18. Manage Agreements, Not People
Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Does anybody here work with people who seem unmanageable?” Steve Chandler asked as he opened one of his leadership seminars.
The managers who filled the room nodded and smiled in agreement. Some rolled their eyes skyward in agreement. They obviously had a lot of experience trying to manage people like that.
“How do you do it?” one manager called out. “How do you manage unmanageable people?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said.
“What do you mean you don’t know? We’re here to find out how to do it,” someone else called out.
“I’ve never seen it done,” Steve said. “Because I believe, in the end, all people ...
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