Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World

by Marcus Buckingham

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure, that just ain’t so.* —MARK TWAIN

As you read, you’ll realize that these Nine Lies have taken hold because each satisfies the organization’s need for control. Large organizations are complex places, and a strong and understandable instinct of their leaders is to seek simplicity and order—not least because this makes it easier to persuade themselves and their stakeholders that they are moving toward their objectives. But the desire for simplicity easily shades into a desire for conformity, and before long this conformity threatens to extinguish individuality. Before we know it, the particular talents and interests of each person are seen as inconveniences, and the organization comes to treat its people as essentially interchangeable.

All quantitative research requires qualitative digging,

we wound up identifying just a few aspects of the employee experience that exist disproportionately on the highest-performing teams. These eight aspects, and these eight precisely worded items,* validly predict sustained team performance: 1. I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company. 2. At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me. 3. In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values. 4. I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work. 5. My teammates have my back. 6. I know I will be recognized for excellent work. 7. I have great confidence in my company’s future. 8. In my work, I am always challenged to grow.

When we ask someone to rate someone else on an abstract quality such as empathy or vision or strategic thinking, their responses tell us more about the person doing the rating than the person being rated. To get good data we have to ask people about their own experiences.

What we, as team members, want from you, our team leader, is firstly that you make us feel part of something bigger, that you show us how what we are doing together is important and meaningful; and secondly, that you make us feel that you can see us, and connect to us, and care about us, and challenge us, in a way that recognizes who we are as individuals. We ask you to give us this sense of universality—all of us together—and at the same time to recognize our own uniqueness; to magnify what we all share, and to lift up what is special about each of us. When you come to excel as a leader of a team it will be because you’ve successfully integrated these two quite distinct human needs.

Experience varies more within a company than between companies.

local experiences—how we interact with our immediate colleagues, our lunching-on-the-patio companions, and our huddling-in-the-corner partners—are significantly more important than company ones.

When people choose not to work somewhere, the somewhere isn’t a company, it’s a team.

while people might care which company they join, they don’t care which company they work for. The truth is that, once there, people care which team they’re on.

Third, just like Lisa, those team members who said they trusted their team leader were twelve times more likely to be fully engaged at work.

our overemphasis on culture leads companies to remove responsibility from where it resides—with the team leaders—and instead to focus on generalities.

There are some things that are real simply because we all agree they’re real—things whose existence depends not on any objective reality, nor on any individual’s subjective reality, but rather on our collective belief in them. By this logic, money, for example, exists only because all of us agree it does. Initially this might sound odd—surely money is just money, not some sort of mass belief system—but here’s the rub: when we all cease to believe in these realities, they cease to be real. If you and everyone else stop believing, all of a sudden, that a particular piece of paper is worth $10, then it actually and rather immediately ceases to be worth $10.

Harari calls these extended, communal realities intersubjective realities, and tells us that they’re the reason our achievements as a species are so different from those of our planet-mates.

What are our intersubjective realities in the world of work? One, obviously, is the idea of the company. We can’t touch it; it exists only in the realm of laws (another intersubjective reality), and when we stop agreeing it exists, it ceases to exist.

Culture locates us in the world. It consists of stories we share with one another to breathe life into the empty vessel of “company.” But—and here’s the kicker—so powerful is our need for story, our need for communal sense making of the world, that we imagine that our company and its culture can explain our experience of work. And yet it can’t. So strong is our identification with our tribe that it’s hard for us to imagine that other people inside our company are having a completely different experience of “tribe” from ours. Yet they are—and these local team experiences have far more bearing on whether we stay in the tribe or leave it than do our tribal stories.

You may not care which company you work for, but since you do care about which company you join, these signifiers are crafted to help a company attract a certain kind of person by highlighting what the company thinks this kind of person values. This is why these signifiers show up time and again in promotional materials, and why they are so prominent in various company rankings—because companies want it that way. These kinds of perks are plumage—peacock feathers for people. They sound cool because they’re designed to get your attention, just like plumage is. So when you read about how a certain company gives each employee “twenty-percent” time to focus on personal projects or claims to always promote from within, just remember that these beautiful feathers are designed almost exclusively to attract you, and that this attraction, as most attractions tend to, will fade.

vanishes. Team experience, on the other hand (how you talk to one another and work with one another), has large and lasting impact on how you do your work, and it doesn’t require all of you to agree to believe in it. It is what it is. And whether or not you all believe in it or can all describe it in the same way, it will nonetheless influence both how effectively your team works and for how long, and how many of your teammates will choose to stay.

Teams simplify: they help us see where to focus and what to do. Culture doesn’t do this, funnily enough, because it’s too abstract.

Whereas culture’s focus leans toward conformity to a common core of behaviors, teams focus on the opposite. Teams aren’t about sameness—they aren’t, at their best, about marching in lockstep. Instead they’re about unlocking what is unique about each of us, in the service of something shared. A team, at its finest, insists on the unique contribution of each of its members, and is the best way we humans have ever come up with of harnessing those distinctive contributions together in the service of something that none of us could do alone.

The big thing is that only on a team can we express our individuality at work and put it to highest use.

The defining characteristic of our reality today is its ephemerality—the speed of change.

