The 5 Key Skills That Successful Managers Possess

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1:03Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz. My guest today is Dave Dodson. Dave's on the faculty of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, where he guides students in tactical execution. He was a McKinsey and Company consultant, and he left to become a serial entrepreneur, where he operated six companies as CEO or executive chairman. He's a co-founder of Sanku, a company that developed the only successful technology to fortify grains with life-saving micronutrients in rural African mills. Sanku was listed by Fast Company as one of the most innovative companies and named by Time Magazine's 100 Best Inventions.

1:46We're going to talk about his book called The Manager's Handbook, Five Simple Steps to Build a Team, Stay Focused, Make Better Decisions, and Crush Your Competition. Boy, a lot of promise in that. Dave, welcome to the show. Good to be here. So this may seem like a really dumb question, but I think it's actually going to be helpful to hear how you actually define the term manager. Yeah, you know, John, I struggled quite a bit with whether I should be saying entrepreneur or manager or leader. And manager seems sort of vanilla, right? But that's what most of us do every day. We're managing. And one of the things I wanted to do with the manager's handbook is to take it from sort of some lofty concept down to what do you do every day, Monday morning, so you can get stuff done?

2:33Yeah, because you're right. I mean, entrepreneurs, business owners, you know, they may not have manager in their title, but they wear the manager hat every day, right? 100%. And the biggest leap that somebody makes is not becoming a manager per se, where you've got two or three people reporting to you, but it's when you become a manager of managers, because then you can't cheat anymore. You can't sort of stay up late or redo someone's work. You have to manage through the organization. And one of the magical things about if you learn the skills on how to manage managers is that's completely scalable all the way up to running the biggest companies in the world.

3:09Yeah. So with your McKinsey and Company credentials, you had to have a framework here, right? Five simple steps to build a team. So kind of in obviously a great deal was drawn from your own experience managing companies and teams. How'd you come up with five steps that you lean on as being really the critical elements? Well, first of all, I am the least likely entrepreneur. I grew up in rural Colorado. The closest town was about 300, population of 300. and we were kind of divided between farmers and ranchers. And I was on the farmer side because my dad made farm equipment. My stepdad built houses and my two grandfathers, one ran an auto dealer and the other ran a coal mine of all things.

3:57And what links all four of these people together is all of their businesses failed. And so I should have just gone out and been a McKinsey consultant, but I didn't want to do that. For whatever reason, in spite of that background, I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur. and things were going well. And then the first time I really stubbed my toe hard and I was like, holy smokes, everything I do doesn't work out. That's when I started to look around and say, how come some people are just better at getting stuff done than other people? And that led to this three, three year search really to try to understand what is the difference.

4:33And what I quickly realized is the difference is not that people have certain attributes. They're born a certain way. They're charismatic, introvert, extrovert. But they've mastered five skills. And I wasn't looking, John, for a framework when I wrote the manager's handbook. I was just out of curiosity. And it just ended up being five skill areas that was universal. I don't care who you were. You're Oprah Winfrey, you know, Rupert Murdoch. Everybody mastered these five skills. It's very interesting. And when we're going to call them skills, I mean, there is obviously there's an implication that can be learned, that can be practiced, that it does take intention to bring them into every meeting.

5:11So let's dive. Well, first off, I want you to identify the five skills kind of in the compact organization, but then I'll sort of dip my toe into each of those and ask you to go a little deeper on something. Yeah. So for example, the first one was the ability to build a team. Right. The second one was an ability to set and then adhere to priorities. One was to be able to take advice from others, be able to seek and take advice. Another was to be a good custodian of your time. And then the last one was to be fanatical about quality. So those were the five. And again, I didn't start out looking for five, but I ended up with those five.

5:47But then I had this predicament, John, because I didn't want to create a PowerPoint presentation or have an academic paper now that I teach at Stanford. I wanted something that people could use. And so the trick was then, how do you convert this insight that I had into a practical way that people could easily acquire these skills? And that was my biggest challenge, honestly. All right. So let's dive in the first one, team building. You know, frankly, every leadership book, every book on running a company, it has at least a chapter right on this. Because obviously, if you're going to grow a business, you know, you're not going to do it all by yourself.

