Super Players

Foreword

Overview

Every leader wants employees who go the extra mile, yet most organizations cannot sustain that commitment once daily pressure and conflict set in. The difficulty is not declaring a culture but keeping it alive across thousands of ordinary decisions, without relying on a single policy or slogan.

Mutual Commitment

Shari Conaway, former managing director of Southwest Airlines’ People Department, grounds the argument in a Career with Heart built on mutual commitment: employees and company each look out for the other’s interests. Southwest calls employees Cohearts, the heart of the company, and recruits first for attitude. That culture is deliberate and daily, not effortless. Aviation carries safety burdens and external pressures, and the work is physically and emotionally demanding, yet the right people who believe in the mission can resolve most conflict together. Conaway’s nearly 30 years there convince her that this partnership drives results. Southwest’s people-centric culture is difficult to create and sustain, demanding focus and hard work.

The Four Habits

The framework names four habits:

• Desire
• Character
• Performance
• Influence

These require effort from every leader and employee, every day and in every situation; there is no “pixie dust” and no top-down exception. The evidence is stark: 47 consecutive profitable years, eight appearances on Forbes’ America’s Best Employers list, 66,000 employees, and 130 million passengers a year.

Key Takeaways

• The employment relationship is a two-way obligation: each side is responsible for the other's interests, not merely its own.
• Hiring should weigh disposition before skill, since a commitment culture depends on people who already believe in the work.
• The four habits bind everyone in the organization, so a leader who treats them as rules for subordinates has misunderstood the culture.
• Safety-critical, physically demanding work does not excuse a people-first culture; it makes the right dispositions more important, because they allow most friction to be resolved without escalation.
• Conaway's account of decades of profitability and repeated employer recognition implies a culture that is difficult to build and harder to maintain, requiring continuous effort rather than a one-time program.

Read This First…

Overview

Most people believe they are valuable at work, often ranking themselves above their peers, while the people judging advancement see a different standard. That gap can stall a career no matter how hard someone works, and closing it is not a matter of effort alone.

The adequacy gap

Most employees and leaders believe they are more valuable than their company does. That perceived gap shapes career speed and distance. In surveys, most people rate themselves in the top half or even the top tenth of their peers. Leaders asked which employees they liked and would rehire described a minimum standard:

• show up
• meet basic job requirements
• handle ordinary problems
• deliver on time and on budget
• follow instructions
• get along
• avoid trouble
• return value roughly equal to pay

The best organizations see those traits as merely adequate. They keep a company afloat but do not help it outpace competitors, survive rapid change, or thrive when adaptability and intelligence, human and machine, decide who leads. Competitive markets favor fewer, better-paid, more capable people.

The Super Player standard

A Super Player draws a reaction of surprise and admiration: work better than the leader could have done, initiative taken, expectations cleared by a mile. Each action functions as a tryout for greater responsibility. Leaders are hungry for people who step up, and what they seek is intelligence expressed in behavior: sensing patterns, creating coherence, guiding systems. The standards are:

• maximize potential and resources
• solve complex problems proactively and systematically
• create efficiencies
• improve everything creatively
• inspire and motivate
• remove obstacles to peak performance
• deliver exponential return on investment
• contribute to a positive environment

Such people must be developed and retained. Super Players control their own destinies, and blaming leadership holds them back. COVID restrictions at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020/2021 and Beijing in 2022 tested athletes, and the most successful accepted reality and made the best of it. Leaders should make fun productive, delight employees as much as customers, and coach people toward personal best rather than merely manage them.

Four capacities

Scaling Up, by Verne, sets out four hiring criteria consistent with Jim Collins, Patrick Lencioni, Brad Smart, and other performance experts. In order:

• Will: desire to excel, courage, perseverance, learning, and innovation. The first 90 to 120 days often feel perfect, then flaws and hard work surface. Employees own their experience and can use curiosity to add value.
• Values: cultural rules for decisions. Fit matters, and faking alignment eventually shows.
• Results: measurable consistency and self-improvement. Employers tolerate too much from consistent performers, but they still need people who distinguish hard work from smart work.
• Skills: lowest priority, because technical skills need refreshing every three to five years. The durable 21st-century skills are observation, communication, and adaptation.

