Join the conversation with David Dodson, author and serial entrepreneur, as he delves into valuable insights from his book, The Manager’s Handbook, a comprehensive blueprint for efficient management. Find practical and data-driven approaches to hiring, onboarding, and daily leadership, all for managers aspiring to enhance team performance and drive business success.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
David Dodson has a diverse background as an accomplished author, thriving serial entrepreneur, and prominent board member of over 40 companies. He is an active investor in more than 100 businesses and the author of The Manager’s Handbook: Five Simple Steps to Build a Team, Stay Focused, Make Better Decisions, and Crush Your Competition.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
A BLUEPRINT FOR CHANGE
David Dodson’s book, The Manager’s Handbook: Five Simple Steps to Build a Team, Stay Focused, Make Better Decisions, and Crush Your Competition, is truly a blueprint for how to be an effective manager, complete with thorough research and data to support simple, actionable practices.
“I wrote the book that I wish someone had handed me when I was managing,” David explained. “I wanted to write a book that was […] efficiently written for someone who was really busy.” From hiring to onboarding to day-to-day leading, The Manager’s Handbook gives the “why” and “how” for managing practices that work.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
The Hiring Scorecard
“I completely shifted from hiring based on gut feel to hiring based on outcomes. So there’s this great story in Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book where Neville Chamberlain went to meet Hitler. He was enchanted by Hitler, and he went back, and he talked about how Hitler shook his hand with a double-handed handshake, and he was a man to be trusted. And of course, he got Hitler all wrong. Winston Churchill got Hitler right because Winston Churchill never met Hitler. That was the key. He was basing it on objective data. That’s the breakthrough with hiring. When you go to hire somebody, you have to first have a scorecard and say, ‘These are the objectives that I want.’ […] And then you interview against that scorecard, and it’s harder to do, but the round trip of hiring the wrong person, suffering through that for months, letting them go, and starting all over again is way worse.”
A Focus on the Beginning
“I have the whole chapter, it’s called ‘The Hundred-Day Window’ because it turns out that between 40 and 60% of new hires fail within the first 18 months. And by the way, those aren’t bad hires. A lot of those people just quit. And if you are very careful about attending to this hundred-day window, turnover drops by 35%. That’s pretty big, right? […] It’s in those hundred days that the connective tissue is built between the person and the company. And once you’ve got that connective tissue, then you’ve got sort of inertia working in your favor instead of out of your favor.”
Nipping it in the Bud
“I like instant performance management. I mean, we just need to rip up all this ‘once a year we get together, or twice a year we get together and we hold you in judgment.’ I mean, can you imagine running an athletic team like that — where you just wait till the end of the season and tell people how they did? […] It’s insane, but we do that. But instant performance management — when you see something good, bad, whatever you wanna reinforce, you do it when it’s all top of mind and you do it with radical candor. […] And you have to build a relationship of trust, which is not that hard to do because they want it. You both want it. So it’s sort of like you’re both in love. You just have to say it out loud and you say, ‘I’m giving you radical candor on this because I care about you because I want you to succeed. I want you to be great.’”
The Power of the Exit Interview
“People oftentimes make the mistake of having the manager do the exit interview. The HR professional or someone that’s not the direct report should be doing an exit interview because you’re trying to open up the aperture and get the maximum amount of information. Well, […] there are things that you’re not gonna say to your manager, especially if it pertains to the managers, the way they manage the company. […] The exit interview is one of the secret weapons that hardly anybody uses because you’ve got sort of one chance to talk to the person who you just broke up with or they just broke up with you and find out what went wrong […].”
“Activity isn’t Progress”
“There’s so much incoming communication and traffic and stuff that we can sit there and just bang away at our email or our Slack channel all day long, and our fingertips are exhausted. And we actually haven’t gotten anything done. And so that’s really separating: are you moving your company forward or are you just being busy? And back before email, the typical manager got 1000 pieces of communication a year. Today, it’s 30,000 and growing because all this stuff has not made us more productive. It’s made it easier for us to waste each other’s time.”
“But we all know that I could write in a chapter, ‘Hey, you know, email’s a big waste of time. Be more efficient.’ Well, everybody’s just gonna revert back to what they did yesterday. So I looked for just a handful of really easy things that you can do that don’t require downloading an app and don’t require any new technology that will improve your productivity. And for me, I tracked it. It was 80 minutes a day that I improved by just doing three things.”
LEARN MORE
Want more tips for effective management? Grab your copy of The Manager’s Handbook: Five Simple Steps to Build a Team, Stay Focused, Make Better Decisions, and Crush Your Competition on Amazon or wherever books are sold.