“The best boss I ever had.” That’s a phrase most of us have said or heard at some point, but what does it mean? What sets the great boss apart from the average boss? The literature is rife with provocative writing about the qualities of managers and leaders and whether the two differ, but little has been said about what happens in the thousands of daily interactions and decisions that allows managers to get the best out of their people and win their devotion. What do great managers actually do?
“我遇到过的最好的老板。”这是我们大多数人在某个时候说过或听过的一句话，但它是什么意思？是什么让伟大的老板与普通的老板不同？文献中充斥着关于管理者和领导者的素质以及两者是否不同的挑衅性文章，但很少有人谈论在成千上万的日常互动和决策中发生了什么，这些互动和决策使管理者能够充分利用他们的员工并赢得他们的忠诚。伟大的管理者到底是做什么的？

In my research, beginning with a survey of 80,000 managers conducted by the Gallup Organization and continuing during the past two years with in-depth studies of a few top performers, I’ve found that while there are as many styles of management as there are managers, there is one quality that sets truly great managers apart from the rest: They discover what is unique about each person and then capitalize on it. Average managers play checkers, while great managers play chess. The difference? In checkers, all the pieces are uniform and move in the same way; they are interchangeable. You need to plan and coordinate their movements, certainly, but they all move at the same pace, on parallel paths. In chess, each type of piece moves in a different way, and you can’t play if you don’t know how each piece moves. More important, you won’t win if you don’t think carefully about how you move the pieces. Great managers know and value the unique abilities and even the eccentricities of their employees, and they learn how best to integrate them into a coordinated plan of attack.
在我的研究中，从盖洛普组织对80,000名经理人进行的调查开始，并在过去两年中继续对一些表现最好的人进行深入研究，我发现，虽然管理风格与经理人一样多，但有一种品质使真正伟大的经理人与众不同： 他们发现每个人的独特之处，然后加以利用。普通的经理人下跳棋，而伟大的经理人下棋。有什么区别？在跳棋中，所有的棋子都是均匀的，并以相同的方式移动;它们是可以互换的。当然，你需要计划和协调它们的运动，但它们都以相同的速度在平行的路径上移动。在国际象棋中，每种类型的棋子都以不同的方式移动，如果你不知道每个棋子是如何移动的，你就无法下棋。更重要的是，如果你不仔细考虑如何移动棋子，你就不会赢。优秀的管理者了解并重视员工的独特能力，甚至是怪癖，他们学会了如何最好地将他们整合到一个协调的攻击计划中。

This is the exact opposite of what great leaders do. Great leaders discover what is universal and capitalize on it. Their job is to rally people toward a better future. Leaders can succeed in this only when they can cut through differences of race, sex, age, nationality, and personality and, using stories and celebrating heroes, tap into those very few needs we all share. The job of a manager, meanwhile, is to turn one person’s particular talent into performance. Managers will succeed only when they can identify and deploy the differences among people, challenging each employee to excel in his or her own way. This doesn’t mean a leader can’t be a manager or vice versa. But to excel at one or both, you must be aware of the very different skills each role requires.
这与伟大领导者的所作所为完全相反。伟大的领导者会发现什么是普遍的，并加以利用。他们的工作是团结人们走向更美好的未来。只有当领导者能够消除种族、性别、年龄、国籍和个性的差异，并利用故事和颂扬英雄，挖掘我们所有人共同的极少数需求时，他们才能在这方面取得成功。与此同时，经理的工作是将一个人的特殊才能转化为绩效。只有当管理者能够识别和部署人与人之间的差异，挑战每个员工以自己的方式出类拔萃时，他们才会成功。这并不意味着领导者不能成为经理，反之亦然。但是，要想在其中一个或两个方面表现出色，您必须了解每个角色所需的非常不同的技能。

The Game of Chess
国际象棋游戏

What does the chess game look like in action? When I visited Michelle Miller, the manager who opened Walgreens’ 4,000th store, I found the wall of her back office papered with work schedules. Michelle’s store in Redondo Beach, California, employs people with sharply different skills and potentially disruptive differences in personality. A critical part of her job, therefore, is to put people into roles and shifts that will allow them to shine—and to avoid putting clashing personalities together. At the same time, she needs to find ways for individuals to grow.
国际象棋游戏在行动中是什么样子的？当我拜访沃尔格林第4000家门店的经理米歇尔·米勒（Michelle Miller）时，我发现她后台办公室的墙上贴满了工作时间表。米歇尔（Michelle）位于加利福尼亚州雷东多海滩（Redondo Beach）的商店雇用了技能截然不同的人，并且可能在性格上具有破坏性差异。因此，她工作的一个关键部分是将人们安排到能够让他们发光的角色和转变中，并避免将相互冲突的个性放在一起。同时，她需要找到个人成长的方法。

There’s Jeffrey, for example, a “goth rocker” whose hair is shaved on one side and long enough on the other side to cover his face. Michelle almost didn’t hire him because he couldn’t quite look her in the eye during his interview, but he wanted the hard-to-cover night shift, so she decided to give him a chance. After a couple of months, she noticed that when she gave Jeffrey a vague assignment, such as “Straighten up the merchandise in every aisle,” what should have been a two-hour job would take him all night—and wouldn’t be done very well. But if she gave him a more specific task, such as “Put up all the risers for Christmas,” all the risers would be symmetrical, with the right merchandise on each one, perfectly priced, labeled, and “faced” (turned toward the customer). Give Jeffrey a generic task, and he would struggle. Give him one that forced him to be accurate and analytical, and he would excel. This, Michelle concluded, was Jeffrey’s forte. So, as any good manager would do, she told him what she had deduced about him and praised him for his good work.
例如，杰弗里（Jeffrey）是一位“哥特摇滚乐手”，他的头发一侧被剃光，另一侧的头发长到足以遮住脸。米歇尔差点没录用他，因为他在面试时无法直视她的眼睛，但他想要难以掩盖的夜班，所以她决定给他一个机会。几个月后，她注意到，当她给杰弗里一个模糊的任务时，比如“整理每个过道上的商品”，本来应该两个小时的工作会花他一整晚，而且不会做得很好。但是，如果她给他一个更具体的任务，比如“为圣诞节把所有的立管都放好”，所有的立管都是对称的，每个立管上都有合适的商品，价格完美，贴上标签，并“面向顾客”。给杰弗里一个通用的任务，他会很挣扎。给他一个迫使他准确和分析的人，他会出类拔萃。米歇尔总结说，这是杰弗里的强项。因此，就像任何优秀的经理都会做的那样，她告诉他她对他的推断，并称赞他的出色工作。