Events and changes are happening faster than they ever have before, so dissecting a situation and turning it into a meticulously constructed plan is an exercise in engaging in a present that will soon be gone. The amounts of time and energy it takes to make a plan this thorough and detailed are the very things that doom it to obsolescence. The thing we call planning doesn’t tell you where to go; it just helps you understand where you are. Or rather, were. Recently. We aren’t planning for the future, we’re planning for the near-term past.

This is not to say that planning is utterly useless. Creating space to think through all of the information you have in your world, and trying to pull that into some sort of order or understanding, has some value. But when you do that, know that all you’ve done is understand the scale and nature of the challenges your team is facing. You’ll have learned little about what to do to make things better. The solutions can be found in the tangible and changing realities of the world as it really is, whereas your plans are necessarily abstract understandings of the recent past. Plans scope the problem, not the solution. So, though you are told that the best plan wins, the reality is quite different. Many plans, particularly those created in large organizations, are overly generalized, quickly obsolete, and frustrating to those asked to execute them. It’s far better to coordinate your team’s efforts in real time, relying heavily on the informed, detailed intelligence of each unique team member.

When we understand the characteristics of an intelligence system, as distinct from a planning system—accurate, real-time data, distributed broadly and quickly, and presented in detail so that team members can see and react to patterns in deciding for themselves what to do—we begin to see them everywhere.

What all of these things have in common is that they move information across an organization as fast as possible, and do so to empower immediate and responsive action. Their underlying assumption is that people are wise, and that if you can present them with accurate, real-time, reliable data about the real world in front of them, they’ll invariably make smart decisions.

It’s not true that the best plan wins. It is true that the best intelligence wins.

If you think the information will help your people gain a better understanding of their real world in real time, share it. And encourage your team to do the same.

Second, watch carefully to see which data your people find useful. Don’t worry too much about making all this data simple or easy to consume, or about packaging it for people, or weaving it together to form a coherent story. The biggest challenge with data today isn’t making sense of it—most of us deal with complexity all the time, and are pretty good at figuring out what we need to know and where to find it. No, the biggest challenge with data today is making it accurate—sorting the signal from the noise. This is much harder, and much more valuable for our teams. So be extremely vigilant about accuracy; watch which information your people naturally gravitate toward; and then, over time, increase the volume, depth, and speed of precisely that sort of data.

Third, trust your people to make sense of the data. Planning systems take the interpretation of the data away from those on the front lines, and hand it off to a select few, who analyze it and decipher its patterns, and then construct and communicate the plan. Intelligence systems do precisely the opposite—because the “intelligence” in an intelligence system lies not in the select few, but instead in the emergent interpretive powers of all front-line team members. You are not the best sense maker. They are.

McChrystal, describing the system he ultimately created in Iraq, makes this same point: “In the old model, subordinates provided information and leaders disseminated commands. We reversed it: we had our leaders provide information so that subordinates, armed with context, understanding, and connectivity, could take the initiative and make decisions.”3 And...

When McChrystal arrived in Iraq, and did everything he could to accelerate the planning system he inherited, the number of raids his troops conducted each month increased from ten to eighteen. When he created his intelligence system, that number shot all the way up to three hundred.4

I mean, yeah. They increased their raids. But we’re those raids accurate? Did they do more harm than good ultimately, because the populace was terrorized? Maybe not. But praising an increase in raids just because it’s more — and not necessarily better — isn’t great.

two. It’s called a check-in, and in simple terms it’s a frequent, one-on-one conversation about near-term future work between a team leader and a team member. How frequent? Every week. These leaders understand that goals set at the beginning of the year have become irrelevant by the third week of the year, and that a year is not a marathon, planned out in detail long in advance, but is instead a series of fifty-two little sprints, each informed by the changing state of the world.

So, each and every week these leaders have a brief check-in with each team member, during which they ask two simple questions: What are your priorities this week? How can I help?

This leads us to one of the most important insights shared by the best team leaders: frequency trumps quality.

In the intelligence business, frequency is king. The more frequently and predictably you check in with your people or meet with your team—the more you offer your real-time attention to the reality of their work—the more performance and engagement you will get.

The data reveals only that those team leaders who check in every week with each team member have higher levels of engagement and performance, and lower levels of voluntary turnover.

we can now know the exact span of control that’s right for every single team leader: it’s the number of people that you, and only you, can check in with every week. If you can check in with eight people, but you can’t fit nine into your schedule, your span of control is eight. If you can find a way to check in with twenty people, then your span of control is twenty. And if you’re one of those people who can legitimately manage a weekly check-in with only two people, your span of control is two. Span of control, in other words, isn’t a theoretical, one-size-fits-all thing. It’s a practical, function-of-team-leader’s-capacity-to-give-attention thing. Your span of control is your span of attention.

And if ever you become a leader of leaders, you’ll need to ensure that your leaders know that this check-in is the most important part of leading.

More often than not, however, low scores are a function not of bad intent but of poor information: team members don’t know how to support one another, because they don’t know what’s going on in enough detail to offer assistance.

The best, most effective way to create clarity of expectations is to figure out how to let your people figure it out for themselves.

This, at their best, is what goals do for us. They enable us to take what we value most and, by adding detail and timelines, to “chunk” these values into a describable outcome, something vivid and tangible.

Our goal becomes our companion, nestled in one corner of our psyche, pulsating, nudging us onward, guiding our thoughts and actions, and giving us the energy to push through the tiredness, the injuries, and the self-doubt, until one day we round the corner in Wenceslas Square and, alongside other people with other goals, complete our marathon.