Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

About

• Multipliers are leaders who bring out others’ capability and intelligence. They’re “genius makers” who multiply an organization’s collective intelligence.

• Diminishers are leaders who’re so absorbed in their own genius that they stifle others’, thus depleting the organization’s vital intellectual resources.

Key Ideas

TALENT MAGNET: Attract and optimize talent

• "building" talent, making it better, and letting it go is central to creating a virtuous cycle of attracting talent.
• celebrate their accomplishments and their departure; because that's how you advertise that your team/org/leadership is the the team people want to work for.

4 Practices of Talent Magnets

1. Look for diverse talent everywhere

   • Value all types of genius (e.g. quantitative analysis, creative problem-solving); and
   • Ignore organizational boundaries to seek talents inside and outside the organization.

2. Find and unlock people’s native genius, be it a knack for connecting people or diagnosing complex issues

   • Carefully observe people to identify what’s native to them, i.e. things that people do (a) easily without conscious effort and (b) freely without condition.
   • Label the ability to make it obvious. Talents often don’t realize their own genius. Labelling it raises their awareness, confidence and the likelihood that they’ll use it.

3. Utilize people to the fullest

   • Connect people with opportunities to use their native ability.
   • Shine a spotlight on them so others can see them in action. This builds their character and confidence even further.

4. Remove blockers that hinder people’s growth/success

   • Remove prima donnas who persistently put their egos over the team’s interests (thus hurting team effectiveness).
   • Get out of the way if they themselves are the blockers.

What Not To Do (that Empire Builders Do)

1. Owning (not developing) talent.
   They bring in great talent, but they underutilize them because they fundamentally undervalue them. This is one of the reasons why Diminishers are costly to organizations.

2. Acquiring more resources.
   Empire Builders focus their energy on acquiring resources and slotting them into organizational structures, where they are visible and clearly under the command of the leader. For some leaders, this amassing of resources/talent can become an obsession.

3. Putting people in boxes.
   They don’t encourage people to step beyond the org chart walls. You can often spot an Empire Builder because they either operate exclusively through one-on-one meetings or run staff meetings as an official way of reporting to them.

4. Letting talent languish.
   They are often the prima donna, insisting that they get maximum time on the stage and that scripts are written to feature them. Whereas Talent Magnets give credit, Empire Builders take credit.

Strategies / Experiments to be a Talent Magnet

• Name the genius
  Find the native genius of every team member. Or, consider someone hard to work with and ask “in what way is this person smart?”

• Upsize their role
  Give people a role/project that’s slightly bigger than their current capabilities, and let them grow into it.

• Let superstars go
  When people have outgrown their roles, encourage them to move on. Don’t keep them for your own gain. Likewise, don’t wait to remove people who’re bad for the team.

LIBERATOR: Demand people’s best thinking and effort

3 Practices of Liberators

1. Create space

   • Release others by restraining yourself - It is a small victory to create space for others to contribute. But it is a huge victory to maintain that space and resist the temptation to jump back in and consume it yourself.
   • Shift the ratio of listening to talking - Liberators are more than just good listeners. They are ferocious listeners. They listen intently because they are trying to learn and understand what other people know.
   • Operate consistently - The consistency of the Liberators’ actions creates two effects:
     1. It establishes a predictable pattern of behaviour, allowing others to know when it is their turn and where there is space for them to contribute.
     2. It creates safety, allowing people not only to jump in, but to do so with full power of thought.
   • Level the playing field - Liberators amplify the voices that are closest to the real issues, in order to extract maximum intelligence and give advantage to the ideas and voices on the lower end of the playing field.

2. Demand best work

   • Defend the standard - Whenever Kissinger received a report, he immediately asked, “Is this your best work?” If the honest answer was “I can do better”, then he insisted that the report gets reworked till it’s the best work it can be.
   • Distinguish best work from outcome - Stress is created when people are expected to produce outcomes that are beyond their control. However, they feel positive pressure when they are held accountable to their best work.

