Start Here
Twelve pieces on the foundations of leading and managing people. Read in order if you are new to it, or pick the one that matches what you are dealing with this week.
What this is
Most management writing assumes you already have the basics. This is the set that comes before that — the ideas that keep coming up in our programmes because they explain most of what happens between a manager and a team.
They are short, and none of them requires anything you have not already seen at work. Read them in order and you will have a reasonable map of the ground. Then run Groundworks with your team to find out which part of it needs your attention first.
The twelve
1
Where we start. Why good training fades within six weeks, and what has to be true instead for a team to work differently.
2
The distinction everyone quotes and few use well. Both are jobs; you are almost certainly doing more of one than you think.
3
Adair’s three overlapping needs — task, team, individual. Fifty years old and still the quickest way to see what you are neglecting.
4
A whole-system lens used widely in management and development work: every situation at work has a personal layer, a relational layer and a task layer. A close relative of Adair’s model above, and most problems get misdiagnosed as the wrong layer.
5
Edmondson’s work, and what it actually means: not comfort, but whether people will say the inconvenient thing in front of you.
6
Five things the brain treats as social threats. Explains most of the reactions you did not expect and took personally.
7
Most conversations never leave the first level, where you only hear what confirms what you already thought.
8
What the term means before it became a training-day cliché, and which parts of it are actually learnable.
9
Autonomy, competence and relatedness. The best-evidenced account of motivation there is, and it explains why incentives so often disappoint.
10
Laurie Santos’ course, and the uncomfortable finding that most of what people expect to make them happier does not.
11
Change is the situation; transition is what people go through. Confusing the two is why most change lands badly.
12
Rob Briner on using the best available evidence rather than whatever is to hand — and why the barrier is incentives, not ignorance.
Then what?
Once you have the ground covered, run Groundworks with your team. It takes ten minutes, it is free, and it tells you which of the eight foundations to work on first — which is a better use of your time than working through this list twice.