Habits and the AI shift

Employment is a pact of deliverables for compensation, not a right or privilege. US Bureau of Labor Statistics data say the average person changes careers seven times, so habits matter more than fixed knowledge. Scientists say 40 percent of daily action is habitual. Daniel G. Amen, M.D., argues in Change Your Brain, Change Your Life that healthy and unhealthy habits are contagious. The 12 habits and 36 actions are best taken one chapter per month over 36 months.

Leading intelligence

AI can make teams faster and flatter but also emptier when people forward generated responses and stop asking real questions. Kara, a sharp and trusted teammate, watched her voice dissolve in auto-generated drafts until she asked what she would say if she were not trying to impress a tool. Intelligence is relational: how a system responds, evolves, and reflects. Three modes adapted from Van M. Van's framework:

• "Do for me": command and execute. Creativity shuts down.
• "Think for me": offload sensemaking without context. Output becomes derivative.
• "Think with me": engage, invite insight, and co-create alignment.

Super Players pause before prompting, calibrate before correcting, and practice clarity, congruency, and integrity. They do not treat AI as magic or people as automation. The future Super Player is a hybrid who partners with AI without losing judgment and leads rather than merely reacts.

Denis Diderot's reversal is the hinge: will follows desire rather than producing it. Commitment meets an obligation and generally stops there, producing adequacy; devotion brings the same enthusiasm to dull work as exciting work and treats each action as a chance to learn. All three habits rest on that desire.

Jessica at SumCo

Jessica joined SumCo as a customer service rep, hoping for leadership. At 26 she got it when her team leader left and Kathy, the VP, handed her five direct reports. Kathy had only 30 minutes every two or three weeks, and SumCo's leadership program was not ready, so Jessica learned by trial and error. She restored team peace and retention, met quarterly goals, and became a "set-her-and-forget-her" leader. That was adequate, not Super Player: she focused on firefighting, did not build other leaders, and left the company without a pipeline. As a Super Player, she asked peers how they grew, found leadership books, contacted a community college business department, and proposed that SumCo pay for a course while she launched an interim program for new supervisors. Productivity rose companywide, and she joined the committee designing the formal program.

Three Super Player steps

1. Learn continuously. According to Brad Smart's Topgrading, A-players read 24 books a year, half for work and half for pleasure; Mark Zuckerberg set a goal of one book every two weeks, and Peter Drucker read fiction to sharpen people skills.
2. Get a peer coach. Marshall Goldsmith recommends an accountability partner who challenges you daily.
3. Be a "Multiplier," Liz Wiseman's term for leaders who amplify the results of people around them, and look for untapped strengths on your team.

Alex at PrepaTax

PrepaTax had 48 branches and more than $50 million in revenue when its leaders set a BHAG of $1 billion in ten years and a One Page Strategic Plan calling for 15% branch growth. Alex, new at Pleasantville, hit 27%, nine points above any other branch, but consumed four times the resources of a branch that was one forty-eighth of revenue. Marketing and legal had to clean up ads that ignored branding and compliance standards, IT cleaned up his server mistakes, and veteran preparers left. He had chased visibility, not company success. The Super Player version studied the tax industry and national firms, lunched with colleagues, brought his ad plan to marketing and legal, and suggested IT train branch staff to solve common problems. Every branch reached 15%, several exceeded it, and Alex was asked to lead an idea committee.

Alignment steps

1. Absorb the vision: know the BHAG and quarterly priorities.
2. Align priorities: ask whether each task serves the larger vision.
3. Enroll colleagues: teach the vision to deepen your own grasp.

Isaac at VeggieHut

Isaac took a part-time job at VeggieHut in college because he loved the food. Diane, the district leader, saw potential and offered him an assistant store leader role at the Boulder store after graduation. She described plans to open five stores a year in each of the next five years across western states.

Isaac was six months into the assistant store leader role at the Boulder VeggieHut and thriving. He loved hospitality, saw a real path to promotion, ate free every shift, and won Franco's respect by keeping the kitchen and dining room spotless. Diane, the district leader, admired his passion for vegetarian cooking and for the customer and employee experience, and hinted he might one day fill her shoes.

