Three Star Leadership

Here's the Review in Brief for Growing Great Employees by Erika Andersen. See below for the Review in Depth and for Additional Resources.

How this book is different:

Erika Andersen uses a gardening metaphor to share her quarter century of experience in helping companies manage their people more effectively.

Strengths:

This is a very well-written and structured book. The metaphor of gardening is carried though well, with good connections to the world of managing.

This book is packed with solid, practical and usable material. It's well laid out. Each chapter has a "Big Ideas" section right at the front to help you master the key points.

Erika Andersen also covers many things not mentioned by other books about managing people such as the importance of listening, setting clear expectations, bringing people on board effectively, and more.

Warnings:

The gardening metaphor may become tiresome. Like all metaphors, it's stretched a bit from time to time. That should not be a reason to stop reading.

If you are like most supervisors some of this will seem "wrong" or contrary to things you have taken as true. Try the suggestions here anyway. They're well thought out and presented.

Bottom Line:

If you are responsible for managing people and their performance this book will help you do your job more effectively. It is an absolute must-read for working managers and for senior executives who want to improve people management in their organizations.

Now for the Review in Depth.

In the introduction, Erika Andersen lays out her underlying premise as follows: "Managing well requires skills—just like cooking or playing the piano or, yes gardening—and I hope to teach you some of those skills." She succeeds. Here's an outline of the book, chapter by chapter.

Preparing the soil. This chapter concentrates on what Andersen calls "the foundation of management success:" listening.

Plan before you plant. This is about how to set expectations. There's very good material here on core competencies and key capabilities. One very important skill that Andersen covers is learning to describe a job clearly. This is vital if you want to find the right people to do the job and if you want to establish clear expectations for them.

Picking your plants. This chapter will be hard for many managers in larger companies to implement. It covers using the interview process to make sure you're hiring the people most likely to succeed on the job. The material is good, and picks up on those listening skills mentioned in the first chapter. The sad reality, though, is that HR has co-opted the hiring process in many companies and the managers have very little say

Not too deep and not to shallow is about how to bring people on board. You will search in vain through dozens of books about managing people without finding a word, let alone a chapter, on this critical task.

The gardener's mind is a great chapter about trusting your own skill and letting human nature help you grow great people. This is the core concept beneath the metaphor. Read this chapter when you doubt yourself. Read this chapter when you are tempted to "make" something happen.

A mixed bouquet. Guess what? Everyone who works for you will be different. This is the chapter that will help you figure out how to manage each of them.

Staking and weeding. This is the day-to-day stuff you have to do to keep the garden growing. It's not very exciting most of the time, but it's absolutely essential and the great supervisors I've known have practiced it as a core part of the job. There's good material on giving feedback of all kinds.

Letting it spread. The gardening metaphor starts to break down a little here, but it's OK. This chapter is about delegation, how to do it well, and how it can make things better for everyone.

Plants into gardeners. The metaphor morphs into science fiction. Imagine the plants in the garden rising up and seeking nutrients on their own, watering each other and thriving. Andersen shares her coaching model in this chapter.

How does your garden grow? The metaphor is back and working. Andersen re-states the core idea that successful gardeners trust their own skills and the power of (human) nature. She offers her "management decision tree" to help you work effectively with your team members. If you like complex decision trees, you'll love it. If you don't, skip it. There's enough good narrative and example here that the decision tree is not really necessary.

Some plants don't make it. I wish this chapter had come earlier in the book, but I'm glad it's here. Too many authors imply that if you do as they suggest everything will work wonderfully and profit and joy will reign. Every working manager knows that's impossible. Sometimes you have to help a team member move on to another job where they can thrive. There are tools here to help you.

The master gardener. When you become responsible for people and their performance you enter a field where you will never know everything. I tell new supervisors that it will take them a year and a half at least to become effective and at least ten years of work to master the art of supervision. Even then you won't know or be good at everything. In this final chapter, Andersen comes to terms with that by giving you tools to guide your own development.

If you are responsible for managing people and their performance Growing Great Employees will help you do your job more effectively. It is an absolute must-read for working managers and for senior executives who want to improve people management in their organizations.

Additional Resources

In addition to an excellent book, Erika Andersen also writes an excellent blog called "The Simplest Thing that Works".

If you're interested in improving your own management performance, you should also check out my Working Supervisor's Support Kit.

This book review first appeared in the Three Star Leadership Blog.

To see what other folks thought of this book, or to purchase it from Amazon, click here.