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

by Marcus Buckingham

When you were at Company B, were you introduced to their Core Values or Leadership Principles or anything like that? Lisa: Yes! I was handed a laminated page of them at my orientation. I was thrilled!

disagreeing and then committing,

And in the light of this experience with Company B, what was important to you as you looked for this next role? Lisa: Three things—culture, leadership, and the work I’d be doing.

What do you mean by culture? Lisa: It’s the tenets of how we behave. I think of it like a family creed—this is how we operate and treat one another in this family. Us: What are some words you’d use to describe Company A’s culture? Lisa: Let me see. Inclusive, collaborative, kind, generous, trusting, fair, supportive. And I think the senior leaders are good people who lead ethically.

Judging by these and other examples, this thing called culture really matters.

It is potentially more important than what the company does—“Culture eats strategy for breakfast!”—how the company does it, how much the employees get paid, or even the company’s current stock price.

Culture matters, according to the voluminous literature on the topic, because it has three pow...

has become our handle on the next.1 As a team leader you are going to be told, repeatedly, that you must take stock of all this because you are responsible for embodying your company’s culture, and for building a team that adheres to these cultural norms. You will be asked to select only applicants who fit the culture, to identify high-potentials by whether or not they embody the company culture, to run your meetings in a way that fits the culture, and, at company off-sites, to don the T-shirts and sing the songs.

When people ask you what it’s “really like” to work at your company, you immediately know you’re going to tell them not about the solar panels and the cafeteria, but about what it’s really like.

You won’t know whether to call this “culture” or not, just as you won’t necessarily know how to label each of these two-foot-level details, but in every fiber of your being you’ll know that this ground-level stuff is what’ll decide how hard people will work once they’ve joined, and how long they’ll stay.

If I am to help my team give their best, for as long as possible, which of these details are most critical? Tell me the most important ones, and I’ll do my level best to pay attention to those.

what distinguishes the best team leaders from the rest is their ability to meet these two categories of needs for the people on their teams.

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. At least, that’s what all this research is telling us.

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.

ADP Research Institute conducted a nineteen-country study on the nature of engagement at work—what drives it, and what it drives.

here are three highlights that you’ll want to know.

virtually all work is in fact teamwork. In companies with over 150 employees, 82 percent of people work on teams, and 72 ...

in small companies, of fewer than twenty people, this finding holds: 68 percent of those in small companies report working on a team, and 49 percent say they work on more than one team. This p...

we know that if you do happen to work on a team you are twice as likely to score high on the eight engagement items, and that this trend linking engagement to teams extends to multiple teams—in fact, the most engaged group of workers acr...

those team members who said they trusted their team leader were twelve times more likely t...

You might not be able to weigh in on your company’s parental-leave policy, or the quality of its cafeteria, but you can build a healthy team—you can set clear expectations for your people, or not; you can position each person to play to his or her strengths every day, or not; you can praise the team for excellent work, or not; you can help people grow their careers, or not. And you can,

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

If the most important experience of work is the experience of team, what should we make of all the “culture of . . .” things with which we began? Are they all entirely irrelevant?

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.

Our intersubjective realities are the distinguishing feature—the apex technology—of Homo sapiens.

That doesn’t mean we should dispense with it; it does mean, however, that we should be careful not to mistake it for something it isn’t.

we imagine that our company and its culture can explain our experience of work.

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.

This is why teams matter, and it’s why they matter much more than cultural plumage matters.

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.

Teams make work real: they ground us in the day-to-day, both in terms of the content of our work and the colleagues wi...

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

we do this we come to realize what is perhaps the biggest problem of all with the idea of culture: it doesn’t actually help us understand what to do more of, less of, or differently.

Whether culture is a real thing or not, whether it defines our tribe at work or not, whether it’s a marker of what sort of company we’re joining or not, it won’t tell you, the team leader, what to do to make things better. For that, we must take you to where the experience lives: to your team, and networks of teams, and their leaders. That’s what matters most.

Your role as team leader is the most important role in any company.

when you’re next looking to join a company, don’t bother asking if it has a great culture—no one can tell you that in any real way. Instead, ask what it does to build great teams.

what your plan is for your team, or, more specifically, what your ninety-day plan is for your team.

the nagging realization that things rarely, if ever, turn out the way you hope they will.

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.

the biggest challenge with data today is making it accurate—sorting the signal from the noise.

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.

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?

the data reveals that checking in with your team members once a month is literally worse than useless.

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

checking in is akin to teeth-brushing: you brush your teeth every day, and while you hope that each brushing is high quality, what’s most important is that it happens, every day.

A team with low check-in frequency is a team with low intelligence.

pinpointing the weekly check-in as the single most powerful ritual of the world’s best team leaders, 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.

Your span of control is your span of attention.

Checking in with each person on a team—listening, course-correcting, adjusting, coaching, pinpointing, advising, paying attention to the intersection of the person and the real-world work—is not what you do in addition to the work of leading. This is the work of leading.

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.