3. Generate rapid learning cycles

   • Admit and share mistakes - By taking your mistakes public, you create a safe environment for others to take risks and fail early, fast, and cheap.
   • Insist on learning from mistakes - It’s okay to fail! You just can’t make the same mistake twice. Make this your mantra.

What NOT To Do (That Tyrants Do)

1. Suppress people’s thinking and capability.
   People only bring up safe ideas that the leader is likely to agree with. This is why Diminishers are costly to organizations – the organization pays full price for a resource but only receives about 50 percent of its value.

2. Dominate the space.
   They dominate meetings, leave little room for anyone else and often suffocate other people’s intelligence in the process. They do this by voicing strong opinions, over-expressing their ideas and trying to maintain control.

3. Create anxiety.
   A percentage of people’s mental energy is consumed trying to avoid upsetting the Tyrant. People don’t know what will set them off, but it is almost certain that the mood will change when they are around.

4. Judge others.
   Tyrants centralize their power and play judge, jury, and executioner. In sharp contrast to the rapid learning cycles of the Liberator, Tyrants create cycles of criticism, judgment, and retreat.

Strategies and Experiments to be a Liberator

• Play your chips
  Try giving yourself a budget of poker chips for a meeting, each one allowing you to speak for 1-2 minutes. Maybe it is five; maybe it is just one or two. Use them wisely, and leave the rest of the space for others to contribute.

• Label your opinions
  Divide your views into: Soft opinions, where you have a perspective and ideas for others to consider AND Hard opinions, where you have a clear and potentially emphatic point of view. By doing so, you can create space for others to comfortably disagree with your “soft opinions” and establish their own views. Reserve the right to have “hard opinions” for when it really matters.

• Make your mistakes known

  1. Get personal. Let people know mistakes you have made in the past and what you have learned from them. Let them know how you have incorporated this learning into your decisions and current leadership practices.
  2. Go public. Instead of talking about mistakes behind closed doors or just one-on-one, bring them out in the open where everyone can learn.

CHALLENGER: Extend compelling challenges

3 Practices of Challengers

1. Seed the opportunity

   • Show the need - You don’t get the most out of people if you just tell them what to do. You get full effort if you help people discover opportunity and, then, get out of their way and let them solve the problem.
   • Challenge the assumptions - Multipliers ask the questions that challenge the fundamental assumptions in an organization and disrupt the prevailing logic.
   • Reframe problems - “The most powerful work is done in response to an opportunity, not in response to a problem.” Analyze the problem, but also reframe it to show the opportunity presented.
   • Create a starting point - By offering a starting point, but not a complete solution, you generate more questions than answers. These questions then encourage your team to fully define the opportunity.

2. Lay down a challenge

   • Extend a concrete challenge - By making a challenge tangible and measurable, you allow others to visualize the end result and communicate the confidence that the organization has the collective brainpower required to accomplish it.
   • Ask the hard questions - Diminishers give answers. Good leaders ask questions. Multipliers ask the really hard questions. They ask the questions that challenge people not only to think, but to rethink and learn new things in order to answer the questions.
   • Let others fill in the blanks - By asking the hard questions and inviting others to fill in the blanks, you are shifting the burden of thinking onto your people, for them to understand the challenge, get intellectually engaged, and find a solution.

3. Generate belief in what is possible

   • Helicopter down - You have to take them down the pathway that it can be done, and why. Do this once and you’ll have created a meaningful proof point that a bold challenge can be successfully met.
   • Lay out a path - Make the impossible seem possible by suggesting a plan. With this insight, the team can visualize a path toward an implementation program.
   • Co create a plan - When people create the plan that they will eventually implement, they understand the challenge ahead and know what actions would be necessary to achieve it.
   • Orchestrate an early win - Multipliers begin with small, early wins and use those to generate belief toward the greater challenges ahead. This way, the weight shifts and the organization is willing to leave the realm of the known and venture into the unknown.

