Chester Elton

To have any hope of succeeding as a manager, you need to get your people all in.

Whether you manage the smallest of teams or a multi-continent organization, you are the owner of a work culture and few things will have a bigger impact on your performance than getting your people to buy into your ideas and your cause and to believe what they do matters.

Bestselling authors of The Carrot Principle and The Orange Revolution, Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton return to answer the most overlooked leadership questions of our day: Why are some managers able to get their employees to commit wholeheartedly to their culture and give that extra push that leads to outstanding results? And how can managers at any level build and sustain a profitable, vibrant work-group culture of their own?

These leading workplace experts teamed up with research giant Towers Watson to analyze an unprecedented 300,000-person study, and they made a groundbreaking finding: Managers of the highest-performing work groups create a “culture of belief.” In these distinctive workplaces, people believe in their leaders and in the company’s vision, values, and goals. Employees are not only engaged but also enabled and energized, which leads to astonishing results—average annual revenues three times higher than for organizations lacking such a positive culture. And this was true during a period that included this most recent recession.

Based on their extensive consulting experience and in-depth interviews, the authors present a simple seven-step road map for creating a culture of belief: define a burning platform; create a customer focus; develop agility; share everything; partner with your talent; root for each other; and establish clear accountability. Delving into specific how-tos for each step, they share eye-opening stories of exceptional leaders in action, vividly depicting just how these powerful methods can be implemented by any manager.

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From New York Times bestselling authors and renowned leadership consultants Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton comes a groundbreaking guide to building high-performance teams. What is the true driver of a thriving organization’s exceptional success? Is it a genius leader? An iron-clad business plan?

Gostick and Elton shatter these preconceptions of corporate achievement. Their research shows that breakthrough success is guided by a particular breed of high-performing team that generates its own momentum—an engaged group of colleagues in the trenches, working passionately together to pursue a shared vision. Their research also shows that only 20% of teams are working anywhere near this optimal capacity. How can your team become one of them?

Based on a groundbreaking 350,000-person study by the Best Companies Group, as well as extraordinary research into exceptional teams at leading companies, including Zappos.com, Pepsi Beverages Company, and Madison Square Garden, the authors have determined a key set of characteristics displayed by members of breakthrough teams, and have identified a set of rules great teams live by, which generate a culture of positive teamwork and lead to extraordinary results. Using a wealth of specific stories from the breakthrough teams they studied, they reveal in detail how these teams operate and how managers can transform their own teams into such high performers by fostering: Stronger clarity of goals; greater trust among team members; more open and honest dialogue; stronger accountability for all team members; purpose-based recognition of team members’ contributions

The remarkable stories they tell about these teams in action provide a simple and powerful step-by-step guide to taking your team to the breakthrough level, igniting the passion and vision to bring about an Orange Revolution.

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Combining a good yarn with great business advice and practical guidance for managers, The Invisible Employee guides management in learning to engage their staff by setting a clear guiding vision, recognizing the strengths in their employees, and providing a sense of visibility and connection to corporate values and goals. This book shows managers how to get involved and lead their people from obscurity to achievement, reaping the rewards across their entire organization.
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Great managers praise effort and reward results. It’s true, and nobody knows it better than the best-selling authors of Managing with Carrots and The 24-Carrot Manager, Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton. Now from these award-winning authors comes a one-a-day manager’s handbook on motivating employees through praise and recognition. A Carrot A Day can keep you away from recognition pitfalls and help you develop employees who are more focused, more committed, and more engaged in your noble cause. Read just one a day and you will become a better leaders – a manager who is able to tap the power of recognition to build a stronger workplace where employees focus on company goals, spot new opportunities faster, and have longer employment life spans (translation: lower turnover).
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For organizations that do it right, it's a bit like discovering gold in your backyard. Employee recognition, long considered a benefit that costs money, can actually be a management tool that makes money. At first blush, the idea is counter-intuitive. As leaders, we've become accustomed to viewing recognition programs as a cost of doing business. But employee recognition is evolving. A groundbreaking research study of 200,000 employees, unveiled in our new book The Carrot Principle, presents a new paradigm: Applying employee recognition techniques within a context of goal-setting, open communication, trust and accountability, (what we have come to call the Basic Four) accelerates the impact of all of these critical management skills.