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

by Marcus Buckingham

what’s most striking when we look at excellent performance is not the absence of deficit but, rather, the presence of a few signature strengths, hon...

therefore improvement consists of finding out, in each trial, what works, seizing hold of it, and figuring out how to make more of it.

And the moment we begin to get better is the moment when something actually works, not when it doesn’t.

we are told to resist the temptation to “just” play to our strengths, and instead to work constantly on our weaknesses.

It is not, for each of us, where performance is easiest—it is where performance is most impactful and increasing.

leaders can’t be in the control business and must be in the intelligence, meaning, and empowerment business—the outcomes business.

Define the outcomes you want from your team and its members, and then look for each person’s strength signs to figure out how each person can reach those outcomes most efficiently, most amazingly, most creatively, and most joyfully. The moment you realize you’re in the outcomes business is the moment you turn each person’s uniqueness from a bug into a feature.

While the outcomes of high performance are visible and clear, the ingredients of high performance vary from person to person.

There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to human beings; and there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to great performance.

Fit the machine to the pilot, not the other way around. You can do the same with your team—it entails adjusting the outcomes you’re asking individual team members to deliver to better match their idiosyncratic talents.

If we were all the same, there would doubtless be things that all of us could not do, and that therefore the team could not do.

Well-roundedness is a misguided and futile objective when it comes to individual people; but when it comes to teams, it’s an absolute necessity.

Customer focus, innovation, growth orientation, agility—these are not abilities to be measured, they are values to be shared.

It goes without question that feedback for each and every one of us at work is a good thing, and that more feedback is an even better thing.

emerged a cottage industry of classes to teach us both how to give this feedback and how to receive it with grace and equanimity.

You, as the team leader, will be told that one of the most important and tricky parts of your job is to convey this feedback to your people, no matter how negative the reviews might be.

Your job is to accelerate team performance, and it’ll be your responsibility to hold a mirror up to the performance of your people so they can see themselves as they really are, and see their performance as it truly is.

This, you’ll be told, is the secret to both success and respect as a team leader—so much so, in fact, that this sort of direct, clear, unvarnished feedback has its own spe...

should you reject the feedback you receive from someone else because it feels odd, or confusing, or just plain wrong, you’ll be helped to understand that this feeling is just a natural reaction to threat, and that to grow as a person and as a leader you will need to “let go of your ego,” to “embrace your failures,”

always maintain a “growth mindset.”

As the author and speaker Simon Sinek said recently in his spot as guest editor for Virgin’s workplace blog, “So here’s a way you can fulfill your potential in the workplace: negative feedback . . . Negative feedback is where it’s at . . . After every project or anything that I do, I always ask somebody, ‘What sucks? What can I do better? Where is there room for improvement?’ I’m now to the point where I crave it. That’s what you want. You want to get to the point where you crave negative feedback.”

No hierarchy or office politics should prevent anyone, no matter their level in the company, from challenging an assumption or interrogating a course of action.

Employees are expected to rate their peers after calls, meetings, and daily interactions, and all the resultant ratings are analyzed (by the team that created IBM’s Watson, no less), permanently stored, and then displayed on a card that each employee carries with him or her at all times.

Bridgewater calls this your “baseball card,” and its intent is to hold you accountable for knowing “who you really are,” and to give everyone else a radically transparent view of what you truly bring to Bridgewater—one of the metrics it displays is your “believability score.”

(Despite the millions of data points collected, Bridgewater still has no reliable measure of each person’s performance, as we’ll see in chapter

But while this might explain why we are now able to give constant feedback, it doesn’t help us understand why we would so desperately want to. To understand that we need to turn to two well-documented oddities of human nature.

coming up with an explanation—an attribution, if you like—for our colleagues’ actions, and those explanations, when they concern the people around us, overwhelmingly ascribe others’ behavior to their innate abilities and personality, not to the external circumstances they find themselves in.

This tendency of ours to skew our explanations of others’ behavior (particularly negative behavior) toward stories about who they are is called the Fundamental Attribution Error.

Fundamental Attribution Error

While our stories of others center on who they are, we are much more generous to ourselves in our interpretation of our own actions.

When it comes to our self-attributions, we skew the other way, and overascribe our behavior to the external situation aro...

If we’re doing something that annoys someone else, then that person is annoyed only because he or she doesn’t understand the situati...

This tendency is called the Actor-O...

one of a number of human-reasoning biases that fall into a category called self-serving biases, because they serve to explain away our own action...

These biases lead us to believe that your performance (whether good or bad) is due to who you are—your drive, or style, or effort, say—which in turn leads us to the conclusion that if we want to get you to improve your performance we must give you feedback on who you are, so that...

One of the inconvenient truths about humans is that we have poor theories of others, and these theories lead us, among other things, to design our working world to remedy or to insulate against failings that we see in others but don’t see in ourselves.*

since success is achieved only through hard work, and since giving negative feedback, receiving negative feedback, and fixing mistakes are all hard work, therefore negative feedback causes success,† and you can begin to see why our faith in feedback, and specifically negative feedback, is so firmly rooted—why

The very absence of permanent feedback allowed them to be more casual, more at ease, and more real, and this safe, attentive place attracted them in the millions.

presentation. It matters less to us whether this “self” is truly us, or whether, as many have observed, our online selves are aspirational projections, than it matters to us that others see us, and like us. We aren’t looking for feedback. We’re looking for an audience, and all of us—not just millennials—seem drawn to places that provide us with a way to meet our audience and gain its approval. What we want from social media is not really feedback. It’s attention,

and the lesson from the last decade is that social media is an attention economy—some users seeking it, some supplying it—not a feedback economy.

More recently, epidemiologists, psychometricians, and statisticians have shown that by far the best predictor of heart disease, depression, and suicide is loneliness—if you deprive us of the attention of others, we wither.

The conclusion was not that workers craved a brighter workplace or a tidier one, or, for that matter, a darker one or a messier one. Instead, what the workers were responding to was attention.

The truth, then, is that people need attention—and when you give it to us in a safe and nonjudgmental environment, we will come and stay and play and work.

But it’s a bit more complicated than that, as it turns out, because feedback—even negative feedback—is still attention.

They then calculated the ratio of highly engaged employees to highly disengaged employees for each type of attention.

To create pervasive disengagement, ignore your people. If you pay them no attention whatsoever—no positive feedback; no negative feedback; nothing—your team’s engagement will plummet, so much so that for every one engaged team member you will have twenty disengaged team members.

They found that negative feedback is forty times more effective, as a team leadership approach, than ignoring people. For those employees whose leaders’ attention was focused on fixing their shortcomings, the ratio of engaged to disengaged was two to one. But if we remember that “engagement” in this case is a precisely defined set of experiences that have been shown to lead to team performance;

Because the third finding was this: for those employees given mainly positive attention—that is, attention to what they did best, and what was working most powerfully for them—the ratio of engaged to disengaged rose to sixty to one.

the power of REWARD vs CHALLENGE

Positive attention, in other words, is thirty times more powerful than negative attention in creating high performance on a team.

People don’t need feedback. They need attention, and moreover, attention to what they do the best. And they become more engaged and therefore more productive when we give it to them.