certain actions often are thwarted. In response, executives opt for onerous, ineffective controls.

What should organizations do?

Take these steps:

  • “Decide what really matters” – Forget about developing the perfect plan. Use the available knowledge to target the best possible outcomes. Make your strategy “an intent rather than a plan.”
  • “Get the message across” – Tell others the results you seek and why they matter. Keep things simple. Don’t overwhelm employees with instructions.
  • “Give people space and support” – Nobody can predict future outcomes. Encourage your employees to be adaptable so that they always work to achieve your main goals. Let them operate within broad boundaries.

Carl von Clausewitz

The logical approach to “turning activity into action” predates Frederick Winslow Taylor. It goes back to the Prussian Army, and Carl von Clausewitz’s 1832 book Vom Kriege (On War). Von Clausewitz, an officer in the army, wrote that during wartime, “things do not happen of their own accord like a well-oiled machine, indeed, the machine starts to create resistance, and overcoming it demands enormous willpower on the part of the leader.” Von Clausewitz labeled this resistance “friction,” which one scholar described as “the totality of ‘uncertainties, errors, accidents, technical difficulties, the unforeseen and their effects on decisions, morale and actions’.”

“Each generation has to relearn old lessons and acquire old skills.”

Friction is both external and internal. Armies are comprised of human beings, who inadvertently add their own friction to events and outcomes. Von Clausewitz recognized that the chaos of war derives from its inherent friction. The three primary sources of friction are: “imperfect information,” “imperfect transmitting and processing of information” and “external factors.” The results of such friction are “not additive but multiplicative.”

Helmuth Carl Bernhard Graf von Moltke

In the 19th century, Field Marshal Helmuth Carl Bernhard Graf von Moltke adapted von Clausewitz’s insights to makes his Prussian Army more deadly and effective. He developed an army operations manual, the Auftragstaktik. Its principles, published as “Mission Command,” help guide the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and other military forces around the world.

“The intelligence of an organization is never equal to the sum of the intelligence of the people within it.”

Von Moltke insisted that his military subordinates must be able to think and act for themselves and always should be ready to act independently when necessary. He wrote, “Obedience is a principle, but the man stands above the principle.” Von Moltke stated that military officers must issue crystal-clear commands and fully understand their top leaders’ intentions. He said military orders must find their way “down ‘to the last man’.” He avoided planning into the unknowable future. As he said, “In war, circumstances change very rapidly, and it is rare indeed for directions which cover a long period of time in a lot of detail to be fully carried out.” Von Moltke told his generals, “The higher the level of command, the shorter and more general the orders should be.”

“A good strategy creates coherence between our capabilities, the opportunities we can detect and our aims.”

Von Moltke’s underlying principle: “The most alignment you have, the more autonomy you can grant.” This depends on superior briefings, as well as “backbriefing,” wherein subordinates check with their superiors to ensure they understand all their earlier directions. In orders issued before a battle, von Moltke kept to single-sentence paragraphs, and each sentence contained one clear direct idea.

“Friction makes doing simple things difficult and difficult things impossible.”

For von Moltke, a plan that is 70% correct is acceptable. A flexible organization can determine how to handle the remaining 30%, depending on the circumstances. Modern organizations can borrow and implement the principles of Auftragstaktik. Employees cannot be afraid to make mistakes and, indeed, must be allowed to do so. In this system of “directed opportunism,” trust must travel up and down the chain of command. The mission command approach rejects any static model of creating and implementing strategy. It demands “thinking and doing” – learning and adapting. Mission command is not “plan and implement.” It is “do and adapt.”

Addressing the Gaps Created by Friction

Contemporary employees are completely familiar with friction – and its ensuing chaos. As organizations grow in size and complexity, friction increases.

“A disproportionate number of fundamental organizational innovations have their origins in disaster.”

This opens “three gaps” that you must address to execute your plans:

1. The Knowledge Gap

Since the future remains unknowable, limit planning to what you can foresee. Your strategy must involve the goal you want and how you plan to achieve it (that is, your execution).