And a good manager would have left it at that. But Michelle knew she could get more out Jeffrey. So she devised a scheme to reassign responsibilities across the entire store to capitalize on his unique strengths. In every Walgreens, there is a responsibility called “resets and revisions.” A reset involves stocking an aisle with new merchandise, a task that usually coincides with a predictable change in customer buying patterns (at the end of summer, for example, the stores will replace sun creams and lip balms with allergy medicines). A revision is a less time-consuming but more frequent version of the same thing: Replace these cartons of toothpaste with this new and improved variety. Display this new line of detergent at this end of the row. Each aisle requires some form of revision at least once a week.
一个好的经理会把它留在那里。但米歇尔知道她可以从杰弗里那里得到更多。因此，她设计了一个计划，重新分配整个商店的职责，以利用他的独特优势。在每个 Walgreens 中，都有一种称为“重置和修订”的责任。重置涉及在过道上摆放新商品，这项任务通常与客户购买模式的可预测变化相吻合（例如，在夏末，商店将用抗过敏药取代防晒霜和润唇膏）。修订版是同一事物的不那么耗时但更频繁的版本：用这种新的和改进的品种替换这些纸盒牙膏。在行的这一端显示此新洗涤剂系列。每个过道每周至少需要进行一次某种形式的复习。

In most Walgreens stores, each employee “owns” one aisle, where she is responsible not only for serving customers but also for facing the merchandise, keeping the aisle clean and orderly, tagging items with a Telxon gun, and conducting all resets and revisions. This arrangement is simple and efficient, and it affords each employee a sense of personal responsibility. But Michelle decided that since Jeffrey was so good at resets and revisions—and didn’t enjoy interacting with customers—this should be his full-time job, in every single aisle.
在大多数 Walgreens 商店中，每个员工都“拥有”一个过道，她不仅负责为顾客服务，还负责面对商品，保持过道干净有序，用 Telxon 枪标记物品，并进行所有重置和修改。这种安排简单而高效，它使每个员工都具有个人责任感。但米歇尔认为，既然杰弗里非常擅长重置和修改，而且不喜欢与客户互动，这应该是他的全职工作，在每一个过道上。

It was a challenge. One week’s worth of revisions requires a binder three inches thick. But Michelle reasoned that not only would Jeffrey be excited by the challenge and get better and better with practice, but other employees would be freed from what they considered a chore and have more time to greet and serve customers. The store’s performance proved her right. After the reorganization, Michelle saw not only increases in sales and profit but also in that most critical performance metric, customer satisfaction. In the subsequent four months, her store netted perfect scores in Walgreens’ mystery shopper program.
这是一个挑战。一周的修订需要三英寸厚的活页夹。但米歇尔认为，不仅杰弗里会对挑战感到兴奋，并通过实践变得越来越好，而且其他员工也会从他们认为的苦差事中解脱出来，有更多的时间迎接和服务客户。这家商店的表现证明了她是对的。重组后，Michelle不仅看到了销售额和利润的增长，还看到了最关键的绩效指标——客户满意度的增长。在随后的四个月里，她的商店在沃尔格林的神秘顾客计划中获得了满分。

So far, so very good. Sadly, it didn’t last. This “perfect” arrangement depended on Jeffrey remaining content, and he didn’t. With his success at doing resets and revisions, his confidence grew, and six months into the job, he wanted to move into management. Michelle wasn’t disappointed by this, however; she was intrigued. She had watched Jeffrey’s progress closely and had already decided that he might do well as a manager, though he wouldn’t be a particularly emotive one. Besides, like any good chess player, she had been thinking a couple of moves ahead.
到目前为止，非常好。可悲的是，它并没有持续下去。这种“完美”的安排取决于杰弗里是否满意，而他没有。随着他在重置和修订方面的成功，他的信心越来越大，在工作六个月后，他想进入管理层。然而，米歇尔并没有因此而失望。她很感兴趣。她密切关注着杰弗里的进步，并已经决定他可能会成为一名出色的经理，尽管他不是一个特别情绪化的人。此外，像任何优秀的棋手一样，她一直在思考前进的几步棋。

Over in the cosmetics aisle worked an employee named Genoa. Michelle saw Genoa as something of a double threat. Not only was she adept at putting customers at ease—she remembered their names, asked good questions, was welcoming yet professional when answering the phone—but she was also a neatnik. The cosmetics department was always perfectly faced, every product remained aligned, and everything was arranged just so. Her aisle was sexy: It made you want to reach out and touch the merchandise.
在化妆品过道上，有一位名叫热那亚的员工。米歇尔将热那亚视为双重威胁。她不仅善于让顾客放心——她记得他们的名字，问好问题，接电话时热情而专业——而且她也是一个整洁的人。化妆品部门总是面貌完美，每件产品都保持一致，一切都安排得恰到好处。她的过道很性感：它让你想伸手触摸商品。