What NOT To Do (that Know-It-Alls Do)

1. Showcase what you know
   Diminishers consider themselves thought leaders and readily share their knowledge; however, they rarely share it in a way that invites contribution. They tend to sell their ideas rather than learning what others know.

2. Test what you know
   When Diminishers do actually engage others, they want to verify that people understand what they know. They ask questions to make a point rather than to access greater insight or to generate collective learning.

3. Tell people how to do their jobs
   Rather than shifting responsibility to other people, Diminishers stay in charge and tell others – in detail – how to do their jobs. They give themselves permission to generate both the questions and the answers.

Strategies and Experiments to be a Challenger

• Go Extreme with Questions
  The first step is to stop answering questions and begin asking them. Find a meeting that you can lead solely with questions. You might be surprised at what people around you already know.

• Take a bus trip
  Take the whole team on a bus trip to see firsthand the needs of your customers and how they actually use your product. Help your team discover the need that must be met. Make it a learning experience that will ignite a fire within your organization.

• Take a massive baby step
  Get the entire organization to take a small, first step. But do it together, en masse, and make it visible so everyone can see the results and start to believe that something great is possible.

DEBATE MAKER: Debate decisions constructively

3 Practices of Debate Makers

1. Frame the Issue

   • Define the question. - The work of the Multiplier is to find the right issue and formulate the right question, so others can find the answers.
   • Challenge the assumptions that enslave the organization in old patterns and ideas
   • Bring up the downsides, tensions and tradeoffs to be considered in a decision
   • Force people to examine the facts and confront reality
   • Explore multiple perspectives on an issue
   • Form the team. Multipliers ensure a great debate by having the right people in the debate. Potential candidates for a great debate include:
   • People with knowledge or insight needed to inform the issue
   • Key stakeholders for the decision
   • People with responsibility for driving the outcome of the decision
   • Assemble the data. Multipliers identify the decision-critical data that needs to be gathered and analyzed prior to the debate. They ask others to come to the debate armed with relevant information, so they are prepared to contribute.

2. Spark the Debate

   • Create safety for best thinking.
   • Share your view last, after hearing other people’s views.
   • Encourage others to take an opposing stand. Allow all points of view, even the unpopular ones.
   • Depersonalize the issues and keep it unemotional.
   • Look beyond job titles.
   • Demand rigor.
   • Ask questions that challenge conventional thinking.
   • Challenge the underlying assumptions.
   • Ask for evidence in the data.
   • Attack the issues, not the people.
   • Ask “why” repeatedly until the root cause is unearthed.
   • Equally debate all sides of the issue.

3. Drive a Sound Decision

   • Re-clarify the decision-making process. Summarize the key ideas and outcomes of the debate, giving people a sense of closure and what to expect next.
   • Address these questions:
     • "Are we making the decision right now or do we need more information"
     • "Is this a team decision or will the leader make the final call?"
     • "If it is a team decision, how will we resolve any differing views?"
     • "Has anything that has surfaced in the debate altered the decision-making process?"
   • Make the decision
     • Multipliers generate and leverage collective thinking, but they are not necessarily consensus-oriented leaders. They may seek the full consensus of the group, but they are equally comfortable making the final decision.
   • Communicate the decision and rationale
     • Close by helping people understand what is expected of them and why, so they can prepare to execute the decision at hand.

What NOT to Do (that Decision Makers Do)

1. Raise issues wrongly
   When a problem surfaces, Diminishers don’t necessarily frame them in a way that allows others to easily contribute. When they raise the issue, they focus on the “what”, rather than on the “how” or the “why” of a decision.

2. Dominate the discussion
   When issues get discussed or debated, Diminishers tend to dominate the discussion with their own ideas.

3. Force the decision
   Rather than driving a sound decision, Diminishers tend to force a decision, either by relying heavily on their own opinion or by short-cutting a rigorous debate.

