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

by Marcus Buckingham

You can’t watch someone’s back if you don’t know where his or her back is.

Trust can never emerge from secrecy. Frequency creates safety.

our assumption has most often been that the best way to create clarity of expectations is to tell people what to do.

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

*POINTY-HAIRED BOSS: We’re having a meeting to discuss employee retention. DILBERT: Tell them that employees quit because there are too many useless meetings. POINTY-HAIRED BOSS: We won’t be getting into reasons at the first meeting.

the weight of evidence suggests that cascaded goals do the opposite: they limit performance. They slow your boat down.

Sales goals are for performance prediction, not performance creation.

Then there’s the fact that you don’t go and look at your goals once you’ve set them. If they were supposed to be guiding your work, you’d think you might.

Self-evaluation of goals isn’t really about evaluating your work, in other words: it’s a careful exercise in self-promotion and political positioning, in figuring out how much to reveal honestly and how much to couch carefully.

In the real world, there is work—stuff that you have to get done. In theory world, there are goals. Work is ahead of you; goals are behind you—they’re your rear-view mirror. Work is specific and detailed; goals are abstract. Work changes fast; goals change slowly, or not at all. Work makes you feel like you have agency; goals make you feel like a cog in a machine. Work makes you feel trusted; goals make you feel distrusted. Work is work; goals aren’t. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Goals can be a force for good.

The best companies don’t cascade goals; the best companies cascade meaning.

The best leaders realize that their people are wise, that they do not need to be coerced into alignment through yearly goal setting.

It is shared meaning that creates alignment, and this alignment is emergent, not coerced.

we need goals because our deficit at work is a deficit of aligned action. We’re mistaken. What we face instead is a deficit of meaning, of a clear and detailed understanding of the purpose of our work,

Our people don’t need to be told what to do; they want to be told why.

Cathy decided that the mission of his company was less to sell chicken than it was to build leaders in local communities.

Don’t tell them what you value, show them.

A second way to cascade meaning is through rituals.

You already have rituals, whether they are conscious or unconscious, and these rituals—the things you do repeatedly—communicate to your people what is meaningful to you.

If we followed you around for a week, we’d see them. Let’s say you have a meeting: What time do you show up? Are you five minutes early, or five minutes late? What are you wearing? Do you catch up with your team members about their personal lives or do you launch right into business? Who talks first? Do you allow your team members to speak, or do you cut them off? Does the meeting go long? Do you hold people back to finish things up?

The question, then, isn’t whether you have rituals or not. The question is whether or not you are deliberate about what your rituals communicate.

Deliberate

The purpose of these meetings is contained not so much in the actual substance of the answers as it is in the reinforcement that Facebook values transparency and openness so much that they will dedicate a significant chunk of top leaders’ time to it each week.

The third lever is stories.

Many of the best leaders are storytellers, not in the sense of writing a novel or a screenplay, but because they cascade meaning through vignettes, anecdotes, or stories told at meetings, on email chains, or on phone calls.

Because they define what we Brits think is most meaningful about us: that we never give up, and we never give in. We value determination and grit more than we value winning, so we tell story upon story of keep-going-ness that usually ends up on just the wrong side of victory.

You tell stories, whether you know it or not, and you’re telling them all the time, in every conversation and at every meeting. What stories are you telling, and what do they say about what you find meaningful?

As humans we are wired to find joy in seeing someone else’s talents in action.

“Something you are good at” is not a strength; it is an ability.

you will be able to demonstrate high ability—albeit briefly—at quite a few things that bring you no joy whatsoever.

A strength, on the other hand, is an “activity that makes...

we are drawn to activities in which we find joy.

“You will never feel proud of your work if you find no joy within it. Your best work is always joyful work.”

Fixing shortcomings, no matter how hard that might be, seems like the hard-boiled business of business; finding delight is the province of poets.

Of the eight conditions that are the signature of the highest-performing teams, there is one in particular that stands out—in study after study, irrespective of industry and irrespective of nationality—as the single most powerful predictor of a team’s productivity.

It is each team member’s sense that “I have the chance to use my strengt...

Biggest predictor of performance

The “every-day-ness” of the feeling that your work plays to your strengths is a vital condition of high performance.

When a team leader does this, everything else—recognition, sense of mission, clarity of expectations—works better.

the best path to greater performance will come from unrelenting focus on these areas.

Excellence, in other words, is a synonym for all-round high ability: well-rounded people are better.

competencies are impossible to measure.

And because competencies are unmeasurable, it is impossible to prove or disprove the assertion that everyone who excels in a particular job possesses a particular set of competencies.

Which brings us to the second fact: the research into high performance in any profession or endeavor reveals that excellence is idiosyncratic.

In the real world each high performer is unique and distinct, and excels precisely because that person has understood his or her uniqueness and cultivated it intelligently.

Growth, it turns out, is actually a question not of figuring out how to gain ability where we lack it but of figuring out how to increase impact where we already have ability.

those who excelled did not share all the same abilities, but instead displayed unique combinations of different abilities, strongly.

Excellence in the real world, in every profession, is idiosyncratic.

If, as someone once said,* the British fox hunt is the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible, then the competency model is the unmeasurable in pursuit of the irrelevant.

The best people are not well-rounded, finding fulfillment in their uniform ability. Quite the opposite, in fact—the best people are spiky, and in their lovingly honed spikiness they find their biggest contribution, their fastest growth, and, ultimately, their greatest joy.

There is the idea that improvement comes from repairing our deficits.

There is the idea that failure is essential to growth. And there is the idea that our strengths are something to be afraid of.