Strategy development and execution are inseparable. One depends upon the other. Your strategy expresses intent, which bridges the knowledge gap. Your strategy should include a viable framework for intelligent decision making, execution and action in a “logical sequence of steps.” These steps represent your organization’s “main effort” and should focus on what von Clausewitz termed “the enemy’s center of gravity.” This could be your competitor’s strongest market or your own company’s greatest inefficiency.

“A mission which tries to encompass multiple tasks can all too easily obscure what really matters.” (from Truppenführung, the German Army guide to leadership, 1933)

Von Moltke referred to strategy as “the evolution of an original guiding idea under constantly changing circumstances.” A wise strategy points your organization in the right direction and links “aims, opportunities and capabilities.” General Electric’s former CEO Jack Welch terms this approach “planned opportunism.”

“Fear is not a word commonly used in management literature, and it may sound overly dramatic. In reality, there is a lot of it about and it is often a reason why people decide to play it safe and do as little as possible.”

Leaders must be wise so they can create and implement effective strategies; they also must be seasoned, intuitive individuals with what Germans call Fingerspitzengefühl, meaning the “feeling in your fingertips” or what Americans refer to as “gut feelings.”

2. The Alignment Gap

The degree of planning must match the level of command, with more detailed planning for lower levels. Each level must know “what to achieve and why.” Without adequate information about corporate goals, employees at subsidiary levels cannot make intelligent decisions. They may pursue activities that do not support the overall strategy. To address this risk, you must clarify your strategy with a “statement of intent.”

“If Peter Drucker first urged managers to manage by objectives, von Moltke could be said to have led with directives.”

This statement should communicate your strategy as it applies to each level of the organization. As this message travels throughout the organization, help each subsidiary level work with additional specificity. Make sure leaders at each level convey their intentions to the next highest level. During these all-important leadership coordination briefings, “check mutual understanding,” and provide needed ground-level adjustments to increase “alignment across functions.” The structure of the organization must enable and empower the strategy. You need a hierarchy of accountable leaders who can “make autonomous decisions.”

3. The Effects Gap

Individuals should act on their own initiative within proper boundaries. They should pay more attention to intentions than to specific instructions and adjust their activities to the situation at hand. Employees must demonstrate “independent thinking obedience” – independent thought and action. Workers will not exercise independent judgment if they are afraid to make mistakes.

“Sins of omission are worse than sins of commission.”

Your organization needs strong-minded leaders. Von Moltke found the type of officers he wanted by setting up a Kriegsakademie (war academy), where military officers learned to think and act independently and to make decisions. They learned to issue clear directives to subordinates that matched outcomes with intentions, thus bridging the effects gap.

“Companies...fall prey to the temptation of replacing clarity with detail.”

Develop your leaders in a similar fashion. Focus first and foremost on your people. Ultimately, they are the ones who will make the difference.

For the best opportunity to succeed, assemble the right people, train them well, lead them properly and provide clear direction.

Ten “Glimpses of the Blindingly Obvious”

These ideas represent common sense, though often common sense “is not so common in practice.” The military calls these ideas glimpses of the blindingly obvious, or GBOs.

“If an organization systematically builds the strategic thinking and briefing skills of its executives, it can create something very powerful.”

Here are 10 of the most important GBOs:

  1. People are not perfect. They possess partial knowledge and “independent wills.”
  2. No one can predict the future. Do not plan beyond what you can forecast.
  3. Ascertain what steps are the most essential and act accordingly.
  4. People cannot act effectively if they do not understand the organization’s intentions.
  5. Once you communicate this information, your staffers must demonstrate that they fully understand it and explain what they plan to do as a result.
  6. Supervisors should make assignments to responsible, accountable individuals and establish the boundaries in which they can operate.
  7. Employees must possess the proper “skills and resources,” and they should be ready to take independent action as required.
  8. Employees must adapt their activities when necessary.
  9. Your people won’t act independently if they believe the organization won’t support them.
  10. Make all directives as clear and simple as possible.

About the Author

Stephen Bungay, an independent consultant and a noted historian, wrote The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain. He is a director at London’s Ashridge Strategic Management Centre.

