The right people make a difference in the world. Question: How do you train people to be happy? Answer: you hire happy people. This tip makes everything so much easier because you are very selective up front and spend time matching skill sets with the job at hand.

Why is this important to me?

I am not doing this summary to waste your time. My vision is to provide concise action steps that you can take right now to improve your life. According to Gallup, 9% of employees are ENGAGED, 71% are UNHITCHED, and 20% are ACTIVELY UNHITCHED. This costs companies billions of dollars a year in revenue.

Why do people quit their jobs? Research shows that the number one reason people leave is because of their direct supervisor. Common sense solidifies this notion. People spend 40% of their lives at work. If you have a neighbor you hate, would you invite him to dinner or avoid him? The same goes for shitty supervisors.

First, Breaking All the Rules is divided into 7 chapters based on significant Gallup research. For the sake of time, I want to outline the what, why, and how in four key points that will help you and your organization.

1. Great Managers Approach: The key to driving profitable growth is customer engagement and loyalty. To have customer engagement, you need employee engagement. The authors outline 12 questions based on the basic concepts that great managers focus on. These are important because you focus on relationships with your direct reports and whether they have the tools to do their job effectively. These simple questions are worth asking in your organization, and I’m going to ask them in ours.

2. Leverage Strengths: People have inherent strengths, and great managers know how to combine those strengths with the right jobs. Traditional thinking focuses on the negatives and works on the weaknesses of your employees. Great managers leverage talents and strengths and manage weaknesses. To do this, you need to understand the weaknesses and help these employees fix them. This requires reciprocity and teamwork. Remember that people don’t change that much. You see this in relationships all the time, one person tries to change the other and it never happens. It is much better to just choose the right person. This also means that you must know what you want. Talents can be defined as recurring behaviors that can be applied productively to defined results.

3. Focus on performance: It is human nature to compete and want to excel at tasks. The 2012 Superbowl was watched by 116 million people in the United States. This is almost half the population. Question: would people watch if they didn’t keep score? Absolutely not. That is why it is imperative that your people keep score. They must know who the opponent is and why they are scoring those points. When the right people are doing the things that come natural to them and that combine with the results, profitable growth will occur. The nature and productive habits of people are their talents. The great mangers look for talents in their people. For people to do the best they can, you need a firm understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, goals, and dreams.

4. The Peter Principle: This principle basically says that people are promoted to their level of incompetence. Here’s an example: You have a top salesperson and you promote him to sales manager. The next thing you know, they fail. They just left their talent zone and moved into their zone of weakness. The goal here is to recognize it and help people become more than they already are.

First, Breaking all the rules is a good book if you handle people. This will help you understand and reorganize your focus. This book will help me personally in two ways. One, we will do the 12-question survey of our people to see where we are and two; We will realign and focus on strengths and manage around weaknesses.

I hope this short summary has been helpful to you. The key to any new idea is to incorporate it into your daily routine until it becomes a habit. Habits are formed in just 21 days. One thing you can take away from this book is to focus on strengths. Investing in strengths and spending time with the most productive people will magnify your results. Most managers spend their time with people who are underperforming. The key is to focus on the best.