Excerpts

From the book Manage to Lead:  Building Blocks for Leadership Success.

(All text is copyright 2024 Hunter and Manage to Lead and may not be reprinted, shared, or reproduced without written permission of the author or appropriate authorship credit.)

"In everything we do, large or small, critical or trivial, we practice excellence.  Excellence is not perfection.  Excellence is not mistake-free.  Excellence is not delicate, unmarred, and pristine.  No, excellence at its core is messy and laden with calluses and scars.  Excellence is that thing inside us that takes years, if not decades, to build and grow and nurture.  It is something that requires constant care and feeding.  If neglected, even for a moment, excellence can wither.  With very little consistent neglect, it will unfailingly die.  To practice excellence means that we must allow its pursuit to become a substantial part of who we are – on the inside so much more than on the outside.  There is no substitute for excellence.  It cannot be faked, nor mass-produced, nor cobbled together with half-efforts, happenstance, or luck.  If the essence of who we desire to be is not rooted in excellence – in our work, our play, and our relationships – we will never become our greatest selves, but rather a shadow of what we could have been, and those lives that we touched will have been robbed of the joy of seeing the manifestation of excellence in us.  Excellence then is our legacy."

"Excellence is intrinsic, not extrinsic."

"There is no inspiration without respect."

"Accountability is not micromanagement."

"Management, done correctly, creates no tangible work product."

"In our experience, the majority of managers don’t struggle to lead their teams successfully because they are incapable of doing so.  They struggle because they are unwilling to do the things necessary to find the long-term success that overcomes any institutional challenges or economic conditions.  They lack the discipline to do the consistent, demanding work required to manage successfully and turn management excellence into leadership success."  

"Now, we have seen in the past that many, many team leaders insist that their team is a high-performing team.  It is extremely rare for a manager to tell us that their team is full of underachievers who never perform to either their own potential nor the expectations of the company.  Consequently, when we speak of high-performing teams, most leaders assume that we are describing exactly the kind of team they manage.  We are not." 

"We posit that there is no single task more important for a good manager to perform with excellence than the hiring of the team members.  No other task, when done poorly, makes a manager’s job inherently more difficult.  When done with excellence, no other task enables the manager, team member, and entire team to be more successful.  Getting the hiring process wrong is simply not an option for a successful manager and leader.  It must be done thoughtfully, carefully, and with utter intention and focus on hiring only the best possible candidate."

"Most critically, we want to exhaust all possible resources to drive improvement.  That means using any tools, processes, and people available to that end.  If the team member feels that their success and high-performance is the driving force behind the performance improvement process, then everyone will be aligned toward a positive goal rather than a negative perception of performance and the future of the team member." 

"This is the point at which we are obliged to offer a key piece of advice regarding expectation setting.  Have a valid business reason for setting the expectation if at all possible.  If you set an expectation with no plans of holding your team accountable to fulfill it, should you really be setting that expectation at all?  We suggest the answer is no."

"[We] propose offering this option to the team:

'Now that I have shared with you the management, leadership, and operating philosophy of this team, you are left with an important decision.  For many of you, this idea is exciting and challenging, and you are eager to get started.  For some of you, the dread or boredom of these ideas is evident on your faces.  I propose to you now that if you genuinely know that you cannot agree to this approach, whether for ethical, personal, or other reasons, let us talk in private about that issue.  Just because you can’t be aligned with what I describe here, doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you, doesn’t make you a bad person, doesn’t mean we don’t value you, and doesn’t mean we don’t want you to be happy and successful, but it does mean that this is probably not the right team for you.'"