It’s a matter of talent
“This book began with a simple observation: there is more intelligence inside our organizations than we are using”.
Some leaders see and grow the intelligence, while others unintentionally create spillage and limit capabilities. I’m sure you’ve seen both types all around you. Which of these groups do you belong to? Are you sure?
Read below to learn more.
Table of Contents
This is not a summary of the book. Instead, I offer my learnings and thoughts based on reading it, in combination with my own experience and interpretations.
The quick and dirty
Title: Multipliers: how the best leaders make everyone smarter / Liz Wiseman with Greg McKeown
One sentence about the book: This is probably the best book about leadership. Period.
The book in one sentence: Research-based principles to unleash your team’s intelligence and capabilities, while identifying your behaviors that limit their growth.
Reading recommendation (yes/no/must): Must read
A win for the employees is a win for the organization
Companies can’t afford leaders who waste talent.
Based on the book’s research, a diminishing leader uses on average only 48% of their team’s capabilities, while multipliers unleash over 95% of them.
Let’s do a quick math exercise for you data-informed folks: for every employee on a diminisher’s team, you waste about 50% of their salary. Want it put differently? Here you go: Get rid of the diminishing leader and it’s like you almost double the team’s headcount for the same cost.
So let’s be clear about this one more time: companies can’t afford leaders who waste talent.
Multipliers and diminishers are leaders on two sides of a continuum, more than a greyscale than 2 opposite endpoints. All of us sit somewhere on this line. Even the best leaders have some diminishing tendencies and vice-versa, the question is not whether we have them, rather are we aware of them and what do we do about it.
The foundation of a multiplier is the belief that people can figure things out. They look beyond their own abilities and focus on extracting and extending the genius of others. Diminishers, on the other hand, believe they are needed to make decisions and drain the intelligence from their team.
Check if you can identify some of these tendencies within your team or with other leaders:
Diminishers are not assholes
Don’t worry, if you identified some of the tendencies above as things you do, it doesn’t mean you’re an evil villain.
When you first read the term ‘diminishers’ I’m sure you had the same image in mind as I did: a tyrant manager who bosses people around and trusts no one. In fact, most of them are very far from that. In fact, diminishers do usually have good intentions, but the results don’t necessarily align with their intentions. In Multipliers, the author calls these leaders accidental diminishers.
The process of moving from accidental diminisher to a multiplier starts with first becoming conscious of where you are on that spectrum. How can you better judge your tendencies? Try these ideas:
Read this article again and go through the tendencies in the image above - think of your team meetings, latest projects, etc. and try to see if you can identify patterns in your behavior
Ask your team members or peers in your next one on one meeting where do they see you on the continuum for some of these tendencies
Take the author’s free Are You an Accidental Diminisher quiz
You can learn about the different profiles of accidental diminishers in the book. Below is an illustration that represents them: note how good intentions are in the heart of all of these.
10 accidental diminisher types (source: https://thewisemangroup.com/quiz/)
More information on accidental diminishers from the Wiseman Group in this video.
It’s an organizational problem, not an individual one
Work today is complex. It involves vast amounts of knowledge and constant change. The role of a leader has shifted from knowing and directing to learning and making connections.
A Gallup study quoted in the book found that across 142 countries, only 13% of employees are fully engaged. Diminishers are an organizational problem, not a local team’s problem.
Diminishers deplete the company of crucial capabilities and intelligence. As we tend to learn basic work behaviors and leadership practices from our first managers, a diminisher boss breeds future diminishing leaders. Over time these behaviors become the norm in our organization and without a clear change plan, the org structure and culture establish it further.
How does diminishing look like on an organizational level? Here are some examples:
Budget and P&L ownership - instead of providing a set budget, targets, and limiting KPIs, employees and/or managers constantly need to ask for approvals
Team structure - departmental and organizational restructuring are decided on top-down, while feedback from middle managers is not baked in early, nor is there an employee committee to spot potential issues
Low team satisfaction - team members request to move to other teams or they leave, while the manager remains in position
Staffing - most leadership roles are filled with external candidates, overqualified employees are not offered other roles proactively nor are supported in finding better jobs outside the organization
My favorite example of all is placing the umbrella of entrepreneurism over employees, encouraging everyone to be one. Unfortunately, if everyone is an entrepreneur, there’s no one to do deep quality work and the entire organization will work towards quick gains and urgent fires.
By no means do I suggest that the company’s resources should be wasted. Hiring more employees as a default solution to increase productivity is the answer of a diminisher, not a multiplier. Having said this, “do more with less” typically results in overworked teams, who max out quickly. Unless there’s a fundamental change in how we lead our teams and in our ability to use more of their intelligence this approach only limits what can be achieved in the long run.
What can we do to improve: A mindset shift for the organization and its leaders
Maybe you follow Adam Grant or Brene Brown or read Brave New Work, Radical Candour, and other recent leadership books. You might work in a fancy matrix organization and work mainly in cross-functional teams. Honestly, all of these do not matter unless you can move yourself and your organization towards the multiplier zone.
The concept of multipliers is the cornerstone of any cultural foundation in your organization. It’s both the reason and the fix to employee burnout and dissatisfaction, to efficiency concerns, to innovation efforts and consequently increasing revenues.
