Brixreport(mngtprinciples).doc

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SURROUND YOURSELF WITH GREAT PEOPLE 

Analyze Strengths and Weaknesses (including your own) – gives you an idea of where your needs are the greatest. The goal is to balance your weaknesses with the strengths of others, then to evaluate the team overall. Even though I probably knew more about city government than I realized, it didn’t compare well with what I’d typically known about the cases I tried. As a lawyer I would feel insecure unless I knew everything possible about a case. So when I put together my original staff, I tried to compensate for that deficiency. A leader wants all his managers to be strong. He doesn’t want yesmen leading any department including the ones the leader himself knows well. If you look at the people I picked to head for example the Police Department I choose 3 outspoken even that was the area I knew best. So it’s a matter of hiring a strong leader only for the agencies you haven’t yet mastered. But because the leader of these agencies will have the responsibility of heading their department and teaching you the intricacies, you need even more expertise in those positions. At the same time, the person must understand that, although you haven’t mastered the details of his department, it is your philosophy that it is to be implemented.

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Learn From Great Things – Sports have played a substantial role in the development of my thinking. I am passionate baseball fan and have studied it all my life. Baseball – and also football, golf, basketball, and boxing-have provided not just enormous enjoyment but a laboratory for seeing what leadership ideas and strategies work. For example, the idea of teamwork, and the balance it provides, was always with me as US Attorney, during my campaigns and later as mayor. Successful sports teams are never built on only one person. Even transcendent star Michael Jordan need supporting cast-and the proof that theyre true leaders is that those other players were better around Jordan than they would have been otherwise. There are also issues of psychological conditioning. When a trial I was prosecuting went wrong, or when some strategy failed while I was mayor, or somebody made a mistake, or I said something people misunderstood, I would think of baseball, and how even the best hitters fail two out of three times. There are important skills to be learned from picking yourself up after something goes wrong, to keep moving ahead without letting it throw you off course. Any leader will have team members with more seasoning than others. The effective leader will encourage such people to impart their wisdom to those less experienced. Talking and sharing advice can do that, but it can be done even more effectively by example. Leadership

2 and balance are easier to see in teams – to see whether the coaches, owners, veteran players are producing the desired results. 

Motivate – In a perfect world, everyone you hire would show up every day eager to work as hard as possible, viewing a job well done as its own reward. This isn’t a perfect world. No matter how much success a leader has in hiring, it is still necessary to stoke the fires. That can be accomplished in a variety of ways, and I use all of them. There were 629 murders in NEW YORK during 1998-the lowest total since 1963, 548 (for comparison in 1993) there were 1,946 homicides). When Bernie Kerik became Police Commissioner, he used that number as his goalpost. For all the right reasons, he wanted as few murders in the city as possible. But there was an extra incentive: he wanted to outdo his predecessor.

REFLECT THEN DECIDE Making the right choices is the most important part of leadership. Every other element –from developing and communicating ideas to surrounding oneself with great people-relies on making decisions. One of the trickiest elements of decision-making is worth out not what, but when. Regardless of how much time exists before a decision must be made, I never make up my mind until I have to. Faced with any important decisions, I always envision how each alternative will play out before I make it. During this process, I’m not afraid to change my mind a few times. Many are tempted to decide an issue simply to end the discomfort of indecision. However, the longer you have to make a decision, the more mature and well reasoned that decision should be. 

Be ready to pull the trigger when time is short – leaders must find balance between speed and deliberation. One facet of making decisions involves knowing how to act when there’s not much time to deliberate. In 1986, I was to try the Parking Violations Bureau case, one of the most important municipal corruption trials in the history of New York City. On my first day in court, the defense made a motion to change venue out of New York City, ostensibly because the defendantspoliticians and bureaucrats-could not get a fair hearing before local jurors. They proposed several locations, such as Buffalo and Hatford. My assistants wanted to discuss among ourselves the merits of all possible venues. I didn’t. Even as they started conferring, I stood up and told the judge, “Your honor, I agree. Let’s change venue, It will remove any question of taint in the case.”

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Use Creative Tension – the fur could fly at some of the meetings of my top staff. I find debates enormously helpful, and would create them specifically so that I could hear more views on just about everything. I always make a better decision if I hear three or four different views. If those advocating those viewpoints do so forcefully and with passion, all the better. You cannot generate heartfelt debate unless the participants believe that the outcome is not predetermined. If your staff knows that you’ll defer to the higher-ranking person’s opinion or choose the idea pitched by whoever’s known you longer, they’ll never develop their case to the degree you require.

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Hear people out – once you’ve made a decision, you must stick to it; but up until that point make it clear that you’ll entertain changing your mind even on subjects that seem cut and dried. When I became mayor, the current and next year budget gaps made me determined to reduce city spending , for the first time since 1981, but I didn’t want to repeat the mistakes made during the infamous fiscal crisis of the 1970s. So two areas were immediately off the table for spending cuts. Infrastructure and Police Department.