To capitalize on these twin talents, and to accommodate Jeffrey’s desire for promotion, Michelle shuffled the roles within the store once again. She split Jeffrey’s reset and revision job in two and gave the “revision” part of it to Genoa so that the whole store could now benefit from her ability to arrange merchandise attractively. But Michelle didn’t want the store to miss out on Genoa’s gift for customer service, so Michelle asked her to focus on the revision role only between 8:30 AM and 11:30 AM, and after that, when the store began to fill with customers on their lunch breaks, Genoa should shift her focus over to them.
为了利用这两对人才，并满足杰弗里的晋升欲望，米歇尔再次调整了店内的角色。她将 Jeffrey 的重置和修订工作一分为二，并将其中的“修订”部分交给了 Genoa，这样整个商店现在都可以从她有吸引力地安排商品的能力中受益。但米歇尔不想让店里错过热那亚的客服礼物，所以米歇尔让她只在上午8：30到11：30之间专注于修订角色，之后，当商店开始挤满午休时间的顾客时，热那亚应该把注意力转移到他们身上。

She kept the reset role with Jeffrey. Assistant managers don’t usually have an ongoing responsibility in the store, but, Michelle reasoned, he was now so good and so fast at tearing an aisle apart and rebuilding it that he could easily finish a major reset during a five-hour stint, so he could handle resets along with his managerial responsibilities.
她与杰弗里一起保留了重置角色。助理经理通常不会在商店里承担持续的责任，但是，米歇尔认为，他现在非常擅长，而且非常快速地将过道拆开并重建，以至于他可以在五个小时的时间内轻松完成一次重大重置，因此他可以处理重置以及他的管理职责。

By the time you read this, the Jeffrey–Genoa configuration has probably outlived its usefulness, and Michelle has moved on to design other effective and inventive configurations. The ability to keep tweaking roles to capitalize on the uniqueness of each person is the essence of great management.
当你读到这篇文章时，Jeffrey-Genoa配置可能已经过时了，Michelle已经转向设计其他有效和创造性的配置。不断调整角色以利用每个人的独特性的能力是优秀管理的本质。

A manager’s approach to capitalizing on differences can vary tremendously from place to place. Walk into the back office at another Walgreens, this one in San Jose, California, managed by Jim Kawashima, and you won’t see a single work schedule. Instead, the walls are covered with sales figures and statistics, the best of them circled with red felt-tip pen, and dozens of photographs of sales contest winners, most featuring a customer service representative named Manjit.
经理利用差异的方法可能因地而异。走进另一家沃尔格林的后台办公室，这家位于加利福尼亚州圣何塞，由 Jim Kawashima 管理，你不会看到一个工作时间表。取而代之的是，墙上挂满了销售数字和统计数据，其中最好的用红色毡尖笔圈起来，还有几十张销售竞赛获胜者的照片，其中大多数都是一位名叫Manjit的客户服务代表。

Manjit outperforms her peers consistently. When I first heard about her, she had just won a competition in Walgreens’ suggestive selling program to sell the most units of Gillette deodorant in a month. The national average was 300; Manjit had sold 1,600. Disposable cameras, toothpaste, batteries—you name it, she could sell it. And Manjit won contest after contest despite working the graveyard shift, from 12:30 AM to 8:30 AM, during which she met significantly fewer customers than did her peers.
Manjit 的表现始终优于她的同龄人。当我第一次听说她时，她刚刚在沃尔格林的暗示性销售计划中赢得了一场比赛，在一个月内销售了最多的吉列除臭剂。全国平均水平为300;Manjit 已售出 1,600 辆。一次性相机、牙膏、电池——你能想到的，她都可以卖掉。尽管从凌晨 12：30 到早上 8：30 在墓地轮班工作，但 Manjit 还是赢得了一场又一场的比赛，在此期间，她遇到的客户比同龄人少得多。

Manjit hadn’t always been such an exceptional performer. She became stunningly successful only when Jim, who has made a habit of resuscitating troubled stores, came on board. What did Jim do to initiate the change in Manjit? He quickly picked up on her idiosyncrasies and figured out how to translate them into outstanding performance. For example, back in India, Manjit was an athlete—a runner and a weight lifter—and had always thrilled to the challenge of measured performance. When I interviewed her, one of the first things out of her mouth was, “On Saturday, I sold 343 low-carb candy bars. On Sunday, I sold 367. Yesterday, 110, and today, 105.” I asked if she always knows how well she’s doing. “Oh yes,” she replied. “Every day I check Mr. K’s charts. Even on my day off, I make a point to come in and check my numbers.”
曼吉特并不总是如此出色的表演者。只有当习惯于挽救陷入困境的商店的吉姆加入时，她才取得了惊人的成功。吉姆做了什么来发起 Manjit 的变革？他很快发现了她的特质，并想出了如何将它们转化为出色的表现。例如，回到印度时，曼吉特是一名运动员——跑步者和举重运动员——并且总是对衡量表现的挑战感到兴奋。当我采访她时，她嘴里说的第一句话是，“周六，我卖了 343 块低碳水化合物糖果。星期天，我卖了367。昨天是110，今天是105。我问她是否总是知道自己做得有多好。“哦，是的，”她回答。“我每天都会查看K先生的图表。即使在休息日，我也会特意进来检查我的数字。

Manjit loves to win and revels in public recognition. Hence, Jim’s walls are covered with charts and figures, Manjit’s scores are always highlighted in red, and there are photos documenting her success. Another manager might have asked Manjit to curb her enthusiasm for the limelight and give someone else a chance. Jim found a way to capitalize on it.
Manjit 喜欢赢，并陶醉于公众的认可。因此，吉姆的墙上挂满了图表和数字，曼吉特的分数总是以红色突出显示，并且有照片记录了她的成功。另一位经理可能会要求曼吉特抑制她对聚光灯的热情，给别人一个机会。吉姆找到了一种利用它的方法。