6:22There's a couple things that show up, hire for outcomes, 360 degree, you know, reviews. I mean, what do you feel like you're adding kind of new to that whole genre really of leadership books? Oh, my gosh. You know, I teach at the Stanford Business School, right? And every class says you got to build a team. But nobody says how to do it. Right. The insight here is that actually, interestingly enough, John, I was watching somebody play the piano. And I was thinking about how do you learn to play the piano? And I realized, well, first you learn how to position your fingers over the keyboard, 88 keys.

6:58Then you learn the difference between a sharp and a flat. Then you learn what the pedals do. And I realized that you learn to play the piano because you learn a set of sub skills. You combine them together and you can play the piano. And I realized the same thing was true with these five skills. So to use your example about building a team, then I looked at, okay, of the people who are great at building a team, this is not about how I did things. I studied the best, the very best leaders. for the manager's handbook, what were the characteristics or what were the sub skills that they had that led to building a team?

7:29So you mentioned 360, doing 360 reviews. So in as few pages as possible, I describe how to master how to do a 360 review, the questions to ask, who should ask the questions, how you curate the information. Then at the end of each chapter, I have a checklist. So when you get ready to do it, you don't have to reread the chapter because I wanted this to be a book that you could use. And I did not want it to be an inspirational book where you read it and you got all excited while you're reading it. And then Monday you do the same thing over again. So hiring for outcomes has become a pretty hot topic, I think, mainly because, you know, the whole quiet quitting or whatever the silly terms of the day are about those that I think it's changing how people think about who they hire and who they, you know, what, who needs to be doing what roles and how to keep them happy at work.

8:17So talk a little bit about this idea of hiring for outcomes and how that's different than, say, hiring for resume experience. Yeah. So I completely turn the whole notion of hiring on its head. And you start with building a scorecard, which is what do you want this person to do? Not what they did, not what their credentials are, but what you want them to do. And then you hire against it. So I remember when I first started hiring, I looked at clever interview questions. So this question that I used to ask everybody is when you close the refrigerator door, how do you know the light goes out? And I was just impressed with myself, you know, and it was a creative answer.

8:57But that had nothing to do with the job and what I wanted someone to do. And so now what I've done is I've learned that you say, okay, what do I want this person to do? I want them to drive sales by 15%. I don't care what school they went to. I don't care how old they are. I don't care what they do for. Can they drive sales by 15 %? Sales by 15%. And then you ask the question, well, how will I know? What are the things that I can do to determine that? And that's what you interview against. And it's a completely different way to interview. And by the way, though, in terms of insights of the book, I do this all in about 15, 20 pages.

9:27You don't need to read seven books on hiring to learn how to be good at hiring. But you could because it's currently it's a very large section in the bookstore. All right. So let's move on to time. And this is a tough one. another one that there's an entire category probably in the bookstores. There's one I want you to really focus on, curing the digital disaster. Oh my gosh. Before the digital age, the average executive had got a thousand pieces of communication a year. Today it's 30 ,000, 30 ,000 and growing, John. And all these productivity tools are just making us less productive. So we all know it's a mess out there.

10:10We all know that we read unproductive email. In fact, 50 % it's reported 50 % of the email that we read, we don't think we needed to read. So we all know we have a problem, but the problem, but the issue is we wake up every morning, we do the same thing over and over again. So I didn't want to just sort of present a problem that everybody knows. And I didn't want to ask people to radically change how they think and how they behave and where their habits are and where their weaknesses are. So I said, you know what, I'm going to give you seven tips. You do these seven tips and you'll save 40 minutes a day.

10:40That's it. And so that's kind of throughout the book. That's what I do is I say, look, I'm not going to try to change your life. I'm going to give you seven things to do tomorrow morning that will solve this problem. Yeah. I actually just hired somebody to delete email for me. That was a solution to that one. Well, John, I'm glad you answered my emails at least. And now let's hear a word from our sponsor, Marketing Made Simple. It's a podcast hosted by Dr. J.J. Peterson and is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work.

