The Leader’s Handbook:
Making Things Happen, Getting Things Done

by Peter R. Scholtes
McGraw-Hill, 415 pps.
ISBN: 0070580286

• More than 95% of your organization’s problems derive from your systems, processes and methods, not from your individual workers. Improving systems takes a concerted, well-planned, usually cross-functional effort led from the top of the organization. Without conscious attention to systems, you will focus on people. Your people are doing their best, but their best efforts cannot compensate for your inadequate and dysfunctional systems.
• You must create systems that routinely allow excellent work to result from the ordinary efforts of ordinary people, not look to the heroic efforts of outstanding individuals for your successful work. Systems’ thinking helps avoid overly simplistic interpretations & solutions to complex problems.
• Changing the system will change what people do.  Changing what people do will not change the system. A well-run organization with well-functioning systems allows people from top to bottom to do work of which they can be proud.
• When you can work well together doing worthwhile work you can create a joyful workplace.
• Certain management approaches--management by objectives, performance appraisal, merit pay, pay for performance, and ISO 9000--represent not leadership, but the abolition of leadership.”
• Current buzzwords like empowerment, accountability, and high performance are meaningless, empty babble. They create only cynicism and resentment.
• 95% of the changes undertaken in organizations have nothing to do with improvement. “In a world without data, opinion prevails.”
• The greatest conceit of managers is that they can motivate people. If they try, they will only make things worse.
• Behind incentive programs lies management’s patronizing and cynical set of assumptions about workers. It implicitly states “I’m OK, you need incentives,” and that the workers are withholding a certain amount of effort, which has to be bribed out of them. “Managers must see themselves as experimenters who lead learning, not dictators who impose control."
• Everything is a system, and we are part of it (Deming)

Peter demonstrates that the old competencies of management, such as assertiveness, forcefulness (control), bottom-line and task-orientation is inadequate and ineffective in today’s global marketplace. Old assumptions, such as external motivation and performance appraisals, are based on false ideas of why and how employees work well. External motivators don’t work, because the most powerful motivators are intrinsic.  Peter emphasizes the need for separating pay and performance, and for closing the ratio between CEOs and hourly workers

Performance appraisals are

• “Just the wrong thing to do,
• The wrong focus,
• Judgment, not feedback,
• Destructive to the relationship of the employee and the evaluator.” 

Peter shows how a leader can be effective, using new methods of competency. These methods emphasize the need to think in systems, to understand the different types of variation inherent in systems, and the need to understand how people learn and function.  Good leaders understand the interrelationship of all the different aspects of business, and

• Give people the what, why, where and when,
• Look for purpose outside the organization,
• Are committed to their customers, and believe that the company should serve the customers,
• Are interested in people,
• Are systems thinkers,
• Tell the truth,
• Communicate clearly,
• Encourage healing and learning in the workplace.

This is in stark contrast to the “dismal” leaders that

• Encourage competitiveness, not teamwork
• Function in chaos,
• Distrust their employees,
• Fail to communicate anything but meaningless management babble.

Even if you are not “top dog” in your company, this book will still help you treat your employees decently, and provide tips on how to convert your boss.  This conversion, when it happens, takes place through example, success and persistence.

At the end of the book, Peter summarizes the “47 habits of pretty good leaders.” The new approach to leadership requires new concepts, roles, values, and relationships, as well as new methods and skills.

Leading by asking good questions is a direct challenge to our old paradigm reflexes and approaches.  Asking good questions

• Represents a major new attitude and skill for the leaders of the new century
• Is something that will take a long time to master, but you can start practicing now.

 “There is a new way to do business, a new philosophy of leadership, a new way to get work done. It is more effective than the old, and is a whole lot more fun.”