But what about Jim’s other staff members? Instead of being resentful of Manjit’s public recognition, the other employees came to understand that Jim took the time to see them as individuals and evaluate them based on their personal strengths. They also knew that Manjit’s success spoke well of the entire store, so her success galvanized the team. In fact, before long, the pictures of Manjit began to include other employees from the store, too. After a few months, the San Jose location was ranked number one out of 4,000 in Walgreens’ suggestive selling program.
但是吉姆的其他工作人员呢？其他员工并没有对 Manjit 的公开认可感到不满，而是开始理解 Jim 花时间将他们视为个人，并根据他们的个人优势来评估他们。他们也知道 Manjit 的成功对整个商店都有好处，所以她的成功激励了团队。事实上，不久之后，曼吉特的照片也开始包括商店的其他员工。几个月后，圣何塞的分店在 Walgreens 的暗示性销售计划中在 4,000 家门店中排名第一。

Great Managers Are Romantics
伟大的管理者是浪漫主义者

Think back to Michelle. Her creative choreography may sound like a last resort, an attempt to make the best of a bad hire. It’s not. Jeffrey and Genoa are not mediocre employees, and capitalizing on each person’s uniqueness is a tremendously powerful tool.
回想一下米歇尔。她富有创意的编舞听起来像是最后的手段，试图充分利用糟糕的雇员。事实并非如此。Jeffrey 和 Genoa 并不是平庸的员工，利用每个人的独特性是一个非常强大的工具。

First, identifying and capitalizing on each person’s uniqueness saves time. No employee, however talented, is perfectly well-rounded. Michelle could have spent untold hours coaching Jeffrey and cajoling him into smiling at, making friends with, and remembering the names of customers, but she probably would have seen little result for her efforts. Her time was much better spent carving out a role that took advantage of Jeffrey’s natural abilities.
首先，识别和利用每个人的独特性可以节省时间。没有一个员工，无论多么有才华，都是完全全面的。米歇尔本可以花无数时间指导杰弗里，哄骗他微笑，交朋友，记住顾客的名字，但她的努力可能收效甚微。她把时间花在塑造一个利用杰弗里天赋的角色上要好得多。

Second, capitalizing on uniqueness makes each person more accountable. Michelle didn’t just praise Jeffrey for his ability to execute specific assignments. She challenged him to make this ability the cornerstone of his contribution to the store, to take ownership for this ability, to practice it, and to refine it.
其次，利用独特性使每个人都更负责任。米歇尔不仅称赞杰弗里执行特定任务的能力。她向他提出挑战，要把这种能力作为他为商店做出贡献的基石，对这种能力拥有所有权，练习它，并完善它。

Third, capitalizing on what is unique about each person builds a stronger sense of team, because it creates interdependency. It helps people appreciate one anothers’ particular skills and learn that their coworkers can fill in where they are lacking. In short, it makes people need one another. The old cliché is that there’s no “I” in “team.” But as Michael Jordan once said, “There may be no ‘I’ in ‘team,’ but there is in ‘win.’”
第三，利用每个人的独特之处可以建立更强的团队意识，因为它创造了相互依存关系。它帮助人们欣赏彼此的特殊技能，并了解他们的同事可以填补他们的不足。简而言之，它使人们彼此需要。老生常谈的是，“团队”中没有“我”。但正如迈克尔·乔丹曾经说过的那样，“'团队'中可能没有'我'，但'胜利'中有。

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. This question will prompt your employee to start thinking about his interests and abilities from this perspective.
要确定一个人的长处，首先要问：“过去三个月里，你工作中最好的一天是哪一天？找出这个人在做什么以及他为什么如此喜欢它。记住：优势不仅仅是你擅长的东西。事实上，这可能是你还不擅长的事情。这可能只是一种偏好，你觉得它是如此内在的满足感，以至于你期待一次又一次地去做，并随着时间的推移变得更好。这个问题将促使您的员工从这个角度开始思考他的兴趣和能力。

To identify a person’s weaknesses, just invert the question: “What was the worst day you’ve had at work in the past three months?” And then probe for 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 (in fact, you might be quite competent at it). 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.
要找出一个人的弱点，只需颠倒问题：“过去三个月你在工作中最糟糕的一天是什么？然后探究他在做什么的细节，以及为什么它对他如此不满。与优势一样，劣势不仅仅是你不擅长的事情（事实上，你可能很擅长）。这是一件消耗你精力的事情，一项你从不期待做的活动，当你这样做时，你所能想到的就是停下来。

Although you’re keeping an eye out for both the strengths and weaknesses of your employees, your focus should be on their strengths. Conventional wisdom holds that self-awareness is a good thing and that it’s the job of the manager to identify weaknesses and create a plan for overcoming them. But research by Albert Bandura, the father of social learning theory, has shown that self-assurance (labeled “self-efficacy” by cognitive psychologists), not self-awareness, is the strongest predictor of a person’s ability to set high goals, to persist in the face of obstacles, to bounce back when reversals occur, and, ultimately, to achieve the goals they set. By contrast, self-awareness has not been shown to be a predictor of any of these outcomes, and in some cases, it appears to retard them.
尽管您要密切关注员工的长处和短处，但您的重点应该放在他们的长处上。传统观点认为，自我意识是一件好事，管理者的工作是识别弱点并制定克服它们的计划。但社会学习理论之父阿尔伯特·班杜拉（Albert Bandura）的研究表明，自我自信（认知心理学家称之为“自我效能感”），而不是自我意识，是一个人设定高目标、在障碍面前坚持不懈、在逆转发生时反弹并最终实现他们设定的目标的能力的最强预测指标。相比之下，自我意识并没有被证明是这些结果的预测因素，在某些情况下，它似乎会延缓它们。

Great managers seem to understand this instinctively. They know that their job is not to arm each employee with a dispassionately accurate understanding of the limits of her strengths and the liabilities of her weaknesses but to reinforce her self-assurance. That’s why great managers focus on strengths. When a person succeeds, the great manager doesn’t praise her hard work. Even if there’s some exaggeration in the statement, he tells her that she succeeded because she has become so good at deploying her specific strengths. This, the manager knows, will strengthen the employee’s self-assurance and make her more optimistic and more resilient in the face of challenges to come.
伟大的管理者似乎本能地理解这一点。他们知道，他们的工作不是让每个员工都冷静地准确地了解自己的优势和劣势的缺点，而是加强他们的自信。这就是为什么优秀的管理者会关注优势。当一个人成功时，伟大的经理不会称赞她的辛勤工作。即使声明中有些夸张，他也告诉她，她成功了，因为她已经变得非常善于发挥自己的特定优势。经理知道，这将增强员工的自信，使她在面对即将到来的挑战时更加乐观和有弹性。