The health inspection was coming. The previous store leader had let the walk-in refrigerator decay, and a busboy had told the last inspector the unit was perpetually broken, so the store was shut down on the spot. Repair bills and the public black eye produced two poor quarters, corporate pressure, fewer regular-customer interactions, and unusually high turnover.

The isolated fix

VeggieHut puts the same refrigerator in every store. It rarely fails outright, so nobody replaces it, but aging units jump past health code limits without warning and repair costs accumulate; Franco said a new walk-in was unaffordable after the revenue slump. So Isaac solved for his own branch. He paid for a preventative maintenance call, opened the Monday staff meeting with a pep talk, ordered hourly walk-in checks with instructions to lower the temperature the moment the needle entered the danger zone, and asked hosts to alert him as soon as the inspector arrived. The visit went clean, the location posted a record high score, and a solid quarter restored revenue.

That was adequate, not Super Player. Isaac was popular and conscientious but added little beyond daily business: he treated a company-wide vulnerability as a store-level nuisance, and by patching only his branch he became part of the constraint on VeggieHut's growth and on his own. He already had Diane's ear and knew her expansion plans, including a preferred future of five new stores a year. From day one he should have asked:

• What was being done consistently poorly, judged by current standards?
• Which processes, procedures, and behaviors would inhibit future growth and scalability?
• How was employee satisfaction monitored, maintained, and acted on?

He should have brought the refrigerator to Franco and Diane right after the first inspection as a systemic issue, and gone to Diane if Franco himself blocked that future. Creating value means adopting company growth objectives as your own, flagging systemic issues that could inhibit growth, and enabling the people and systems that support scalability.

The super version

Isaac scheduled several temperature checks a day and recorded each result, which proved the checks happened and quantified how often the unit failed; he funded the chore with credits toward free meals and bonus time off. He gathered repair records and revenue figures from Franco and from other assistant store leaders, then compared a new walk-in against maintenance costs, revenue lost to failed inspections, and the hiring and training expense of turnover. Diane used those numbers to win a corporate capital investment. Stores across the region saved on repairs, passed inspections consistently, and kept more employees.

Three ways to start:

1. Learn the whole business. Orientation will not hand it to you, so enlist colleagues in other departments and experienced leaders to explain company cycles and how the moving parts connect.
2. Study scalability. Read about how companies grow, including Great by Choice by Jim Collins and Verne Harnish's tips in Start to Scale, and design solutions that would still work with hundreds or thousands of people.
3. Create growth committees. Enlist ambitious colleagues, share what you learn, and champion growth loudly enough that others make it routine.

Angela loved her marketing job at Evergreen Commercial Construction, a green builder. After Evergreen merged with another green building company, the transition unsettled personnel and communication with customers, and negative reviews spiked across employment and customer platforms. Jeff, her boss, asked her to lead the PR response as the company shored up its pipeline and prepared for more acquisitions.

A plan built on energy

Angela proposed monitoring online presence, thanking positive reviewers, responding to negatives and moving those conversations offline, plus regular social posts, a blog, and a weekly employee podcast. Tony in IT offered production help, and Bonnie took over social and review engagement, persuading some negative reviewers to revise or remove comments. The first podcast episode featured Bonnie's work, and nearly half of Evergreen's employees listened. Social engagement rose. Then momentum faded: topics ran dry, posting slowed, and podcast engagement dipped. The bad press eased, and Jeff said executives were pleased.

Why the effort stalled

The plan relied on intensity rather than infrastructure. Angela never aligned content with broader company goals or asked what executives most wanted to highlight. Jeff delegated but did not set clear leadership expectations. Bonnie produced volume without metrics or standards to show whether followers became clients or stayed engaged. The podcast had no content calendar or system for consistency, and Tony's audio skill did not make the show compelling. By keeping creative work inside marketing, Angela missed subject-matter experts in other departments. It was hustle, not structure.

To create value, the work has to do three things:

• Serve present goals and future scalability.
• Build systems and templates others can repeat, improve, and expand.
• Engage colleagues across the company in co-creating content, building skills, and sharing ownership.