A true reflection needs to take place, followed by a real mind shift. Two streams need to be addressed simultaneously to progress towards the multiplication of your collective intelligence. The first is on an individual basis, the second on an organizational level.
In both paths, it doesn’t require doing a big change all at once. Instead, start by incorporating more multiplier moments in your work and intentionally experiment with changes to your methodologies.
Individual leader growth
Here’s a fact for you: You are not a 100% multiplier. So yes, you do have where to improve. Start by identifying what are your diminishing tendencies. Earlier in the article, I’ve shared a few recommendations as to how to evaluate yourself.
Educate yourself on the tendencies of multipliers and try to introduce changes in small increments through experimentations. Make sure you plan your experiments well and pay attention to these questions:
What’s your hypothesis and how is it connected to your diminishing tendencies?
How would you implement an improvement and where should you introduce it?
How would you evaluate if there’s an improvement?
You can use this resource from the Wiseman Group, called The 30-day multiplier challenge, to help you combat the most common diminishing actions based on the type of accidental diminisher you most relate to.
In the following illustration, you can see some of the most significant multiplier tendencies. Use them to kickstart your journey.
I’d also advise you to follow up this book with a read of The Coaching Habit, which complements it well. Though not strictly a leadership book, it contains valuable observations and tools to incorporate some of these tendencies into day-to-day conversations with your team and colleagues.
If you looked carefully at the image above, you probably asked yourself what is someone’s “Native Genius”. It’s not a clearly defined strength or skill. Think of something that people do well, naturally, easily, and without conditions. Unleashing the Native Genius at work is a guaranteed way to improve productivity, increase satisfaction and reduce burnout.
Organizational adjustments
Executives, mid-level managers, and HR experts invest so much time and resources in acquiring the best talent but spend considerably less effort to benefit the most out of that employee capabilities. Courses, conferences, and scheduled classroom-like training sessions don’t vertically and inherently develop your leaders. They add some more lateral expertise, up skills, but don’t create a significant change in habits and mental models. Here are a few things you can try to turn the ship the right way.
1 - Are your hiring practices limiting the amount of multipliers you hire?
We tend to put extreme focus on hard skills and on evaluating whether a candidate's values match those of our company. Instead, try to focus on their soft skills, how they communicate, and their general perspectives. Some questions to help you find high-likelihood multipliers are:
Ask about their team and check how long they can go on and in what manner: do they specify roles, or do they talk about traits, do they speak highly of them, or stick to facts
Do they comment about the things you say or do they explore further asking more questions?
Do they have intellectual curiosity? Have they shared examples where they made others better and what they learned from their team members?
How much weight is given to direct experience in the role you’re hiring for? Are you looking for natural strengths that cross fields or focused on narrow skill-matching?
Do you have someone from outside the team interviewing the candidate acting as an unbiased bar-raiser and/or do the future team members of the candidate participate in the interview schedule? How much weight is given to their feedback?
2 - How do you proactively develop your leaders?
Leaders usually have the least time to focus on learning new skills, taking courses, and participating in workshops. On the flip side, they do have so many opportunities at work to practice and experiment.
Some things to consider regarding leadership development:
Is there a function in the organization that is in charge of working with leaders beyond the classroom environment of traditional Learning and Development programs?
How do you ensure your leaders are experts in designing their team rituals? Who’s helping them make their interactions more efficient, facilitate retrospectives, define goals, improve their one on one meetings, etc.?
Is there a centralized function that creates hypotheses for organization-wide tendencies and works deliberately to create incremental improvements?
Do you have a program in place for aspiring or emerging leaders? Does it go beyond workshops and include practical experience leading rituals and projects while receiving leadership-specific feedback?
3 - How do you react to a diminishing leader in your organization?
Think about a recent diminishing leader in your organization, what actions were taken to help them and their team recover? Most often the actions taken are a conversation with the team, supervisor’s feedback, HR involvement in establishing new team agreements, crafting roles and responsibilities documents, or changing rituals. Sounds about right?
Try the following:
Gather more information from the affected team concerning multiplier<>diminisher tendencies and assess where they stand
Setup a deliberate experimentation process in place, one that goes from hypothesis to implementation to analysis and consequent iteration
If that manager is a strong performer on an individual level, consider moving them to an individual contributor role and find a different leader for the team, thus benefiting twice
Part ways from the leader, yes even if they are great as individual contributors
The dirty little secret about good leadership
There’s one secret nobody tells you about leadership: good leadership is easy, bad leadership is exhausting.
Wait, what? Leadership is supposed to be hard.
Nope… You know what’s hard? Hard is to be told what to do, to tell people what to do and check up on them, to have colleagues constantly disagree with you, to feel like everything is a fight, to not feel fulfilled.
Good leadership is easy because you do less. Call it lazy leadership.
You give less input, make fewer decisions, negotiate less with internal stakeholders, don’t work overtime. When you unleash the intelligence and capabilities of others, the multiplier effect kicks in and gets more gains in less effort. And you multiply not only business results, but also employee satisfaction, employer branding, customer satisfaction, and your employees' peace of mind.
Now you also saved some time and energy to develop a hobby.
Reading this and realized you are managed by a diminisher? Check out this useful guide on How to deal with diminishing managers by the Wiseman Group.
