Managing Effort: Getting Results – A Coaching System for Managers

About the book

As a manager of others, getting results is your top priority. In most cases, you can’t do it all by yourself: you depend on the performance of the people you work for, the people you work with, and the people who work for you. As a manager, you are responsible for results – but you cannot manage those results.

This book is about getting results, with a focus on how you can do that through a unique coaching system called “Managing Effort”.

The “Managing Effort System” is a practical, easily learned approach to getting people to do what they are paid to do. It challenges some of the traditional approaches to management, and it may challenge some of your beliefs or practices. At times, some of the concepts may seem counterintuitive. But they are proven and tested – we’ve seen them at work thousands of times, and chances are you have too, every time you have managed effectively.

This book is intended to get you to take a critical look at how you invest your time and energy, to identify where you are maximizing your return on energy, and to examine your management and coaching style and the performance culture you are creating. It will explain the critical elements of performance, show you how to gain commitment to essential processes and behaviors, and set out an amazingly straight-forward process for getting your people to accept responsibility and accountability for their own effort and results. In short, it is about coaching and developing your people to become better self-managers.

We expect that this book will often reinforce your conscious competence. And we are confident that the concepts and approaches we explore will stay with you, becoming a permanent part of your coaching and leadership approach.