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The Art of Action

Book The Art of Action

How Leaders Close the Gaps Between Plans, Actions and Results

Nicholas Brealey Publishing,
 


29 November 2025

Reality-Based Leadership

Recommendation

Drama is emotionally expensive. Making up stories based on judgments about your circumstances is human nature, but those stories chew up time and energy and warp your decisions. Leadership consultant Cy Wakeman presents a simple but powerful process for clearing away blame, excuses and unenthusiastic performance. Much of Wakeman’s advice is common sense, in keeping with her “reality-based” outlook. She challenges commonly held beliefs about employee management, most notably the idea that the workplace is a democracy. BooksInShort recommends her hard-nosed insights to leaders who are ready to conquer the drama.

Take-Aways

  • Your emotional reactions to workplace circumstances provide the raw material for your “story” about them. If you drop your story, only the facts will remain.
  • “Reality-Based Leaders” coach employees to act independently.
  • They know what questions to ask so they can analyze the facts – not the stories – in a workplace dilemma and then decide how to help.
  • Focus on finding fact-based resolutions to problems. Becoming mired in drama or hypothetical situations is not productive.
  • Model the behavior you want your employees to emulate.
  • Managers get lost in details but leaders provide vision.
  • Leaders can teach their employees to be “bulletproof” in the face of change.
  • Quit wishing for the perfect work circumstance; it doesn’t exist.
  • Reward your top performers. Fire underachievers.
  • The workplace is not a democracy; everyone’s opinion does not count.

Summary

Maybe It’s All in Your Head

Imagine yourself as an employee whose managers just promoted a co-worker who flattered the boss. You work harder, so you feel snubbed. In your mind, your workplace rewards political connections and ignores the people, like you, who contribute the most. But your conclusion is not “reality-based.” You live inside a story that you have created, and – like most other people – you act according to your beliefs, not the facts. Your emotional reactions to your workplace circumstances provide the raw material for your story about them.

“Reality-Based Leaders...implement decisions with excellence. They value action over opinion.”

“Nothing would get done around here if it weren’t for me,” “I’m underpaid for what I do” and “My co-workers don’t appreciate me” are all typical self-constructed narratives. But work’s not making you crazy, you are. Seeing things as they are is one thing and imbuing reality with meaning is another. When you judge other people’s motives and make assumptions about the causes and effects of their actions, you create an expensive productivity drain.

“The difference between management and leadership is that management is working on your business and leadership is working on your people.”

The most common stories that people make up star themselves in the role of victim. This “learned helplessness” limits their potential more than any external obstacle. People’s stories are familiar and make them feel safe, even if their tales also make them miserable. Blaming others for negative circumstance is an excuse for doing nothing about them. Modern workplace wisdom says that listening to employee complaints is important. But too much listening only magnifies and reinforces employees’ belief in learned helplessness. The antidote to the victim mind-set is “personal accountability.” Psychologists have found that perfection doesn’t lead to happiness; happiness derives from taking responsibility for what happens in your life.

Fact from Fiction

Quit “arguing with reality.” Often the stories you believe are worse than the facts. Perhaps the sales office sent in a new order but neglected to include necessary information, so the order is incomplete. Missing data doesn’t have a hidden meaning; information is just facts. But you start thinking that the salespeople are too lazy to do their jobs and that you have to pick up their slack; your mood and mind-set sour. Motivated by anger, you’re likely to be unhelpful, unproductive and rude.

“Our stories come from a deep inner voice of doubt that we owe it to ourselves to question.”

To determine what you believe, begin by listing the facts you know about the situation. Are the salespeople really lazy? They sold something, so somebody’s working. Who do you – as a manager or an employee – become in your story if you choose to believe it? If there is no story, how can you remedy the problem of the missing data? If you are convinced your story is right, you might send the order back to sales, delaying it. That means the customer will suffer for the sake of your self-satisfaction. Or you could deal with the facts, and not the story, by just calling the sales department to request the missing information. That’s a win-win outcome. Take your story out of the mix and what remains are the facts plus two questions: “How can I help?” and “What is the very next thing I can do to add value right now?”