The Super Player version

Angela paused to ask what caused the reputation problem, what long-term implications different responses carried, and how to design for the future. She met Jeff and the executive team to understand the short- and long-term vision. The merger had exposed fractures, and leadership wanted to re-engage internal and external audiences. She designed a structured communication strategy. Internally, Evergreen would use a weekly newsletter, a monthly podcast instead of a weekly one, and quarterly in-person events for values and recognition. Externally, it would use a social media calendar, a blog, and a playbook for online reviews. She hired a part-time journalism student to help with templates, brand guidelines, and repeatable storytelling, and asked each department to contribute content annually. After three months, followers grew modestly but conversion rates followed. Surveys showed new clients had found Evergreen through blog posts or social content, and employee morale rose. Leadership committed to fund the program for another year and asked Angela to keep leading it. Excellence had become culture rather than an emergency response.

Steps employees can take today

1. Act with the future in mind. Ask if a solution is repeatable and sustainable, and how others might build on it.
2. Create templates. Document solutions, build checklists and how-tos, and make structures others can use.
3. Engage creative means. Study the content you consume, notice what earns attention, and bring those insights to reports, meetings, and strategy.

Mary builds a process, not a rescue

Complaints landed on Mary's desk and she paused rather than panicked. Her team drafted a process that streamlined common tasks, assigned labor by strength and tracked progress end to end, then spent 30 minutes a day building a version that could scale. They objected that there was no time to plan; she said that was exactly why they had to. The result was efficient, replicable, transparent, balanced and resilient, with quality control, documentation, cross-training, onboarding guides, and forecasts for seasonal surges and vacations. The last innovation taught other departments to make their own simple videos, freeing the video team and turning clients into co-creators.

Three steps employees can take

1. Meet cross-functionally: experience is shaped across silos, and one lunch can change a workflow.
2. Establish clear process metrics: measure by quality, time and cost, and track how planning affects efficiency.
3. Contribute to process improvement: document systems, make the how visible, and aggregate small monthly gains into systemic lift.

Dylan at BreezeAir

BreezeAir Heating and Air Conditioning had a breakout year and an operations collapse to match: technicians ran long, leadership refused overtime, and Dylan's team rescheduled two or three customers almost daily while reviews soured. He won temp workers and a cleared day, then ran eight hours for technicians and phone reps on late arrivals, cost overruns, role-played interactions and coaching in de-escalation, mirroring and tone. He added a quiz, a survey on friendliness, professionalism and clarity, a shadow program pairing well-reviewed employees with strugglers, and longer appointment blocks. Scores and reviews climbed.

The gains were temporary: nothing entered onboarding, and nobody asked why technicians ignored procedure. Listening sessions found that onboarding taught diagnosis but skimmed repair execution, some had never been shown current methods, and efficiency carried no reward. He won quarterly skills testing and got efficiency and satisfaction scores into the bonus structure. Within two quarters reviews rose, morale spiked, online referrals produced leads, and technician retention improved.

Brittany at Cinemand

Cinemand Software had no communications department, so a customer service team was handed the CEO's retreat presentation for two hundred employees. Janna, Steve's assistant, delivered a gentle demolition: dry, five typos, quarterly goals lost in the background. Theater-trained Aliyah rebuilt the visuals around emotion and humor, and the talk landed, but the goals still did not stick, because the team had built a moment rather than a campaign. The Super Player version, "Mission Possible," framed the goals through a fictional employee's journey, planted clues in pre-event emails, gave Steve a theme, and released bloopers afterward. Employees used the name as shorthand, and Steve funded the team as an internal comms squad.

Connie at BrightStart-4-All

BrightStart-4-All, a nonprofit serving low-income Latinx infants and toddlers, spent three years requesting a marketer before hiring Connie. She launched social profiles, rebuilt the site from a previous employer's template, and lifted newsletter open rates 5%. Donations never rose, and a "Local Baby" holiday card sold modestly. Her creativity was solitary: she trained no one, and nothing she built would outlast her. As a Super Player she paused, interviewing stakeholders and every department, surveying donors, then co-creating a strategy tied to real goals. Lunch-and-learns taught storytelling, video and social media, and a rotating content calendar, templates and a new creative committee spread the work.

The BrightStart Result

A small creative committee carried the redesign of the newsletter and website at BrightStart-4-All. The work was stronger than Connie could have produced alone and spread ownership beyond her. By year's end donations rose 18% and volunteer inquiries increased. Marketing belonged to everyone. At the annual party Ramon toasted Connie, and she stood with her team to share the credit.