UNDERPROMISE AND OVERDELIVER 

Promise only when you’re positive – this rule sounds so obvious that I wouldn’t mention it unless, I saw leaders break it on a regular basis. In the long run, grand rhetorical promises undermine a leadership authority. For a public official, a sweeping pledge to reduce crime by a specific percentage or create a certain number of jobs may get a good news coverage for a day or two; but if the results fail to much the prediction, the leader leaves every one with the fear that the word of the boss cannot be trusted. The airlines wanted to assure everyone that life would quickly get back to normal. It was the right impulse. Indeed, I heeded it myself over and over during those chaotic first weeks – but only after I was convinced that what I was telling people would happen would actually happen. Often, someone who is being pressed for deadlines will sputter something out just to appease the people who want to know. I do my best to anticipate those questions; but when you don’t know the answer, you’ve got to be hones enough to say so.

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Don’t turn a victory into a defeat – one of the reasons I dislikes announcing expectations before I know the results is that in doing so, a leader risks turning a positive development into a disappointment. When Rudy Crew was a Chancellor of Schools, he promised that he was going to improve reading test scores by 5 to 10 percent. The schools had already been improving, so this may have seemed a modest promise.

4 But the school system in New York was still in such a state of disrepair that any improvement should have been warmly greeted. Well scores did improve by 3.6 percent. The press remembered the 5 to 10 percent promise. The New York Times reported it under the headline “Student Math Scores Gain Is the Smallest in Recent Years.” What was actually boost in reading scores, which could have helped the morale of a broken system, ended up deflated because it failed to meet expectations. One of the duties of a leader is to let his staff know how he expects them to behave. Employees should be expected to use their good judgment, but not to divine their boss’s ideas and preferences – they are owed clear communication about what the boss expects. My staff came to understand that as much as I relish statistical accountability, I didn’t like specific numbers being promised before we had the evidence that those numbers were attainable. The risk of turning a victory into a failure is more than just a matter of impression and morale. Sometimes a misguided prediction can actually do some harm.

DEVELOP AND COMMUNICATE STRONG BELIEFS 

Develop strong beliefs – the ideas that form the basis of your leadership can develop in number of ways. Some come from your parents, as many of mine did. Others derive from friends, teachers, clergy, even rivals.

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Re-examine Beliefs: The Political Odyssey - my skepticism about community policing is an example of strong belief I came to only after seeing the facts up close and realizing that they couldn’t be disputed. The development of beliefs can follow a more winding path, an evolution that might not be applicable to everyone but is irrefutable to the person honest enough to acknowledge it. Sometimes these beliefs are inconvenient, even painful. They may lead you away from long-held positions and might even cost you friends. But a real leader, one who leads from a true heart and honest mind, won’t deny an emerging belief simply because it makes him uncomfortable.

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Communicate Strong Beliefs – a leader not only set direction, but communicate that direction. He usually cannot simply impose his will – and even if he could its not the best way to lead. He must bring people aboard, excite them about his vision and earn their support. They in turn will inspire those around them, and soon everyone will be focusing on the same goal; the effort will come from within, which always results in more forceful advocacy than if someone is just going through the motions to please their boss. Expressing ideology is one of a leader’s most powerful tools. Nowhere was that clearer than during the days following the WTC disaster. I tried to explain the enormity of what had happened and hold accountable those responsible for the attacks.

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Be direct and Unfiltered – one of the great advantages of being New York City mayor was that I could communicate directly. Because it was such a visible job, I didn’t have to be a slave to press coverage. A leader who cannot access the airwaves or draw people to a meeting risks having a media shape the publics impressions of him. Someone with as a high a profile as the mayor of a big city can create his own impression, and can ensure that the press becomes just another element that factors into decisions.

Any leaders to have the media on his side – it makes the job easier and it plain feels better than being beaten up every morning. But when you run a large organization there will always be a bias toward presenting you in a negative way. Its not necessarily a personal grudge (although sometimes there’s that, too and it’s fair to wonder why so many journalists consistently vote to the left of their audiences) probably the majority of those who cover any government and most corporations – have a bias against the organization. Their instinctive reaction is to assume, in any instance that’s open to interpretation, that you must be doing something wrong, taking advantage somehow. You have to find some way to offset this bias. One of the best ways is to communicate your true message directly without spin, spokespeople, focus groups, or TelePromptTers. 

The Importance of Language – words are enormously important to me. I love to read and I love language, the sheer pleasure of words in the right order. Choosing one word over another is an important act.

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Stick to your word – any leader is only as good as his word. When it comes to communicating beliefs and ideas, a leaders word is not only an emblem of trust but a critical device in spreading the message. One of the first fights we had in my administration was over the merging of the police departments. New York City had the NYPD, the Transit Police who patrolled the subways, and the Housing Police, responsible for the public housing projects. It was unwieldy bureaucracy, each with its own unions and contracts. More important, it wasn’t the right way to protect the city.

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Tailor the message to the listener – one f a leaders responsibilities is to meet the needs of those he or she leads. The point is not to alter your message depending on the audience, but to present it so that it can be understood by whomever you’re addressing. The goal should be to ensure your message gets through loud and clear to as many people as possible. Sometimes the best way to get a message across is not to say anything at all and let your actions speak for you.