On April 23, 2012, Geoffrey James posted 8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Bosses. In this post, Geoff shares that the best managers have a fundamentally different understanding of workplace, company, and team dynamics. Geoff interviewed some of the most successful CEOs in the world in order to discover their management secrets. In this post, Geoff shares that the “best of the best” tend to share the following eight core beliefs:
1. Business is an ecosystem – see business as a symbiosis where the most diverse firm is most likely to survive and thrive. Create teams that adapt easily to new markets and can quickly form partnerships with customers, other companies … and even competitors.
2. A company is a community – see your company as a collection of individual hopes and dreams, all connected to a higher purpose. Inspire employees to dedicate themselves to the success of their peers and therefore to the community–and company–at large.
3. Management is service – set a general direction and then commit yourself to obtaining the resources that their employees need to get the job done. Push decision making downward, allowing teams form their own rules and intervening only in emergencies.
4. My employees are my peers – treat every employee as if he or she were the most important person in the firm. Excellence is expected everywhere, from the loading dock to the boardroom. As a result, employees at all levels take charge of their own destinies.
5. Motivation comes from vision – inspire people to see a better future and how they’ll be a part of it. As a result, employees work harder because they believe in the organization’s goals, truly enjoy what they’re doing and (of course) know they’ll share in the rewards.
6. Change equals growth – see change as an inevitable part of life. Don’t value change for its own sake but know that success is only possible if employees and organization embrace new ideas and new ways of doing business.
7. Technology offers empowerment – see technology as a way to free human beings to be creative and to build better relationships. Adapt your back-office systems to the tools, like smartphones and tablets, that people actually want to use.
8. Work should be fun – see work as something that should be inherently enjoyable–and believe therefore that the most important job of manager is, as far as possible, to put people in jobs that can and will make them truly happy.