The focus-on-strengths approach might create in the employee a modicum of overconfidence, but great managers mitigate this by emphasizing the size and the difficulty of the employee’s goals. They know that their primary objective is to create in each employee a specific state of mind: one that includes a realistic assessment of the difficulty of the obstacle ahead but an unrealistically optimistic belief in her ability to overcome it.
专注于优势的方法可能会在员工中产生一点过度自信，但优秀的管理者通过强调员工目标的规模和难度来缓解这种情况。他们知道，他们的主要目标是在每位员工中创造一种特定的心态：包括对未来障碍的困难进行现实的评估，但对自己克服障碍的能力抱有不切实际的乐观信念。

And what if the employee fails? Assuming the failure is not attributable to factors beyond her control, always explain failure as a lack of effort, even if this is only partially accurate. This will obscure self-doubt and give her something to work on as she faces up to the next challenge.
如果员工失败了怎么办？假设失败不是由她无法控制的因素造成的，总是将失败解释为缺乏努力，即使这只是部分准确。这将掩盖自我怀疑，并在她面对下一个挑战时给她一些工作。

Repeated failure, of course, may indicate weakness where a role requires strength. In such cases, there are four approaches for overcoming weaknesses. If the problem amounts to a lack of skill or knowledge, that’s easy to solve: Simply offer the relevant training, allow some time for the employee to incorporate the new skills, and look for signs of improvement. If her performance doesn’t get better, you’ll know that the reason she’s struggling is because she is missing certain talents, a deficit no amount of skill or knowledge training is likely to fix. You’ll have to find a way to manage around this weakness and neutralize it.
当然，反复的失败可能表明一个角色需要力量的弱点。在这种情况下，有四种方法可以克服弱点。如果问题相当于缺乏技能或知识，这很容易解决：只需提供相关培训，给员工一些时间来适应新技能，并寻找改进的迹象。如果她的表现没有变得更好，你就会知道她挣扎的原因是因为她缺少某些才能，这是任何技能或知识培训都无法弥补的缺陷。你必须找到一种方法来管理这个弱点并消除它。

Which brings us to the second strategy for overcoming an employee weakness. Can you find her a partner, someone whose talents are strong in precisely the areas where hers are weak? Here’s how this strategy can look in action. As vice president of merchandising for the women’s clothing retailer Ann Taylor, Judi Langley found that tensions were rising between her and one of her merchandising managers, Claudia (not her real name), whose analytical mind and intense nature created an overpowering “need to know.” If Claudia learned of something before Judi had a chance to review it with her, she would become deeply frustrated. Given the speed with which decisions were made, and given Judi’s busy schedule, this happened frequently. Judi was concerned that Claudia’s irritation was unsettling the whole product team, not to mention earning the employee a reputation as a malcontent.
这就引出了克服员工弱点的第二种策略。你能给她找到一个伴侣，一个在她薄弱的领域有很强才能的人吗？以下是此策略的实际效果。作为女装零售商安·泰勒（Ann Taylor）的销售副总裁，朱迪·兰利（Judi Langley）发现，她和她的一位销售经理克劳迪娅（Claudia，化名）之间的紧张关系正在加剧，克劳迪娅的分析思维和强烈的天性创造了一种压倒性的“需要知道”。如果克劳迪娅在朱迪有机会和她一起复习之前就知道了什么，她会变得非常沮丧。考虑到做出决定的速度，以及朱迪繁忙的日程安排，这种情况经常发生。朱迪担心克劳迪娅的恼怒会让整个产品团队感到不安，更不用说为员工赢得不满的名声了。

An average manager might have identified this behavior as a weakness and lectured Claudia on how to control her need for information. Judi, however, realized that this “weakness” was an aspect of Claudia’s greatest strength: her analytical mind. Claudia would never be able to rein it in, at least not for long. So Judi looked for a strategy that would honor and support Claudia’s need to know, while channeling it more productively. Judi decided to act as Claudia’s information partner, and she committed to leaving Claudia a voice mail at the end of each day with a brief update. To make sure nothing fell through the cracks, they set up two live “touch base” conversations per week. This solution managed Claudia’s expectations and assured her that she would get the information she needed, if not exactly when she wanted it, then at least at frequent and predictable intervals. Giving Claudia a partner neutralized the negative manifestations of her strength, allowing her to focus her analytical mind on her work. (Of course, in most cases, the partner would need to be someone other than a manager.)
一个普通的经理可能会认为这种行为是一个弱点，并告诉克劳迪娅如何控制她对信息的需求。然而，朱迪意识到，这种“弱点”是克劳迪娅最大的优势之一：她的分析思维。克劳迪娅永远无法控制它，至少不会持续太久。因此，朱迪寻找一种策略，既能尊重和支持克劳迪娅的知情需求，又能更有效地引导它。朱迪决定充当克劳迪娅的信息合作伙伴，她承诺在每天结束时给克劳迪娅留下一封语音邮件，并简要更新。为了确保万无一失，他们每周设置两次实时“触摸基地”对话。这个解决方案满足了克劳迪娅的期望，并向她保证，她会得到她需要的信息，即使不是她想要的时间，那么至少是频繁和可预测的时间间隔。给克劳迪娅一个搭档抵消了她力量的负面表现，让她能够将分析思维集中在工作上。（当然，在大多数情况下，合伙人需要是经理以外的人。

