Review: The Effective Manager by Mark Horstman

The Effective Manager by Mark Horstman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was very fortunate to come across Manager-Tools in 2005 when I took on management responsibilities. Since that time I have been avid listener to many Manager-Tools podcasts and in fact have attended the Manager-Tools effective manager and communicator courses; twice.

Yet with everything I have learned from these interactions over the years, The Effective Manager is the book that puts it all together. The rhyme, reason and rationale of what it means to be a manager and more importantly, recommendations of what you should do as a manager are in this book. And yes, I learned even more by reading this book on top of what I have learned via the podcasts and conferences.

For those starting out as managers, I couldn’t recommend a better book to get started and to understand how to be effective as a manager. There are many examples on how these recommendations can be applied. Furthermore, the book is full of data points which helped me understand the impact of implementing these various approaches.

Three key takeaways from the book:

1. A manager is responsible for two key things: Results and Retention
2. The four critical manager behaviours are to get to know your people, communicate about performance, ask for more and to push work down. This book provides a plethora of detail and examples of how to do this. This is achieved by the development of the Manager Tools Management Trinity
3. Micromanagement isn’t what most people believe it is. Mark Hostman quotes it as “… the systemic and routine application of an intrusive relationship such that the manager assigns a task, explains what to do, how to do it, insists on total process compliance, and then observes the work in real time, correcting the work as it is being done, and, in the event of divergence from standards, taking OVER the work and completing it.” Very true.