High Performing Managers

Good managers often hit a ceiling because the habits that earned their promotion start to hold them back. Drawing on Marshall Goldsmith's What Got You Here Won't Get You There and Satya Nadella's culture shift at Microsoft, this module sets out the four disciplines of excellent managers and shows why the step up means working differently, not harder, once your impact depends on others.

Self awareness is a practice to return to, not a profile completed once and filed away. This module brings together Honey and Mumford's learning styles, Broadwell's Conscious Competence model and Luft and Ingham's Johari Window, with Ray Dalio's radical transparency as an extreme example, to help you coach people in the way they learn, pass on skills that have become automatic and close your own blind spot.

As responsibility grows, your own effectiveness sets the effectiveness of everyone who depends on you. This module draws on Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive, including his five practices and his discipline for managing time, and on Ram Charan and Larry Bossidy's Execution, with Bossidy's AlliedSignal operating reviews as the case. It shows how to work on the right things and then close the say-do gap.

A high performing manager's results depend as much on their own manager and on peers they cannot instruct as on their team. Using Gabarro and Kotter's Managing Your Boss and its four-step model, this module covers understanding your manager's world, keeping information flowing upward, influencing sideways through colleagues' currency and your own reliability, and reading the political terrain honestly, illustrated by a composite cross-functional budget case.

Getting the best from others is a daily practice rather than an occasional intervention. Drawing on the HBR Guide to Coaching Employees and Gallup's engagement research, this module covers choosing between directing, coaching and mentoring in the moment, building engagement through clarity, development, recognition and genuine care, and handling sustained underperformance fairly, with a composite case showing how coaching uncovered the real cause.

This capstone introduces no new theory. It reads two well-documented turnarounds, Alan Mulally at Ford and Anne Mulcahy at Xerox, framework by framework, showing Goldsmith's shift, the Johari Window, Drucker's effectiveness, Charan's execution rhythm, managing upward and outward, and getting the best from others working together under pressure. It shows why frameworks compound rather than add up, and turns the whole toolkit back on your own context.

A toxic performer usually costs a team more than they appear to contribute. Using Robert Sutton's The No Asshole Rule and his aftermath, target and pattern tests, this module helps you tell toxic behaviour apart from honest challenge or a bad day, keep talent and damage on separate ledgers, count the hidden costs, and act early, drawing on Uber's 2017 to 2019 leadership change and culture reset.

The structure of reviews, ratings and conversations either supports or undermines everything else a manager does. This module sets out why the annual review and forced ranking manage so little, what continuous performance management removes and adds, and what a substantial check-in covers. It uses Adobe's Check-In system, launched in 2012, as the case, being clear about what the evidence does and does not show.

Tuckman describes how a single team develops; this module addresses leading when speed and complexity require many teams to coordinate constantly. Drawing on Stanley McChrystal's Team of Teams and his Joint Special Operations Task Force 714 in Iraq, it explains why efficient is not the same as adaptable, how shared consciousness, empowered execution and trust across boundaries depend on each other, and how to build your own O and I briefing.