Creativity as a Discipline

Three steps translate creativity into practice:

• Establish clear, data-driven goals. Define metrics before launching, then test, measure, refine, and optimize rather than only create.
• Develop a creativity process. Treat inspiration as exposure and structure: read widely, join forums, visit trade shows in unfamiliar industries, and build systems for ideation, feedback, and iteration.
• Surface the creativity around you. Invite collaboration, host show-and-tell sessions, share tools, and spotlight ideas from unexpected places.

Auggie at GoGas

Auggie arrived to lead engineering at GoGas, a gas station chain, inheriting ten veterans and the myth of a predecessor who retired after 40 years. He saw an R&D process stuck in the past: underused CAD software, outdated station modeling, no 3D printing, and no conversation about electric vehicle charging. GoGas was profitable, but Auggie saw the edge of a cliff. When he raised prototyping, EV adaptation, and CAD skills, Ricki said they had talked about it before, but urgent work always came up. Abel said the company met its targets. The resistance was generational inertia, not malice. Leadership had hired Auggie to modernize but had not told the wider organization that change was coming. He scaled back to a first step, full CAD training and a 3D printer, with EV to wait. Chris called it doable, Abel nodded, and the team built a rollout plan.

Persuasion and the Full Arc

Urgency was the gap. Auggie had built rapport and compromised, but he let the team hear a pace objection rather than the stakes of delay. A Super Player sees the full arc of transformation, speaks to hearts and minds, and uses strategy, persuasion, and timing to bring people through belief, not just tasks. Auggie studied Robert Cialdini's seven principles of persuasion: reciprocity, scarcity, authority, consistency, liking, social proof, and unity. He opened with a personal story about an outdated process that cost a key contract, cast modernization as entry into an elite class of innovators, cited data and experts, pointed to competitors, invoked efficiency, safety, and progress, offered extra help, and drew on existing relationships. The full plan, EV included, drew questions and suggestions instead of resistance. Within two weeks the team had a shared roadmap for software upgrades, 3D printing, and EV research. Within months GoGas rolled out station designs with integrated EV charging at lower cost and faster turnaround.

Change Steps

Three employee steps follow:

• Write an envisioned future using Ari Weinzweig's technique: describe the change in vivid emotional and physical terms so people feel what success looks like.
• Map your influence landscape: list everyone affected, consider their perspective, anticipate objections, and use Cialdini's principles in the pitch.
• Create your coalition: enlist others early, share credit, and give voice, because change sticks when others own the mission.

Resource suggestions and discussion prompts follow each exercise.

Scale comes from turning large missions into systems that move. An operator describes building a platform rather than climbing a ladder; the power is tactical, organizing people, processes, and technology to execute. The boss test is to find the pain a manager carries into boardrooms and solve it, especially when it is hard; ask directly what they need to win. Launching Oracle Cloud meant pushing against legacy systems and corporate friction. Delegation is the scale mechanism: hire experts in finance, operations, engineering, and integration, align them, trust them, and get out of the way. Influence happens before the meeting, in one-on-ones with potential blockers; listen, adjust, build coalitions, so other leaders repeat the idea. Loving the build matters because bureaucracy and burnout make emotional cost the real plateau.

Messy as Method

Alex Bradley, art director at Chandelier Creative, treats mess as curiosity, not disorder. She still leaves cabinet doors open; her attention is elsewhere, imagining. Messy is not erratic. Messy has direction; erratic loses the center and patches ideas without story or soul. Her process resembles visual excavation: wide research, screenshots, moodboards, rough compositions, and half-formed ideas revisited later. Breakthroughs come from those sparks, not clean outlines. Ideas are living organisms, not objects: a concept is a seed that stretches and evolves, and rushing it toward a clean headline or trendy aesthetic can suffocate it. That means knowing when to press or let breathe, when to build structure or loosen the grip, and trusting the right environment yields more than demanded. Compression quietly kills creative work: pressure demands answers too early. Protect by letting ideas stay strange, resisting explanation too soon, and letting meaning condense naturally.