Should the perfect partner prove hard to find, try this third strategy: Insert into the employee’s world a technique that helps accomplish through discipline what the person can’t accomplish through instinct. I met one very successful screenwriter and director who had struggled with telling other professionals, such as composers and directors of photography, that their work was not up to snuff. So he devised a mental trick: He now imagines what the “god of art” would want and uses this imaginary entity as a source of strength. In his mind, he no longer imposes his own opinion on his colleagues but rather tells himself (and them) that an authoritative third party has weighed in.
如果很难找到完美的合作伙伴，请尝试第三种策略：在员工的世界里插入一种技术，通过纪律帮助完成个人无法通过本能完成的事情。我遇到了一位非常成功的编剧和导演，他一直在努力告诉其他专业人士，比如作曲家和摄影指导，他们的作品不合格。于是他想出了一个心理伎俩：他现在想象“艺术之神”想要什么，并利用这个虚构的实体作为力量的源泉。在他看来，他不再将自己的观点强加给同事，而是告诉自己（和他们）一个权威的第三方已经介入。

If training produces no improvement, if complementary partnering proves impractical, and if no nifty discipline technique can be found, you are going to have to try the fourth and final strategy, which is to rearrange the employee’s working world to render his weakness irrelevant, as Michelle Miller did with Jeffrey. This strategy will require of you, first, the creativity to envision a more effective arrangement and, second, the courage to make that arrangement work. But as Michelle’s experience revealed, the payoff that may come in the form of increased employee productivity and engagement is well worth it.
如果培训没有带来任何改善，如果互补的伙伴关系被证明是不切实际的，如果找不到漂亮的纪律技巧，你将不得不尝试第四种也是最后一种策略，即重新安排员工的工作世界，使他的弱点变得无关紧要，就像米歇尔·米勒（Michelle Miller）对杰弗里所做的那样。这个策略首先需要你有创造力去设想一个更有效的安排，其次，需要有勇气让这种安排发挥作用。但正如米歇尔的经验所揭示的那样，以提高员工生产力和敬业度的形式可能带来的回报是非常值得的。

Trigger good performance.
触发良好的性能。

A person’s strengths aren’t always on display. Sometimes they require precise triggering to turn them on. Squeeze the right trigger, and a person will push himself harder and persevere in the face of resistance. Squeeze the wrong one, and the person may well shut down. This can be tricky because triggers come in myriad and mysterious forms. One employee’s trigger might be tied to the time of day (he is a night owl, and his strengths only kick in after 3 PM). Another employee’s trigger might be tied to time with you, the boss (even though he’s worked with you for more than five years, he still needs you to check in with him every day, or he feels he’s being ignored). Another worker’s trigger might be just the opposite—independence (she’s only worked for you for six months, but if you check in with her even once a week, she feels micromanaged).
一个人的长处并不总是被展示出来。有时它们需要精确触发才能打开它们。扣动正确的扳机，一个人就会更加努力地推动自己，在阻力面前坚持下去。挤错了，这个人很可能会关机。这可能很棘手，因为触发器有无数种神秘的形式。一个员工的触发因素可能与一天中的时间有关（他是一个夜猫子，他的优势只有在下午 3 点之后才会发挥作用）。另一个员工的触发因素可能与你（老板）相处的时间有关（即使他已经和你一起工作了五年多，他仍然需要你每天和他一起检查，或者他觉得自己被忽视了）。另一个工人的触发因素可能恰恰相反——独立（她只为你工作了六个月，但如果你每周和她联系一次，她就会觉得自己受到了微观管理）。

The most powerful trigger by far is recognition, not money. If you’re not convinced of this, start ignoring one of your highly paid stars, and watch what happens. Most managers are aware that employees respond well to recognition. Great managers refine and extend this insight. They realize that each employee plays to a slightly different audience. To excel as a manager, you must be able to match the employee to the audience he values most. One employee’s audience might be his peers; the best way to praise him would be to stand him up in front of his coworkers and publicly celebrate his achievement. Another’s favorite audience might be you; the most powerful recognition would be a one-on-one conversation where you tell him quietly but vividly why he is such a valuable member of the team. Still another employee might define himself by his expertise; his most prized form of recognition would be some type of professional or technical award. Yet another might value feedback only from customers, in which case a picture of the employee with her best customer or a letter to her from the customer would be the best form of recognition.
到目前为止，最强大的触发因素是认可，而不是金钱。如果你不相信这一点，那就开始忽略你的一位高薪明星，看看会发生什么。大多数管理者都知道，员工对认可的反应很好。优秀的管理者会完善和扩展这种洞察力。他们意识到每个员工的观众都略有不同。要成为一名出色的经理，您必须能够将员工与他最看重的受众相匹配。一个员工的听众可能是他的同事;赞美他的最好方式是让他在同事面前站起来，公开庆祝他的成就。另一个人最喜欢的观众可能是你;最有力的认可是一对一的对话，你平静而生动地告诉他为什么他是团队中如此有价值的成员。还有一位员工可能会用他的专业知识来定义自己;他最珍贵的认可形式是某种类型的专业或技术奖项。还有人可能只重视客户的反馈，在这种情况下，员工与她最好的客户的合影或客户给她的一封信将是最好的认可形式。

Given how much personal attention it requires, tailoring praise to fit the person is mostly a manager’s responsibility. But organizations can take a cue from this, too. There’s no reason why a large company can’t take this individualized approach to recognition and apply it to every employee. Of all the companies I’ve encountered, the North American division of HSBC, a London-based bank, has done the best job of this. Each year it presents its top individual consumer-lending performers with its Dream Awards. Each winner receives a unique prize. During the year, managers ask employees to identify what they would like to receive should they win. The prize value is capped at $10,000, and it cannot be redeemed as cash, but beyond those two restrictions, each employee is free to pick the prize he wants. At the end of the year, the company holds a Dream Awards gala, during which it shows a video about the winning employee and why he selected his particular prize.
考虑到需要多少个人关注，根据个人情况量身定制表扬主要是经理的责任。但组织也可以从中得到启示。大公司没有理由不采用这种个性化的认可方法并将其应用于每个员工。在我遇到的所有公司中，总部位于伦敦的汇丰银行（HSBC）的北美分部在这方面做得最好。每年，它都会向其顶级个人消费贷款表现者颁发梦想奖。每位获奖者都将获得一份独特的奖品。在这一年中，经理们要求员工确定如果他们获胜，他们希望得到什么。奖金价值上限为 10,000 美元，不能兑换为现金，但除了这两个限制之外，每个员工都可以自由选择他想要的奖品。在年底，公司会举办梦想奖晚会，期间会播放一段视频，介绍获奖员工以及他选择特定奖项的原因。

