Celebrating 7 Incredible Years with 7 Invaluable Resources
As we ring in the New Year, it’s hard to believe AMWTW just turned 7! Incredibly, we’ve trained hundreds of managers over the years and helped business founders and leaders work through all manner of problems. But in many ways, it still feels like we’re just getting started.
One thing we’ve noticed during our countless conversations with clients is that certain invaluable resources tend to surface time and again. So we decided to celebrate our anniversary by sharing the top 7 with you – one for each year since we first put our Modern HR model to work.
Our 7 Most Referenced Resources
1. THE LEADERSHIP PIPELINE
We frequently share this summary of The Leadership Pipeline (by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and Jim Noel) with our management training participants. If you take just one thing away from it, let it be this:
Most people become managers because they were great individual contributors. But the skills required to manage people and teams effectively are almost the complete opposite.
In many cases when people transition to management, they simply double-down on doing what made them successful in the first place. Making the move to people manager, however, actually means changing what you value and how you spend your time.
2. GALLUP’S STRENGTHSFINDER
The main premise behind Gallup’s CliftonStrengths assessment (formerly known as Clifton StrengthsFinder) is that we spend too much time trying to fix people’s weaknesses - and not enough focused on natural talents where the development potential is endless.
At AMWTW, we use this tool with every manager we work with, and to help teams:
· Navigate conflict
· Increase productivity
· Improve the quality of their work
After years of referring to this framework with our clients, our own team continues to learn from it as we apply the Strengths methodology to work better together.
3. OUR EMPLOYMENT LAWYER, STEVE WILLIAMS
Legal expertise is essential when it comes to hiring, firing, and navigating the range of employment matters that lie in between. Over the past seven years, Steve has helped both AMWTW and many of our clients solve their most challenging legal matters. We honestly don’t know what we’d do without his generous and ever-sage advice.
4. DEALING WITH DIFFICULT PEOPLE MICRO-COURSE
Since it’s not uncommon to find one or two ‘difficult’ people at the core of many organizational problems, we created this digital course years ago with advice on how to deal with such individuals. The good news? Most of the time, solving the problem of dealing with difficult people is completely within your control.
5. THE ORGANIZING FRAMEWORK
We love this tool most for its versatility. And given that it’s our most requested resource, it would seem that our clients agree! Creating a Performance Improvement Plan? Need to document a goal or KPI? This is one of the simplest tools we can offer. If you’d like a copy, feel free to send us an email.
6. LESSONS FROM “OUR FIRST BOSS”, RANDY BAKER
For better or worse, half of our team credits this guy with shaping their early careers 😊. Instead of letting us join the social committee or plan events, Randy pushed us to make data-driven decisions linked directly to business outcomes. It was he who taught us that HR is a business-first function that owes its capacity for strategic work to deep business understanding.
7. OUR AMWTW VALUES
Although we’re still working to capture all of our values in a way that’s worth sharing, the one we’re probably best known for is time integrity. Those who’ve worked with us know we ALWAYS call, show up, and start our meetings right on time, without exception.
At AMWTW, we believe that the simple act of showing up on time - and delivering what you say you’re going to deliver - is the most underrated management tool for building trust. So we encourage you to keep tabs on your own time integrity and look for opportunities to amplify trust with your teams and colleagues by showing up on time, every time.