Have you ever wondered why a group of remarkable individual performers can get together and fail as a team? You can have all the talent in the world, but if individuals do not share common goals, coordinate their efforts, and trust one another to carry their share of the load, then you don’t have a team. So how does a team manager bridge this divide between individual performance and team performance? It turns out they construct that bridge on three simple building blocks: team alignment, team process, and team relationships.

Giving someone feedback can be a daunting task for a manager-especially when an employee is underperforming. To soften the blow, we sometimes refer to difficult feedback as “developmental” or “constructive” But these phrases rarely prompt the type of productive conversations managers need to have with team members. Steve King, a longtime executive who has held leadership roles with a variety of organizations, cuts to the chase with a simple and tested framework on providing feedback. Think of how great it would be to break through the typical awkwardness of giving feedback and start having serious conversations about performance, development, and careers. Regardless of your role, if you want to give feedback to others on a regular basis, you need a proven approach to improve the quality of your conversations. It starts with four simple words-Brag, Worry, Wonder, Bet.

Why is it some managers are so good at managing their teams and so good at managing individuals on their teams, yet productivity seems to lag below expectations? The likely suspect … failure to proactively manage work processes. Workplace productivity is the by-product of many factors, but the two most important of those factors may be people and processes. We often shower managers with resources to build their people management skills yet provide little in the way of building their process management skills. This book is about balancing the scales and treating the efficacy of work processes as the natural counterpart to excellent people management. With some thoughtful attention to the way our processes are constructed and some well-placed preventative and contingent measures, all of us, with the help of our teams, can thoughtfully manage process and improve team performance.

Whether you’re a new or seasoned manager, you’ve probably been overwhelmed by unspoken employee expectations and human resources processes. It can be easy to ignore doing what you actually need to do as a manager to develop employees and keep the best ones. In this guidebook to managerial success, you’ll learn how to answer six simple questions employees care about the most:

• What is expected of me?
• What and how should I develop?
• How am I doing?
• How did I do?
• How will I be rewarded?
• What is next for me?