“‘... what is the most important qualification you look for in a leader?’... ‘Humility,’... ‘That’s what distinguishes those who can turn these facilities around....’” (page 8) “Leaders who succeed are those who are humble enough to be able to see beyond themselves and perceive the true capacities and capabilities of their people. They don’t pretend to have all the answers. Rather, they create an environment that encourages their people to take on the primary responsibility for finding answers to the challenges they and their facilities face.” (page 9) Pages 9-10 share of how this group started purchasing healthcare facilities that were in rough shape. They went in with the mindset “that the key missing ingredient in failing healthcare operations was not an absence of the right people or even the right location but an absence of the right mindset.” They shared that “‘Some of our competition couldn’t get rid of facilities and their teams fast enough because they thought that the teams were simply defective. Our thesis was that we could take a poorly lead and therefore underperforming facility and, by helping the existing team see what was possible, they could turn it around.’” After having acquired some teams/locations, often the parting manager would give them a list of employees to fire. They shared that often those people became their best performers. They then go on to share this: “organizational improvement, even turnaround, is less a matter of getting the wrong people off the bus than a matter of helping people see. It is a matter of changing mindset.” Ok this next piece is big for me because I’m a big fan of having a vision and working towards it. They share that “‘Leaders fail,’... ‘by coming in saying, ‘Here’s the vision. Now you go execute what I see.’ That’s just wrong in our view of the world.’... ‘Although leaders should provide a mission or context and point toward what is possible, what humble, good leaders also do is to help people see. When people see, they are able to exercise all their human agency and initiative. When they do that, they own their work. When people are free to execute what they see, rather than simply to enact the instructions of the leader, they can change course in the moment to respond to ever-changing, situation-specific needs. That kind of nimbleness and responsiveness is something you can’t manager, force, or orchestrate.” (pages 10-11). So as important as it is to have a vision, it’s also important to help pass that vision on to someone else. Page 11 mentions the idea of “reading situations attentively.” I just can’t help but wonder what kind of power enters the scene if my analytics (whether for my personal endeavors, or for business) when this attentiveness is given. “This book is about how to help unlock this kind of collaboration, innovation, and responsiveness—how to experience a way of seeing, thinking, working, and leading that helps individuals, teams, and organizations significantly improve performance.” (page 11). I kind of want to take this as a challenge as a data guy. This identifies 3 stakeholders for me:
Then, here are the metrics we would measure:
Help the stakeholders experience a way of:
All of these metrics would help fuel the main metric of “performance”, that thing we’re trying to “significantly improve.”
The author comes straight out and says that the following thought is a foundational belief to the basis of this book. “mindset drives and shapes all that we do—how we engage with others and how we behave in every moment and situation.” (page 12).
Coming soon.
Coming soon.
Coming soon.
The author's make the case that options open up when we have an outward, versus a "narrow [self-interested]" mindset. I would expect this. It feels like something that goes along with the beginning of the book where they highlighted the importance of humility in a leader. It also takes me back to my takeaways from reading Good to Great. When I read that, it felt clear to me that the greatest leaders were humble leaders. This line really called out to me regarding thsoe with an inward mindset: "a person may successfully achieve his objectives, but he won't care if the way he does his work makes it harder for others to achieve theirs." That outcome feels like a tragedy to me, and the scary part is I could see myself falling prey to that. I'm hoping to find principles in this book that help circumvent that. I found this passage to be a really interesting description of someone who has an outward mindset. "Someone with an outward mindset holds himself accountable both for his own actions and performance and for his impact on others' actions and performance. He understands that he is connected with others and holds himself accountable for the impact of his manner of connection."