Ten Conversations

Nadine Heintz, senior director of brand content and marketing operations at Etsy, pitched a unified content team as a center of excellence, consistency across channels, and career paths. An earlier attempt stalled on self-doubt, with journalism roots making org design feel foreign. After structural changes reopened the chance, she tested the idea with affected writers and heard it would strengthen support and skill development. Leaders liked it but did not move while other changes were underway. Jan Brown, a business coach, advised sharing a good idea with ten people and seeing what happens. Heintz built a deck using McKinsey's SCR framework:

• Situation: writers scattered across the company.
• Complications: inconsistent channels and limited skill and career development.
• Recommendation: a unified content center of excellence.

She practiced an elevator pitch in hallways and over coffee, gave formal presentations, and refined the case with feedback. A new marketing leader and other changes cleared the path; the idea was approved in a weekly one-on-one. The lesson is patience: personal readiness and business readiness are different, and a failed or delayed pitch still proves creative courage.

Holding the Room

Mo Fathelbab, former executive director of Entrepreneurs' Organization, built The Forum, a peer-dialogue protocol of deep trust, after joining nearly four decades ago as its first employee. Facilitation is a top-level skill; meetings are culture-setting rituals. A facilitator sets tempo, shapes discourse, and decides when silence speaks. The three traits of a Super Facilitator are:

• Drive vulnerability: model candor, ask open questions, name the unspoken.
• Practice relational self-awareness: be the conductor, not the show; with eight people in a full-day retreat, speak less than one hour, ask more than answer, track quiet voices.
• Embody the ethos: confidentiality, respect, speaking from experience, non-judgment, commitment to growth.

Start by volunteering to run a meeting, sharing an agenda, opening with a check-in, and closing with one takeaway. Reflect on who spoke, who stayed silent, whether the group went deep, and whether people left clearer and more connected. Facilitation moves a group from chaos to coherence and is how Super Players activate others.

Key Takeaways

• Bring devotion rather than mere compliance to your work, aim at problems the business has not yet solved, and treat each result as an audition for more responsibility.
• Bet on will and values before results and skills when you hire or assess yourself; drive and cultural alignment compound while technical knowledge decays.
• Turn your fixes into infrastructure: document the process, build templates, and hand ownership to colleagues so the improvement outlasts your attention.
• Build consent before the meeting: test ideas with affected colleagues, recruit allies early, facilitate so quiet voices shape the decision, and make the cost of waiting visible.
• Use AI to sharpen your judgment rather than outsource it; ask it to challenge your assumptions and keep the final reasoning and questions yours.

Next Steps…

Overview

Knowing which habits would help is not the same as having them. Most people know what to do but don't do it, and finishing the last page doesn't close that gap. What's left is a decision about where to start.

One Behavior at a Time

Get ahead by doing the job you want next before the title arrives, and by working in small steps: one habit each month, one behavior each week. The twelve-month plan is built to be run again once you finish it, like athletes practicing fundamentals. A second pass isn't repetition for its own sake. It shows you new ways to improve results at every level. It also tends to build a following among colleagues and leaders as the material gets shared. For focused help on one specific habit, the Growth Institute resources listed at each chapter's end are there. The book works equally as a full instruction manual or a quick reference.

Key Takeaways

• Start performing at the level of the job you want while the title still belongs to someone else, and use the gap as practice instead of waiting for permission.

• Keep each change small enough that a bad week can't undo the whole effort.

• Share what you're working on with colleagues and the people above you; the material spreads, and the visibility it creates is part of what moves your career forward.

• Treat the chapter-end Growth Institute resources as a reference shelf for quick fixes, reaching for a single tool when one habit needs work rather than rereading the whole book.

The Employer’s Guide to Stimulating Value

Overview

Employers keep waiting for valuable employees to appear, while employees keep waiting to be told what valuable means. What neither side can see is that the standards, the descriptions, and the development all have to exist before anyone can meet them.

A survey of CEOs found that employers often struggle to find valuable employees, and part of the fault lies with employers. Many companies lack basic elements:

• Clear standards and values that project company culture.
• Detailed job descriptions with metrics.
• Solid training programs that help employees define value.
• Regular, structured reviews so employees receive useful feedback.
• Robust recruiting so poor performers can be replaced.

