What Leaders and Managers Can Learn from Uncommon Service
A regional operations director is presenting next year's service plan to the executive team. The slide lists five priorities: faster response, more personalized interactions, tighter cost control, higher retention, and expanded self-service, each with its own champion convinced their metric matters most. The CFO asks a pointed question: if the budget can only move two of these five numbers next year, which two, and what happens to the other three. The room goes quiet, because no one has been asked to rank priorities against each other rather than chase all of them at once, and admitting some will get worse feels like failing in advance.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Choosing the one dimension to excel at
Most leadership teams default to scorecards that treat every dimension of service as equally important, which quietly guarantees mediocrity across the board. Real excellence requires a leader willing to say, in one repeatable sentence, which dimension the organization will out-perform rivals on, then defend that choice when other departments lobby to add their own priority. The clarity has to survive budget season, not just the offsite where it was agreed.
Leaders announce a priority but keep every other metric on the same dashboard with the same weight, so nothing actually changes in how resources get allocated.
Pick one metric on your current scorecard to visibly deprioritize this quarter, and tell your team directly why it now matters less.
Naming what the organization will be merely adequate at
The harder leadership act is not choosing what to excel at but publicly owning what stays only adequate, since every function head believes their area deserves protection. Funding real excellence requires taking resources from somewhere specific, and if a leader won't name the somewhere, the organization finds it anyway, usually by under-staffing whatever seems least urgent this week rather than what strategy calls for.
The sacrifice gets distributed evenly as a small cut everywhere, which weakens every function slightly instead of protecting the chosen strength fully.
Identify the one function or metric your team will formally deprioritize this year, and put that decision in writing where your own manager can see it.
Designing the operating model around the choice
A stated priority that never touches hiring criteria, incentives, or daily workflow is just a slogan. Leaders have to redesign job descriptions, bonus formulas, and escalation paths so people doing the work are rewarded for the chosen strength rather than punished for the sacrifice, since employees learn to optimize for whatever is actually measured, not what a memo announced. That unglamorous redesign work is where most strategic trade-offs succeed or quietly die.
Leaders change the message without changing the incentive plan, so employees keep optimizing for the old, unstated priorities.
Audit one incentive or performance metric this month and change it to reward the strength you've chosen, even in a small way.
Managing expectations honestly across the organization
Employees and customers both need to hear the trade-off stated plainly, not discovered through disappointment. A leader who tells the team, and eventually the market, exactly what the organization has chosen not to excel at gives everyone permission to stop apologizing for it and defend it instead. Silence about the sacrifice turns a considered strategy into what looks, from outside, like an unexplained decline in service.
The clearest tension for leaders sits between the operating model and organizational politics: redesigning incentives to match the chosen strength usually means another department loses budget or headcount, and that department often has enough influence to resist quietly for months. A second tension appears between choosing the strength and communicating it honestly, since admitting a deliberate weakness to the board can look, to people outside the room, like an admission of failure rather than a plan.
Name one thing, honestly
Which scorecard metric would you defend if a peer challenged its priority? Whose incentives still reward what you've asked the organization to stop chasing?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Audit one incentive or performance metric this month and change it to reward the strength you've chosen, even in a small way.