Ego and Its Discontents

Your world mirrors your attitudes. If you’re in a hurry at a store, you’ll scowl and be abrupt. Little wonder, then, that you will perceive other people as grumpy or unhelpful. When you smile, your experience of others will reflect that friendliness. Everyone participates in the creation of his or her own reality. What you judge to be missing in a situation is likely what you need to provide.

“These voices waste our time and cause us to feel helpless, and they stop us from moving forward productively and getting the results we want.”

Ego is not the same as confidence. The ego mediates your perception of your reality while trying to fulfill your desires. The ego loves drama and always wants to be the star in your story. If the story’s all about you, your ego calls the shots. It takes humility to realize that your ego is not the best guide. A humble servant-leader thinks the best of others and keeps an open mind. Unmasking ego-motivated behavior is difficult, especially when you believe that you are entirely unselfish. If you worry that others won’t like your decisions, your ego is running the show. Ego causes you to waste energy trying to prove you’re right so everyone will support you and approve of you. Never mind being right; your goal should be succeeding in your job.

“If I believe you are uncommunicative, I withhold communication. If I see you as hostile, I respond with hostility. Model the behavior you want to see.”

The best decisions are based on facts without an emotional charge. Give up being right – even if you don’t get the results you want. Be open to an impartial account of the steps that led to your results, and learn from them. Even negative feedback offers opportunities for growth. Successful companies are open, flexible and always learning; that’s what makes them fun places to work.

Manager Versus Leader

Act as a leader, not a manager. Leaders provide an overall vision of success and empower employees to take specific roles on a team. Managers are usually too busy putting out fires to look at the big picture. As a leader, your goal is to develop autonomy and confidence in your people. Have faith that they will figure things out for themselves, and clearly affirm that you expect them to do so. Help them see how to succeed no matter what the circumstances. Minimize drama by enabling employees to separate their emotional stories from the facts.

“What if, on the other hand, the worst-case scenario is true?”

Any argument that pits one person’s word against another’s is a trap. Don’t get caught up in the story. Instead, coach the person who came to you. You two are the only ones sharing the present moment. Make yourself the “go-to” person who asks questions that shed light on the decision-making process. To build employee confidence, teach your staffers to answer their own questions. Greater confidence means greater competence.

“Emotional Blackmail”

When people try to manipulate you through your insecurities, that’s “emotional blackmail.” They might say, “This is not the way things used to be,” or “You haven’t brought up this issue before.” Don’t take the bait. Focus on a more productive dialogue. Say: “While that has been the standard in the past, here is how I would like you to do things now,” or “This is true, and while we could focus on that, I would prefer to focus on what will bring us the best results.” Ask questions such as “What are you trying to achieve?” and “What’s your plan to achieve it?” If you’re not sure how best to respond, use a stock neutral statement such as “I see,” or “Let me think about that.”

“Drama is ultimately the result of a lack of clear leadership.”

Employee surveys let workers who lack a sense of personal accountability complain about their less-than-perfect circumstances. These surveys add fuel to the idea that a worker’s poor performance is due somehow to the work environment or a lack of resources. When you ask employees for recommendations, you can also ascertain their accountability. For example, to learn more about their motivation, ask employees to make one request that would improve their circumstances and three things they would be willing to do to get it fulfilled.

“Work with the Willing”

Don’t knock yourself out trying to make miserable people happy. Focus on team members who are inspired to improve themselves, those who work toward the firm’s overall goals. Not every employee adds equal value to the company, so trying to treat everyone “fairly” ignores reality. Holding the hands of subpar performers is a disservice to them and the firm. Set your standards objectively, but set them high and hold employees accountable. Reward those who achieve.

“If you as a leader do not embrace reality...those you lead will not know how to invest the precious resources of their time and energy.”

Some 20% of the employees in any given workforce are self-starters who enjoy work and add value. Another 20% dislike their jobs and resist every step toward progress. The 60% in between are in “maintenance” mode, doing only what they must to avoid being fired. However, this maintenance group often picks up the slack for the underperforming 20%.