You can imagine the impact these personalized prizes have on HSBC employees. It’s one thing to be brought up on stage and given yet another plaque. It’s another thing when, in addition to public recognition of your performance, you receive a college tuition fund for your child, or the Harley-Davidson motorcycle you’ve always dreamed of, or—the prize everyone at the company still talks about—the airline tickets to fly you and your family back to Mexico to visit the grandmother you haven’t seen in 10 years.
可想而知，这些个性化奖品对汇丰员工的影响。被抬上舞台并得到另一块牌匾是一回事。这是另一回事，除了公众对你的表现的认可之外，你还为你的孩子获得了大学学费，或者你梦寐以求的哈雷戴维森摩托车，或者——公司里每个人都还在谈论的奖品——你和你的家人飞回墨西哥看望你10年未见的祖母的机票。

Tailor to learning styles.
根据学习风格量身定制。

Although there are many learning styles, a careful review of adult learning theory reveals that three styles predominate. These three are not mutually exclusive; certain employees may rely on a combination of two or perhaps all three. Nonetheless, staying attuned to each employee’s style or styles will help focus your coaching.
尽管有许多学习风格，但仔细回顾成人学习理论会发现三种风格占主导地位。这三者并不相互排斥;某些员工可能依赖两种或全部三种的组合。尽管如此，与每个员工的风格保持协调将有助于集中精力进行指导。

First, there’s analyzing. Claudia from Ann Taylor is an analyzer. She understands a task by taking it apart, examining its elements, and reconstructing it piece by piece. Because every single component of a task is important in her eyes, she craves information. She needs to absorb all there is to know about a subject before she can begin to feel comfortable with it. If she doesn’t feel she has enough information, she will dig and push until she gets it. She will read the assigned reading. She will attend the required classes. She will take good notes. She will study. And she will still want more.
首先是分析。Ann Taylor 的 Claudia 是一名分析员。她通过拆解任务，检查其元素并逐块重建它来理解它。因为任务的每一个组成部分在她眼中都很重要，所以她渴望获得信息。她需要吸收关于一个主题的所有知识，然后才能开始对它感到满意。如果她觉得自己没有足够的信息，她会挖掘并推动，直到她得到它。她将阅读指定的阅读材料。她将参加必修课程。她会做好笔记。她会学习。她仍然想要更多。

The best way to teach an analyzer is to give her ample time in the classroom. Role-play with her. Do postmortem exercises with her. Break her performance down into its component parts so she can carefully build it back up. Always allow her time to prepare. The analyzer hates mistakes. A commonly held view is that mistakes fuel learning, but for the analyzer, this just isn’t true. In fact, the reason she prepares so diligently is to minimize the possibility of mistakes. So don’t expect to teach her much by throwing her into a new situation and telling her to wing it.
教分析仪的最好方法是在课堂上给她充足的时间。和她一起角色扮演。和她一起做尸检练习。将她的表演分解成各个组成部分，以便她可以小心翼翼地将其重新构建起来。总是让她有时间准备。分析仪讨厌错误。一个普遍的观点是，错误会促进学习，但对于分析者来说，事实并非如此。事实上，她之所以如此勤奋地准备，就是为了尽量减少出错的可能性。所以不要指望通过把她扔到一个新环境中并告诉她去飞翔来教她很多东西。

The opposite is true for the second dominant learning style, doing. While the most powerful learning moments for the analyzer occur prior to the performance, the doer’s most powerful moments occur during the performance. Trial and error are integral to this learning process. Jeffrey, from Michelle Miller’s store, is a doer. He learns the most while he’s in the act of figuring things out for himself. For him, preparation is a dry, uninspiring activity. So rather than role-play with someone like Jeffrey, pick a specific task within his role that is simple but real, give him a brief overview of the outcomes you want, and get out of his way. Then gradually increase the degree of each task’s complexity until he has mastered every aspect of his role. He may make a few mistakes along the way, but for the doer, mistakes are the raw material for learning.
第二种占主导地位的学习方式，做，情况正好相反。分析者最强大的学习时刻发生在表演之前，而执行者最强大的时刻发生在表演期间。试错是这个学习过程不可或缺的一部分。米歇尔·米勒（Michelle Miller）商店的杰弗里（Jeffrey）是一位实干家。当他自己解决问题时，他学到的东西最多。对他来说，准备工作是一项枯燥乏味的活动。因此，与其与像 Jeffrey 这样的人进行角色扮演，不如在他的角色中选择一个简单但真实的特定任务，给他一个你想要的结果的简要概述，然后让开他。然后逐渐增加每项任务的复杂程度，直到他掌握了他角色的各个方面。他可能会在此过程中犯一些错误，但对于实干家来说，错误是学习的原材料。

Finally, there’s watching. Watchers won’t learn much through role-playing. They won’t learn by doing, either. Since most formal training programs incorporate both of these elements, watchers are often viewed as rather poor students. That may be true, but they aren’t necessarily poor learners.
最后，还有观看。观察者不会通过角色扮演学到很多东西。他们也不会边做边学。由于大多数正规培训计划都包含这两个要素，因此观察者通常被视为相当差的学生。这可能是真的，但他们不一定是学习能力差的人。

