Leading a global health organization
11-Mar-2010
Tachi Yamada the President of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - Global Health Program
was interviewed in the New York Times recently.
Here is our synopsis:
Becoming a manager
The most difficult transition to becoming a manager is the issue of delegation.
What do you give up? If you micromanage, you can stand over everybody and
guide them - but you won’t have enough hours in the day to do that.
Learning how to delegate and still make sure everything happens is where I
learned the principle of “micro-interest”. I monitor the details. I
have intimate knowledge of what’s going on, but I don’t tell people what to do.
Focus on the critical
things
If there are 10 tasks in a project, what is the one thing that everything else
hinges on? Problems can occur in the other 10 areas, but they won’t
determine the overall outcome. There may be one or two points where the
outcome of the entire project is at stake, and you’d better be on top of these.
Focus on what is great
You can’t go into an organization, fire everybody and bring in everybody you
want. You have to work with the people you have. If I spend my time
focusing on everything that’s bad, I’ll get nothing done. Or I could say,
what are the best things about the people I have? What makes them great,
and how can I really improve them one or two notches?
Hire those who embrace
change
Take somebody who’s moved 10 times in their lives. And then take someone
who has lived in one town their whole lives. Who do you think is more willing
to change? Hire people who truly embrace change, otherwise you will have
an organization that’s constantly fighting to stay at the status quo.
That leads to stagnation, and there are many examples of companies that have
failed because of that.
Hire for intelligence
You can’t train people to be more intelligent. It’s not about whether
they can add and subtract six-figure numbers - but that they can take a complex
problem, break it down into its pieces and figure out the best way
forward. There’s nothing more complex and abstract than human relationships.
And if they can work their way through a human relationship problem
intelligently, my guess is that they’re very smart people.
Give direct feedback
It doesn’t matter how many good things you say, the one bad thing is what
sticks. So if I have something negative to say, I will say it. I will be
clear about it. I won’t try to couch it in a lot of positives.
People have a natural tendency to not want to hear a negative message, so I try
to do it as quickly as I can, and I try to do it in the moment. But
I also try to give positive feedback in other moments. To try to mix the
two is very hard, because the positive messages get lost in the one negative
message, and the negative message gets garbled.
Get outside your own
geography
You can’t possibly be competitive in today's world unless you actually go
outside your own geography and learn the way other people live and
think. What’s "out there" is more important than what you
already know.
Be with people
When you are with somebody, make that person feel like nobody else in the world
matters. I turn off my mobile phone because I don’t want the outside
world to impinge on the conversation we’re having. Every moment counts,
and that moment is lost if you’re not in that moment 100 percent.
Stephen Lynch
Chief Operating Officer - Global Operations
RESULTS.com
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