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12:02You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive. Look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create, and you can have them today. Check it out at dtm.world slash certification. That's DTM dot world slash certification. So the next category is advisors. So, you know, especially since we're addressing the manager's handbook, you know, where does a board or a mentor fit in to a company's structure or an individual's structure? Yeah, you don't have to be the CEO and you don't have to have a board of directors to be really good at seeking and taking advice.

12:49advice and you know as a as an effective manager you want to do two things you want to be able to make decisions on a timely basis and you also want to make right decisions and most of the problems that day-to-day managers face are not new someone has already faced those problems so the idea is to go out and create a group of advisors that you can use either formally or informally and then know how to use them so what i do is first of all i say here's the criteria that you look for finding an advisor. You don't let it be, don't let them happen randomly or organically, go find those people. And then how do you use them?

13:23So, so John, I get called all the time from my former students and I'm an investor in about a hundred companies, CEOs who call me. And usually most of the time is utterly wasted. I'll have a, I'll have a 30 minute call with someone and they'll take 27 minutes to describe the problem. So what I do is I say, here is a simple four-step process on how to have a really effective 15 minute call with an advisor where they hang up the phone and they feel like, wow, I really added value. I hope this person calls me back again. And instead of you telling stories about your problem, you hung up the phone and you thought, okay, I got my problem solved.

13:59Now I can go work on something else. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Priorities. You know, the thing that jumped out to me in that section is I think everybody's accepted, whether they use it or not, that they need a business plan or a marketing plan. Those are kind of accepted things. You introduced something that I personally haven't heard said this way. It makes total sense, but I'd wonder if you could unpack the operating plan. Yeah. So the kind of one of the many things that I turn on its head in the manager's handbook is don't this whole thing about an annual budget. Forget about it. That's just a crystal ball guess on what your sales are going to be or whatever it is.

14:34What you need is an operating plan and an operating plan. You go through a process and I walk people through the process that you go through to figure out what are the two or three things that you need to work on over the following year in order to move the company forward. And one of the things that was screamed out, whether I was looking at Warren Buffett or Steve Jobs or any of the other managers that we all look back and we say, wow, I want to be like them. They were brutal about setting and adhering to priorities. And in fact, Steve Jobs has this famous quote. He was at the Apple Worldwide Conference.

15:08And he said, you have to learn to say no. And when you say that, it pisses people off. but it's the only way you can get things done. And I'm quite close to one of his former board members, Andrea Jung, and I've talked to her about Steve Jobs and is the myth about him being so relentless about setting priorities and having an operating plan true. And she said, I've never met anybody who was more brutal with priorities than Steve Jobs. In fact, Joni Ives, who was his design developer, sorry, he was the chief designer for Apple. and he said that Steve Jobs would come to him almost on a daily basis and said, what have you said no to today?

15:49Yeah, and that's, you know, obviously we're talking about Apple, but I mean, down to the three-person, you know, entrepreneurial, you know, venture, you're going to get 27 emails today, that 26 of which you need to say no to, but it's tough. I mean, it takes a real discipline, doesn't it? Because there are so many things that are going to come at you and some of them look like real opportunities. And if you don't have those two or three priorities, it's pretty easy to say yes and get sidetracked, isn't it? Oh, it is. And two insights for me is one, setting and adhering to priorities is not about not doing the things you shouldn't do.

16:24That's easy. It's supposed to. That's table stakes. It's saying no to things that are that are is a really great idea that you really want to do. But you know that you'll never get to it. That's when you know you're being good at setting and hearing to priorities. And the other insight was, you know, I drive home when I was running companies, I drive home and I go, oh, that's a great idea. We should do that. And then I'd walk in and I'd say, OK, let's do this, too. And then then nothing would happen. I'd say, how come these guys can't keep up with me? The organization moves so slow. Well, the problem is that it's so easy to ideate.