When employers expect employees to figure things out alone, performance becomes inconsistent. Employers should provide the environment and tools that nurture value creation, yet employees often must compensate for missing infrastructure, which frustrates people who do not know what is wanted. A companion guide addresses employers and employees rising into employer roles.

Will: Habits of Desire

• Habit 1: Developing Leadership. Leadership development reduces spending on outside recruiting, acculturation, and retention. Three activities matter:
  • Share the leadership process as a coach. Keep a journal of why and how you act, discuss it in one-on-ones, and extract lessons from daily wins and challenges.
  • Create internal peer learning programs. If none exist, give rising employees direction, budget, and resources, then promote the program and ensure leaders participate.
  • Apportion time and money to leadership development. Growth and succession need homegrown leaders, and training can take months or years, so start small, integrate development into reviews, and give one leadership challenge each quarter.
• Habit 2: Aligning Vision. Alignment needs a grounded common belief, not mere agreement. Three steps:
  • Train diligence by teaching people exactly how to reach goals, overprepare, and attend to details.
  • Focus on truth over expedience by making it safe, even required, to surface problems and inefficiencies.
  • Reward people for digging deep with bonuses for efficiency ideas that save money, a day off for solving a recurrent problem, and regular suggestion meetings.
• Habit 3: Enabling Growth. Great employees do not automatically know how to scale a company, so growth must shape culture. Three steps:
  • Make plans well-defined and well known, with tangible objectives leading to a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG), broadcast and tied to daily metrics.
  • Empower employee decision-making by aligning how decisions are made and using a template of goals and milestones so people measure progress.
  • Reward forward thinkers by funding safe failure. Set aside time and resources for experiments, allow graceful failure, and reward success.

Values: Habits of Character

Core values often become decoration. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras wrote the 1996 Harvard Business Review article "Building Your Company's Vision" about core values, and nearly every company now posts five or six phrases for most people to ignore. At an Inc. 5000 talk to 75 CEOs, all said their companies had core values, but only three could recite them. If CEOs do not know the values, employees cannot live them. Values and purpose must be pervasive and integrated from orientation through advancement.

• Habit 4: Integrating Core Values and Purpose. Three steps:
  • Make core values and core purpose meaningful. Single words like integrity and trust do not direct decisions, and a purpose implied to make the owner money does not inspire. Test whether values are actionable, measurable, understandable, able to attract wanted talent and repel unwanted talent, usable in hiring, firing, praise, and reprimand, and worth sacrificing profit for. A purpose must answer what difference the company makes in people's lives and the world. The guide points to outside resources for this work.
  • Create core-values- and purpose-based job descriptions and performance reviews. List tangible, measurable requirements for each value and purpose, vet candidates against them, monitor adherence, and remove misfits quickly. Annual reviews doom a company to a year of mediocrity, while quarterly or monthly reviews allow growth and refinement.
  • Recruit heavily. Without a waiting list of ready recruits who fit the values, a company cannot replace a useful but toxic employee, and the team learns that values are for show.
• Habit 5: Managing Conflict. A healthy environment for debate moves a company forward. Three steps:
  • Train productive conflict. Do not assume people know how to disagree fairly, so bring in professionals to teach debate and resolution of personality struggles.
  • Establish open forums through monthly town halls, quarterly surveys, an online suggestion box, and room to vent.
  • Make sure everyone feels heard. Leaders can use mirroring, note taking, and follow-up questions, while the company explains how it follows up and tracks satisfaction statistics.
• Habit 6: Driving Excellence. Excellence should not be left to chance. Three steps:
  • Reward learning in new areas by pushing people outside their comfort zones and building advanced skills in-house.
  • Media-enable employees, since companies without multiple media competencies leave people behind and get left behind.
  • Teach planning, because many people cannot build a plan, monitor milestones, and account for moving parts. A standardized structure helps them communicate and identify what is missing.