Watchers can learn a great deal when they are given the chance to see the total performance. Studying the individual parts of a task is about as meaningful for them as studying the individual pixels of a digital photograph. What’s important for this type of learner is the content of each pixel, its position relative to all the others. Watchers are only able to see this when they view the complete picture.
当观众有机会看到整体表现时，他们可以学到很多东西。对他们来说，研究任务的各个部分与研究数码照片的单个像素一样有意义。对于这种类型的学习者来说，重要的是每个像素的内容，以及它相对于所有其他像素的位置。观察者只有在查看全貌时才能看到这一点。

As it happens, this is the way I learn. Years ago, when I first began interviewing, I struggled to learn the skill of creating a report on a person after I had interviewed him. I understood all the required steps, but I couldn’t seem to put them together. Some of my colleagues could knock out a report in an hour; for me, it would take the better part of a day. Then one afternoon, as I was staring morosely into my Dictaphone, I overheard the voice of the analyst next door. He was talking so rapidly that I initially thought he was on the phone. Only after a few minutes did I realize that he was dictating a report. This was the first time I had heard someone “in the act.” I’d seen the finished results countless times, since reading the reports of others was the way we were supposed to learn, but I’d never actually heard another analyst in the act of creation. It was a revelation. I finally saw how everything should come together into a coherent whole. I remember picking up my Dictaphone, mimicking the cadence and even the accent of my neighbor, and feeling the words begin to flow.
碰巧的是，这就是我学习的方式。几年前，当我第一次开始采访时，我努力学习在采访一个人后创建关于他的报告的技能。我理解了所有必需的步骤，但我似乎无法将它们放在一起。我的一些同事可以在一个小时内敲出一份报告;对我来说，这将需要一天的大部分时间。然后有一天下午，当我闷闷不乐地盯着录音机时，我无意中听到了隔壁分析师的声音。他说话太快了，我一开始以为他在打电话。几分钟后，我才意识到他正在口述一份报告。这是我第一次听到有人“在行动”。我看过无数次完成的结果，因为阅读别人的报告是我们应该学习的方式，但我从未真正听过其他分析师的创造行为。这是一个启示。我终于明白了所有东西应该如何组合成一个连贯的整体。我记得我拿起录音机，模仿邻居的节奏甚至口音，感觉单词开始流动。

If you’re trying to teach a watcher, by far the most effective technique is to get her out of the classroom. Take her away from the manuals, and make her ride shotgun with one of your most experienced performers.
如果你想教一个观察者，到目前为止，最有效的技巧是让她离开教室。把她从手册中带走，让她和你最有经验的表演者之一一起骑霰弹枪。

. . .

We’ve seen, in the stories of great managers like Michelle Miller and Judi Langley, that at the very heart of their success lies an appreciation for individuality. This is not to say that managers don’t need other skills. They need to be able to hire well, to set expectations, and to interact productively with their own bosses, just to name a few. But what they do—instinctively—is play chess. Mediocre managers assume (or hope) that their employees will all be motivated by the same things and driven by the same goals, that they will desire the same kinds of relationships and learn in roughly the same way. They define the behaviors they expect from people and tell them to work on behaviors that don’t come naturally. They praise those who can overcome their natural styles to conform to preset ideas. In short, they believe the manager’s job is to mold, or transform, each employee into the perfect version of the role.
在米歇尔·米勒（Michelle Miller）和朱迪·兰利（Judi Langley）等伟大经理人的故事中，我们已经看到，他们成功的核心在于对个性的欣赏。这并不是说管理者不需要其他技能。他们需要能够很好地招聘，设定期望，并与自己的老板进行富有成效的互动，仅举几例。但他们本能地做的是下棋。平庸的管理者假设（或希望）他们的员工都会受到同样的事情的激励，被同样的目标所驱使，他们会渴望同样的人际关系，并以大致相同的方式学习。他们定义了他们期望人们的行为，并告诉他们去做那些不自然的行为。他们赞美那些能够克服自己的自然风格以符合预设想法的人。简而言之，他们认为经理的工作是将每个员工塑造或转变为完美的角色。

Great managers don’t try to change a person’s style. They never try to push a knight to move in the same way as a bishop. They know that their employees will differ in how they think, how they build relationships, how altruistic they are, how patient they can be, how much of an expert they need to be, how prepared they need to feel, what drives them, what challenges them, and what their goals are. These differences of trait and talent are like blood types: They cut across the superficial variations of race, sex, and age and capture the essential uniqueness of each individual.
伟大的管理者不会试图改变一个人的风格。他们从不试图强迫骑士以与主教相同的方式移动。他们知道他们的员工会在他们的思维方式、如何建立关系、他们有多无私、他们有多耐心、他们需要成为多少专家、他们需要多准备、是什么驱动他们、什么挑战他们以及他们的目标是什么方面会有所不同。这些特质和天赋的差异就像血型一样：它们跨越了种族、性别和年龄的表面变化，捕捉到了每个人的本质独特性。

Like blood types, the majority of these differences are enduring and resistant to change. A manager’s most precious resource is time, and great managers know that the most effective way to invest their time is to identify exactly how each employee is different and then to figure out how best to incorporate those enduring idiosyncrasies into the overall plan.
像血型一样，这些差异中的大多数是持久的，并且无法改变。管理者最宝贵的资源是时间，伟大的管理者知道，投资时间的最有效方法是准确确定每个员工的不同之处，然后弄清楚如何最好地将这些持久的特质纳入整体计划。

To excel at managing others, you must bring that insight to your actions and interactions. Always remember that great managing is about release, not transformation. It’s about constantly tweaking your environment so that the unique contribution, the unique needs, and the unique style of each employee can be given free rein. Your success as a manager will depend almost entirely on your ability to do this.
要想在管理他人方面表现出色，你必须将这种洞察力带到你的行动和互动中。永远记住，伟大的管理是关于释放，而不是转型。这是关于不断调整您的环境，以便每个员工的独特贡献、独特需求和独特风格可以得到自由发挥。作为经理，你的成功几乎完全取决于你的能力。