Hundred Percenters

Challenge Your Employees to Give It Their All, and They'll Give You Even More

by Mark Murphy

Number of pages: 240

Publisher: McGraw-Hill

BBB Library: Human Resources, Operations Management

ISBN: 9780071638944



About the Author

Mark is the founder and CEO of Leadership IQ, a top-rated provider of leadership training. He has trained personnel at Microsoft, IBM, MasterCard, Merck, and other companies. Murphy has been featured in such publications as Fortune, Forbes, BusinessWeek, and The Washington Post.

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Editorial Review

Peek out your office door and take a good look at your employees. With the exception of a few royal pains, you've got a nice group of people. By and large, they do good work, they get along with you and one another and they're generally well intentioned. But, are they giving 100%? Are they pushing themselves to their limits and beyond? If leadership IQ research on more than 500,000 employees and leaders is any indication, out your door you see a lot more getting Okness than greatness . Right now, 77% of leaders believe that their employees are not giving 100%. And they're not far off in their assessment, because 72% of employees admit they're not giving 100%. The 100% Leader creates Hundred Percenters by challenging them and creating a connection with them, unleashes their true potential to achieve extraordinary results. The 100% Leader doesn't just accept people as they are; he instead sees what we could become and cares enough to push us beyond self- imposed limitations to realize our potential.q

Book Reviews

"Ultimately, Mark Murphy’s book is as much about turning yourself into a hundred percent leader as it is about achieving this same result from your employees. In reality, one naturally follows from the other, and both rely on the same tools and techniques. They are mutually inclusive — you can’t have one without the other." Gulyani.com

"We’ve all experienced employees who were very good at their craft; very highly skilled, but also are a royal pain for their bosses and co-workers. Don’t you just love trying to deal with those people? Murphy has penned an entire chapter on how to deal with what he terms “talented terrors”. These are people who possess the skillsets of a superstar, but also have an attitude that is like a cancer in the workforce. They destroy morale, reduce leadership effectiveness and even get good leaders fired. They must either change or be removed and Murphy walks the reader through the entire process." montyrainey

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Wisdom to Share

The 100% Leader doesn't just accept people as they are; he instead sees what we could become and cares enough to push us beyond self- imposed limitations to realize our potential.

If you issue great challenges while still building intense connections with people, you're the ultra-desirable 100% Leader.

The balance seems to be that leaders should be loved, but they should be loved for pushing people to give 100%, not for coddling or appeasing them.

You don't have to be a world leader to issue a HARD challenge, nor do you have to have thousands of followers. You just have to be willing to push past what's easy, to do what's right.

Money is great. But working for money will never be as motivating as working for something bigger than oneself.

Companies whose existential anchor is money, like Enron, will never outperform a company whose existence is serving customers.

Imagine if Martin Luther King Jr. had stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and said: "Our goal should be that within the next 30 years, the incidents of hate crimes will be reduced by 63% and the percentage of minorities living below the poverty line will be no higher than the percentage for any other racial group." Those might be goals to aspire, but not to inspire.

HARD goals aspire. They force us to push through our self-imposed limitations, to focus on something bigger than our own immediate wants, and to solve challenges of vital necessity.

Ask your employees this question: Do you believe this goal is necessary? If 70% or more say yes, then you're in good shape.

As crazy as it sounds, limiting people's resources can actually be an effective way to grow their skills and elevate their performance.

There's a positive linear relationship between difficulty and performance. Studies proved that as the difficulty of the goal increased, performance also increased, given that the goal was specific.

Critical mistakes left uncorrected are unacceptable. This translates to heavy frustration on your part and unnecessary performance limitations on the part of your employees; both of which have no place in a Hundred Percenter workplace.

Eliminate blame because the goal of delivering constructive feedback is not to make employees feel bad for whatever they may have done or thought. 100% Leaders avoid historical and emotional punishment and focus on solutions.

Don't skimp on the details. No matter how small a detail may be, it's something employees are going to be held accountable for, make sure you give them the information they need.

Synchronize your understanding. You'll never win an employee's buy-in to change if you tell the employee to shut up and follow orders.

If something is not optional and you will hold the employees accountable for if they don't do it, you must give clear and logical feedback.

Positive reinforcement is not praise, and it's not warm and fuzzy. It's a teaching tool that addresses a psychological principle based on the fact that desirable behavior gets repeated when reinforced.

The only folks who appreciate empty praise are low performers. Hundred Percenters want meaningful feedback.

Hundred Percenters are never happy when rewards are vague or distributed on a widespread level. It provides no learning curve and no differentiation that their performance stands out from everyone else's.

In order to be effective, positive feedback must provide a clear picture of the specific performance that's being commended as in "I like your attention to detail."

Positive reinforcement depends on a brain connectionthat associates the reward with the desired behavior.

If you want positive feedback to carry full impact, it has to be delivered in real time.

A great story draws listeners in by showing, not telling of events. People want more than hard data. They want to have an emotional connection with the story.

Predominantly achievement-motivated individuals avoid low-risk situations because the easily attained success is not a genuine achievement.

Tolerating low-performers, which Talented Terrors most definitely are, was one of the main causes of firing round 1000 board members from 268 public, private and health-care organizations.