Results: Habits of Performance

• Habit 7: Surfacing Issues. Steven D. Goldstein's Why Are There Snowblowers in Miami? describes a glaring glitch in Sears's distribution system that hundreds of people overlooked for years and that cost the company resources. Companies must balance the status quo against reacting to too many ideas. Three steps:
  • Promote practical ideation and pragmatism. Let an inventor present to the group and let the group debate the merits, which improves criticism and ensures vetting before resources are risked.
  • Facilitate information sharing. Give departments physical, technological, and time capacity to share knowledge, supported by process and training so the result is not a crowded closet of meaningless data.
  • Support continual improvement by rewarding solutions. Innovation matters only if it produces more profit, so create legitimate and fun incentives for solving systemic problems.
• Habit 8: Improving Process. Employers often reward on-the-fly problem solving when they should encourage system builders. Adequate employees solve problems as they arise, good employees create process for themselves, and Super Players establish systems and metrics that help the company scale. Three steps:
  • Encourage process improvement time by budgeting for work on the business, incentivizing systemization, and making documentation part of onboarding and cross-training.
  • Test potential employees for process capability with a small project and ask how to make it more efficient for a larger team.
  • Communicate the big picture with a BHAG and three-year key thrusts so employees design systems with end goals in mind.
• Habit 9: Getting Things Done. Leadership must create accountability, which increases ownership and productivity. Three steps:
  • Kill sacred cows. Tradition is not a reason to keep unproductive processes, so encourage employees to deconstruct them.
  • Incentivize the behavior you need. If requirements and rewards conflict, or people lack tools and training, work will not get done.
  • Empower local decision-making. Ground-level people know how things work, so create safe failure environments, let decisions align with objectives, and reward success publicly.

Skills: Habits of Influence

• Habit 10: Fostering Communication. Internal communication deserves more spending than it usually gets, and affordable tools can improve the return. Three steps:
  • Create standardized methods and protocols for email subject lines, structure, copying, document length, and presentation formats so people focus on substance.
  • Engage everyone in communication through departmental activities rather than a one-way CEO lecture, and assess communication skills in hiring and reviews.
  • Reward effective creativity by identifying and replicating unique, entertaining practices instead of letting them remain one-offs.
• Habit 11: Inspiring Creativity. Creative work needs an environment that supports out-of-the-box thinking. Three steps:
  • Provide creative structure that allows safe failure. Give clear goals, ample time, and resources to brainstorm before nailing ideas, and set boundaries that do not jeopardize livelihoods.
  • Get outside guidance and inspiration through speakers, conferences, museums, and monthly sessions sharing outside thinking.
  • Expect more of creatives. If they only do design work, the company misses their ability to see old problems anew, so expose them to non-creative staff.
• Habit 12: Effecting Change. Companies often avoid teaching persuasion for fear of repercussions, but growth requires people who can change hearts and minds for the right reasons. Three steps:
  • Create a culture where change is welcome, with standards that distinguish argument for its own sake from effective persuasion and public recognition for new creations.
  • Institute a persuasion course in onboarding, teaching theories and practice from Robert Cialdini and others, with presentations and media in a safe setting.
  • Foster strong relationships through empathy, cross-department knowledge exchanges, take-a-colleague-to-lunch events, inter-department trainings, and after-work social events so people can find followers. The guide also points to a recommended TED talk.

Key Takeaways

• Build the operating basics first: publish clear standards, write role descriptions with measurable outcomes, train people for the work, review them on a regular cadence, and keep a recruiting bench deep enough to replace poor fits. Without that scaffolding, capable staff waste effort guessing what good looks like.
• Treat leadership, alignment, and scale as deliberate systems: coach through documented one-on-ones, fund peer learning, make truth-telling safer than convenience, and translate the long-range goal into quarterly challenges and funded experiments. Otherwise growth outruns the people expected to carry it.
• Turn stated principles into decision rules: make each one specific enough to guide hiring, reviews, praise, discipline, and profit tradeoffs, then keep a standing pool of candidates who fit, so no useful but corrosive employee becomes untouchable. Add regular venues for disagreement and skill-building so those principles survive real conflict.
• Reward process builders rather than firefighters: give people time to document and simplify systems, test candidates for process thinking, retire traditions that no longer earn their keep, and align authority with local knowledge. Scaling stalls when heroics substitute for repeatable systems.
• Invest in influence as a scalable skill: standardize routine communication, give creative people constraints and exposure to the rest of the business, and teach persuasion in onboarding with real practice. Change will otherwise depend on a few charismatic people instead of a company-wide capability.