2025 Hindsight Edition: I re-read this scrappy set of notes expecting to dislike it, in line with my memory of the book, but actually I think these are useful nuggets. I certainly treat 121s now as the employee’s meeting, and have a very different approach to doing them to when I first started managing (terribly, btw, and I’m sorry to the people I was supposed to be looking after then.)
Training is responsibility of Managers
Functional training: how to do the actual stuff
Management training: set expectations re one-on-ones etc
“Being too busy to train is the management equivalent of being too hungry to eat”
One-on-Ones
It is the employee’s meeting. Ask them for an agenda in advance. Then probe in the meeting. What have you been trying to do? What’s frustrating? What could be better? Have you been mulling any ideas?
Getting Started in a new role
Come with a lot of new things you want to do. Too many
- Write weekly objectives of things to produce immediately.
- Get interacting with lots of people quickly.
- Set daily or weekly meeting with integration manager, and ask them all the questions about things that haven’t quite made sense, and outline what you’ve learned from them.
Org Design
The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad.
Think of the organizational design as the communications architecture for your company. If you want people to communicate, the best way to accomplish that is to make them report to the same manager. By contrast, the further away people are in the organizational chart, the less they will communicate.
The organizational design is also the architecture for how the company communicates with the outside world. For example, you might want to organize your sales force by product to maximize communication with the relevant product groups and maximize the product competency of the sales force. If you do that, then you will do so at the expense of simplicity for customers who buy multiple products and will now have to deal with multiple salespeople.