1. If you want to build, maintain, and improve your workplace, you have to become adept at not just managing, but leading change.
2. Change involves two key challenges for people—learning and letting go.
3. Five change accelerators:
   1. Education
   2. Emotion
   3. Motivation
   4. Collaboration
   5. Communication
4. Learning something new makes us temporarily incompetent.
5. Use your coaching skills to ask people about how they learn best.
6. Training as part of a master plan:
   1. Provide top-notch training for new skills.
   2. Put the new knowledge to immediate use.
   3. Provide ongoing feedback to employees as they try new things.
7. People don’t “Analyze—Think—Change”. What they really do is “See—Feel—Change.”
8. Don’t just tell people things, show them truths that touch their emotions and move them to change their behaviors. Dramatic, concrete, real-life examples are your best friend.
9. People fall in love with their own ideas and solutions.
10. Tips for developing a positive, healthy culture:
    1. Employees know it’s not a democracy, but their voices matter.
    2. The boss plays favorites, and everyone’s a potential favorite.
    3. Employees work well together because the boss breaks down barriers.
    4. People actually get things done in meetings!
    5. Mistakes create a climate of learning, not fear.
11. Three key factors when deciding how to decide:
    1. Quality: What information is needed to make the best decision? Do I have enough? Whose input would make it better?
    2. Speed: How much time do we have?
    3. Acceptance: How will the decision style affect the employees’ acceptance and implementation of the decision?
12. Identifying exceptional employees and giving them important assignments, learning opportunities, coveted work shifts, and participation in key projects and decisions.
13. Get all these assignments done in the time frame and to the specifications I demand—but also dedicate your time and resources to helping others. That dissonance drives people bonkers—and into bunkers. Even if they want to help their colleagues, they back away out of self-preservation.
14. What makes a great day at work for you?
15. Here is the information that you want to learn:
    1. What do their bosses expect of them?
    2. How do they measure success?
    3. What professional standards are really meaningful in their specialty area?
    4. What personal goals have they set for themselves?
    5. What are they really proud of?
    6. Who in the organization “get’s it”—that is, just knows how to work with them to get things done with maximum success and minimum hassle? What do they do differently from other people?
16. In positive cultures, meetings are forced on the right goal. The participants are frank but friendly, and everyone is heard.
17. Six good reasons to call a meeting:
    1. To provide timely information.
    2. To give direction.
    3. To make group decisions.
    4. To produce a product.
    5. To generate ideas and solutions.
    6. To observe rituals.
18. 8 Essentials of Managing Your Boss:
    1. Knowing your manager’s work habits and how to work with—or around them.
    2. Understanding your boss’ values and how they align with your own.
    3. Communicating in ways your manager is most likely to hear and heed.
    4. Disagreeing with your leader as the loyal opposition and not the enemy.
    5. Advocating effectively for your team’s needs and interests.
    6. Incorporating your boss’ perspective as you make decisions.
    7. Earning the boss’ trust through your talent, reliability, and integrity.
    8. Building a partnership that makes successes much sweeter and failures non-lethal.
19. Your personalities may vary, along with your work habits and communication styles. Your differences will be far less of a problem if you start with the assumption that it’s your responsibility to adapt to your boss’s way of doing things.
20. Bosses never want to be blindsided by bad news.
21. When in doubt, inform. The danger of over communicating pales in comparison to the riskiness of violating the “no surprises” rule.
22. Make certain you aren’t part of the problem. Keep doing work in the face of pressure.
    1. Use your emotional intelligence to respond rationally to irrational behavior.
    2. Look for mentors and coaches to help you.
    3. Jump ship if you must, but do it with a plan, not on impulse.
23. Organizations that drive in compassion and drive out fear attract superior talent, have lower turnover costs, share ideas more freely, have less dysfunctional internal competition, and trump the external competition.
24. What do you really want to be known for?
    1. They will speak not only of what you’ve done but also the person you are and what you stand for. That’s true leadership.
25. Bosses with referent power don’t simply memorize and enforce the rules; they develop workplace cultures which employees share a deep understanding of the values that guide them.
26. What you measure is what you value.
27. The importance of understanding what people value in their lives- and learning that there’s so much more to them than what we might see on the surface.
28. Tips for Humanity and Harmony:
    1. Be at your best when people face their worst challenges.
    2. Support people’s celebration of life’s happiest rites and rituals.
    3. Remember that your praise defines the team’s priorities; don’t send mixed messages.
    4. Don’t pit the single against the married, or the childless against the parents.
    5. Create a climate where people look out for each other.
29. Leadership and Fun at Work:
    1. It starts with you; be a good sport.
    2. You don’t define fun, your employees do.
    3. Cultivate the catalysts of fun on your crew.
    4. When in doubt, add food.
    5. You don’t mandate fun; you welcome and reward it so that it grows naturally.
30. Fun matters. Fun makes up for modest pay. It takes the sting out of disappointment. It facilitates collaboration. It serves the interest of retention.
31. For each one of us who aspires to be a great leader, a true leader, it all comes back to one question. What do you really want to be known for?
32. Positive Workplace Cultures:
    1. Integrity
    2. Humanity
    3. Levity

Work Happy: What Great Bosses Know