16:56It's so it takes so little time to come up with a great idea. But the people have to implement it. They're the ones who have to hire people and get leases and negotiate agreements and find vendors and so forth. So just recognizing that ideating takes about a minute and implementing takes weeks and weeks. Well, not to mention that it takes your eye off the ball of what they're actually got some momentum on already because, you know, identified that as a priority. That's another. It's sort of the cost, the cost of not doing what you said you were going to do. So the fifth one is quality. And boy, this is a tough one because, I mean, again, this one's a really easy one to say.

17:31I think everybody, nobody will argue with you about, you know, quality being a huge component, but it's also a tough one. I mean, what I've discovered is that it is really probably more closely aligned with culture than it is with any set of, you know, mandates. So how do you make, you know, quality obsession a part of culture? so nothing about the manager's handbook is about slogans or attributes or anything it is a how-to manual so so for example there's a chapter on how do you find out from a practical way how do you find out what your how your customers view quality literally down to what are the types of questions you should ask your customers and what types of questions what types of customers you should ask So there's a chapter on how do you define quality.

18:22So it's not just a slogan, you know, let's go out there and be good to our customers. You've got to find out what matters to them. Then there's a chapter on how do you measure quality. And there's a lot of ways you measure quality that are all historical. They're trailing indicators like NPS. By the time you get a bad NPS score, John, your customers are already disappointed. So the book says, how do you find out what the leading indicators are and how your customers are feeling? So you create happy customers, not how you identify whether what you did worked or not. So every chapter is a how-to.

18:58So we've all read books, even books that, as you said, are very how-to, very practical. But then we have our job, right? We read the book and then we have our job. So how would you recommend that somebody go about making this book something that sticks, making the ideas in this book stick? Well, I tried to write it as much as a paint by numbers book as possible. And I had this kind of post-it note that said, write the book you wish someone handed you. And then I didn't have to write it out. But when I first became a manager. So that was my watchword throughout the whole thing. Then I said, OK, how do you structure the book in a way that makes it a how-to manual?

19:40So one of the big insights of the book or one of the structures of the book is at the end of every chapter, there's a single page that just says here are seven things or here are 10 things there's no gimmicky if there's only seven i only put seven down there that you need to remember so that when you go out and you're doing a 360 review you don't have to reread the whole book just go to page whatever it is the last page of that chapter and go oh yeah i got it and then the so so so it's written in a way that you read it once and then you've got basically you know 22 little quick references. And then the last part is that, and this is the hard part.

20:14I'd written the whole book and I was sitting down with a mentor of mine, a guy who's given me a lot of guidance, Michael Porter, who is sort of the Michael Jordan of MBA professors, written 19 books. And he was helping me with the book. He'd read the book and he said, you know, the problem with your book is you created a checklist and people are going to just pick the pieces that they want off of here. And they're only going to pick the easy ones. And he said, what you actually created here was a unifying theory of execution. And he showed me that, you know, you can't go into things that John, that you and I've talked about today.

20:48You can't put together a good operating plan unless you have a good team and you can't have a good team and you can't execute that if you're not providing good quality, et cetera, et cetera. And he said, what you have to get your readers to do is your readers have to understand that you can't just pick and choose. You've got to put all the pieces together, just like if you want to play the piano you can't learn everything but the difference between a sharp and a flat you got to learn that part too and that's the difference between the people who you know there's the whole skill thing but there's also are you committed to really becoming a good manager and if you are you got to learn these five skills there's no way around it awesome well dave we i appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast you want to invite people to where they might find your book, obviously also where they might connect with you.

21:37Yeah. So the two really easy places go on barnesandnoble.com and pre-order or Amazon pre-order. Those are, you know, the two kinds of classic places to order the manager's handbook by myself, David Dodson. And easy way to reach me is through my, just go on the Stanford University website. Awesome. And the book will be out, depending upon when you're listening to this show. The book will be out in mid July of 2023. So you can either pre-order or order when it's available at all your fine booksellers. So Dave, again, thanks so much for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. And hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

22:15Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics. Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It's called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it at marketingassessment.co, not.com,.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That's just marketingassessment.co. I'd love to chat with you about the results that you get.

23:00We'll be right back.