4 Strategies and Experiments to be a Debate Maker

1. Ask the Hard Questions
   Ask the questions that will get at the core of the issue and the decision. Ask the questions that will confront underlying assumptions. Pose the questions to your team and then stop. Instead of following up with your views, hold yours and ask for theirs.

2. Ask for the Data
   When someone offers an opinion, don’t let it rest on anecdote. Ask for the evidence. Look for more than one data point. Ask them to identify a cluster of data or a trend. Make it a norm so people come into debates armed with the data.

3. Ask Each Person
   Reach beyond the dominant voices and hear all views and all data. You might find that the softer voices belong to the analytical minds who are often most familiar with and objective about the data.

INVESTOR: Instill accountability

3 Practices of Investors

1. Define ownership

   • Name the lead - Clarifying the role that you will play as a leader actually gives people more ownership, not less. They understand that they hold the majority ownership position and that success or failure depends on their efforts.
   • Give ownership for the end goal - When people are given ownership for the whole, not only for a piece of something larger, they stretch their thinking and challenge themselves to go beyond their scope.
   • Stretch the role - One way that Multipliers incite growth is by asking people to stretch and do something they’ve never done before. Stretching the role stretches the person in it. This bigger role creates a vacuum that must be filled, accelerating the growth of the person

2. Invest resources

   • Teach and coach - You are teaching by helping your team solve real problems. Even if you know the solution, don’t offer it. If you do, you’ve lost the teaching moment. It has to be Socratic. You ask the question and tease out the answer.
   • Provide backup - You’re not the only one who needs to provide the intellectual capital for your team – use external resources, too. Don’t just limits the investment options to what you know and what you have time and energy to personally invest.

3. Hold people accountable

   • Give it back - Investors get involved in other people’s work, but they continually give back leadership and accountability, using reassuring phrases like “You’re smart. You can figure this out.”
   • Expect complete work - Multipliers never do anything for their people that their people can do for themselves. They use phrases like “Don’t just identify the problem; find a solution.”
   • Respect natural consequence - Investors want their investments to be successful, but they know they can’t intervene and alter natural market forces. By providing the possibility to fail, these leaders give others the freedom and the motivation to grow and succeed.
   • Make the scoreboard visible - When the scoreboard is visible, people hold themselves accountable and get reminded of the bigger picture.

What NOT to Do (that Micromanagers Do)

1. Maintain ownership
   Diminishers don’t trust others to figure it out for themselves, so they maintain ownership. When they delegate, they hand out piecemeal tasks but not real responsibility.

2. Jump in and out
   Micromanagers hand over work to others, but they take it back the moment problems arise. This way, not only do they end up doing all the work, but they rob others of the opportunity to use and extend their own intelligence.

4 Strategies and Experiments to be an Investor

1. Let Them Know Who’s the Boss
   Let people know that you will stay engaged and support them, but they (not you) are in charge and accountable. Start with ownership for the current scope of their role, and then take it up one level, for the whole project.

2. Let Nature Take its Course
   Nature teaches best. When we allow people to experience the natural consequences of their actions, they learn most rapidly and most profoundly.

3. Ask for the F-I-X

   • Ask People for the complete thought process and provide a fix.
   • Questions
     • "What solution(s) do you see for this problem?"
     • "How would you propose we solve this?"
     • "What would you like to do to fix this?"
   • Don’t assume responsibility for fixing the problem. Put the problem back on their desk and encourage them to stretch themselves further.

4. Hand back the pen

   • When you see a team member struggling, offer help, but have an exit plan in mind (giving the pen back).
   • Questions
     • "I'm happy to help think this through, but I'm still looking for you to lead this going forward."
     • "You are still the lead on this"
     • "I'm here to back you up. What do you need from me as you lead this?"

Accidental Diminishers

Dealing with Diminishers

Adopting Multipliers Practices