Joel Trammell is a successful author and owner of Texas CEO Magazine, which reaches more than 10,000 CEOs across the state. After decades of experience as a CEO himself, he realized that many of his fellow business leaders seriously lacked the fundamental tools and education to further their companies. He launched a website with support and tools for his peers and wrote multiple books outlining various techniques and approaches that would benefit other leaders. He is a pioneer in the field of CEO education and training.
‘The Manager’s Playbook: Make Exceptional People Management Your Competitive Advantage’ is an amazing read and has helped many reach their goals. What inspired you to write this groundbreaking book?
Having had the experience as CEO of building large organizations, I saw how critical managers are and how under-resourced they are in terms of training, support, and expectation setting. The typical manager comes in and starts managing a team based on their own experiences. They usually haven’t been given basic tools around leadership, influence, motivation, hiring, and so on. That leads to employees not having a consistently good experience, and to the company not delivering consistent results.
In this book you provide readers with a wide range of effective tools. I know it’s hard, but if you had to pick one which is your favorite and why?
In great organizations, everything starts with the strategic plan. That includes the company’s mission, vision, values, strategic objectives, and near-term priorities. We give CEOs a tool for capturing all that in a 1-Page Strategic Plan. That simple document can be a game changer for everyone in the company.
What was one of the challenges you faced in writing ‘The Manager’s Playbook’? Conversely, what was one of your successes?
Lots of the hard work of developing the actual management system took place long before we wrote the book. So, while capturing the system in book form took a lot of effort, the heavy lifting happened over several years prior.
We had to figure out a way to present the principles holistically. Many of them interrelate and overlap. But I believe we succeeded in developing a model that’s complete, able to be implemented on an organizational scale, and able to be tailored to the individual manager’s strengths and style.
Who or what would you say is your biggest influence?
Reading First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman was a pivotal moment. It started me on the journey toward thinking about how to articulate key ideas around management and leadership. Almost 25 years later, that book has a lot of smart stuff to say about how good managers operate. It’s a good reminder that when good people leave a company, it’s almost always because of their direct manager.
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