Reward or Fire

Remember that 60% of your workforce could go either way. Reward them by lightening their load and firing the people you should fire instead of spending fruitless energy trying to turn them around. Focusing on those who underperform shows the 60% that negativity draws your attention. That discourages your well-performing top 20%, who might look for work elsewhere. “Play favorites.” When you reward those who add value to the business, others get the message.

“If you subscribe to the idea that everyone’s opinion has to count, in effect you are handing out veto power to the majority while only a minority has the power to say ‘yes’.”

Acknowledge your role in co-creating a difficult employee. Don’t ignore those who resist. Show them what their behavior costs the organization. Establish short, structured meetings in which you hold employees accountable for their performance. These meetings, which provide the necessary forum to encourage better behavior, minimize the time staffers need to demonstrate that they can meet your expectations. If an employee still falls short, you will have ample justification and documentation for firing him or her, and it won’t come as a shock.

“Bulletproof Employees”

When companies change – no matter how public and complete the planning – employees are surprised. Surprise leads to panic, and panicked people will look to place blame. Ignore that inevitable reaction and welcome change. Defend any challenges from employees simply by saying that their opinion is “good to know.” This sort of neutral statement will help defuse the constrictive thoughts that change can inspire. A “Reality-Based Leader” responds to change with flexibility and capitalizes on new opportunities. Choose your reaction: Decide on success. Change is a great opportunity for learning. To focus on its lessons and restrict its damage, teach your employees to be bulletproof and impervious to its difficulties.

“It always takes less energy to have a legitimate confrontation than it does to keep avoiding it.”

Gather your employees and ask them to state their concerns. Write these “risks” down as you go around the room. Explain that minimizing risk is the job at hand. Prioritize the outcomes that worry you in terms of high, medium or low probability. Work on the high and medium risks first, and ask your group to brainstorm strategies to manage them. Remember, competency follows confidence. Commit to a course of action, and the learning and challenges it entails. That dedication builds the competence required to succeed. Move quickly to resolve your concerns. Do not become mired in drama or hypothetical situations. That is not productive. Working within your current constraints to design a solution that elegantly serves multiple needs is the best form of “thinking inside the box.”

“When you work with a group of willing people – no matter how small – you will start to get results that make believers of others.”

In high-pressure situations, leaders often make the mistake of saying that a new challenge will be easy to overcome. In other words, they lie. Other mistakes include reacting to anger with anything other than a neutral response or withdrawing support as soon as the challenge is overcome. The more you build flexibility into your teams and the better you plan ahead for genuine crises, the more ready your team will be to handle change.

Reality-Based Teams

Some of your workplace beliefs may be keeping you from the results you want. Get over them! Surmount them! For instance, forget the idea that your employees’ opinions all carry equal value. Your office is not a democracy. Unless someone’s opinion would help finalize your own decision, don’t ask for it. Plans and choices will never be perfect. If you are faced with an opinion you dislike or a directive with which you disagree, loyalty demands that you try your best to implement it as instructed. Tell your team to do the same. “Reality-Based Leaders” are open to new information that might improve a current plan, but they need employees who execute decisions, not those who offer opinions.

“To get your team staged for success, first communicate a clear and compelling vision about what is possible.”

Abandon accepted business wisdom like “There is no I in Team,” and “Don’t bring me a problem without also coming armed with a solution.” Your goal is to guide your employees to take personal accountability. Each person should be responsible for his or her contributions to a team effort. They should not bring problems to you that they could solve. Bear in mind that those in the best position to perceive a problem are not necessarily those best positioned to solve it.

“Profits are the result of personally accountable bulletproof employees who make trust a conscious decision.”

Freezing up and hunkering down in hard times is human nature, but survivors know that “waiting for clarity” can be deadly. Clarity emerges from action. Clearly define your team members’ roles and the team’s overall goals. Provide a vision of the future that inspires your team. Delegate. Encourage your staffers to develop their talent and leadership qualities. The most productive question your team can ask is “How can I help?”

About the Author

Speaker, workshop trainer and consultant Cy Wakeman blogs for FastCompany.

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Reality-Based Leadership

Book Reality-Based Leadership

Ditch the Drama, Restore Sanity to the Workplace, & Turn Excuses Into Results

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