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

by Marcus Buckingham

the single most powerful predictor of both team performance and team engagement is the sense that “I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work.”

Now, we tend to think of “performance” and “development” as two separate things, as though development or growth is something that exists outside of the present-day work.

But development means nothing more than doing our work a little better each day, so increasing performance and cr...

A focus on strengths increases performance. Therefore, a focus on strengths ...

there is a wealth of biological data to reinforce the truth that positive attention accelerates development.

when we examine your brain’s growth—when we count the new neurons and their connections—it turns out that you grow far more neurons and synaptic connections where you already have the most preexisting neurons and synaptic connections.

it is simply easier to forge new connections where you already have lots.

As the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux memorably described it, “Brain growth is like new buds on an existing branch, rather than new branches.”5

This is your brain on negative feedback: it responds as if to a threat, and it narrows its activity. The strong negative emotions produced by criticism “inhibits access to existing neural circuits and invokes cognitive, emotional, and perceptual impairment,”

Negative feedback doesn’t enable learning. It systematically inhibits it and is, neurologically speaking, how to create impairment.

the students who received attention focused on their dreams and how they might go about achieving them, however, the sympathetic nervous system was not activated. Instead it was the parasympathetic nervous system that lit up. This is sometimes referred to as the “rest and digest” system. To quote the researchers again: “[T]he Parasympathetic Nervous System . . . stimulates adult neurogenesis (i.e., growth of new neurons) . . . , a sense of well being, better immune system functioning, and cognitive, emotional, and perceptual openness.”7

In other words, positive, future-focused attention gives your brain access to more regions of itself and thus s...

We’re often told that the key to learning is to get out of our comfort zones, but this finding gives the lie to that particular chestnut—take us out of our comfort zones and our brains stop paying attention to anything other than surviving the experience. It’s clear that we learn most in our comfort zone, because that’s our strengths zone, where our neural pathways are most concentrated. It’s where we’re most open to possibility, and it’s where we are most creative and insightful.

Comfort zone is where you learn. Not OUTSIDE your comfort zone.

If you want your people to learn more, pay attention to what’s working for them right now, and then build on that.

The pull to look at the negative is a very strong one—the Berkeley psychologist Rick Hanson sums up the research memorably when he says, “the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones”—which is why making this a conscious habit is so important.

The difficulty for you here is that people aren’t processes, nor are they machines—what works for processes and machines doesn’t work for men and women.

Finding itself in negative-criticism territory, the human brain stiffens, tenses, and—in meaningful ways—resists improvement.

Tom Landry, who coached the Dallas Cowboys for twenty-nine consecutive years, was one leader who figured this out.

Early in his coaching career, with the Cowboys struggling at the bottom of the league and a bunch of misfits on his roster, he introduced a radical new method of coaching. While the other teams were reviewing missed tackles and dropped balls, Landry instead focused his players’ attention on their wins, however minor.

highlight reel of where that player had done something easily, natura...

number of wrong ways to do something ...

data shows that people on the highest-performing teams strongly agree with this item far more than people on lower-performing teams.*

theory of Appreciative Inquiry,

organizational growth will always follow the focus of your attention.

Nowadays, recognition has become a synonym for praise,

Recognition, in its deepest sense, is to spot something valuable in a person and then to ask her about it, in an ongoing effort to learn who she is when she is at her best.

The trick to doing this is not just to tell the person how well she’s performed, or how good she

you’ll want to do is tell the person what you experienced when that moment of excellence caught your attention—your instantaneous reaction to what worked.

The nature of your attention is key. If a team member screws something up, of course you have to deal with it. But remember that when you do, you’re merely remediating—and that remediating what’s wrong, so a mistake won’t happen again, moves you no closer to creating excellent performance.

correcting someone’s grammar will lead to her writing a beautiful poem, or telling someone the correct punchline to a joke will make this person funny.

Excellence is not the opposite of failure: we can never create excellent performances by only fixing poor ones. Mistake fixing is just a tool to prevent failure.

three to five moments of appreciative attention for every one piece of negative feedback.11 While there is no need to obsess over the mathematical precision of the ratios,12 the science suggests that if you aim for this level of deliberate imbalance you and your team will be well served.

Stop start keep

much of what we call “advice” is perhaps better understood as The Recitation Of A Set Of Tactics That Work For Me And Only Me.

The same applies to “performance transfusions.” To succeed, they depend on how individuals make sense of what they’re hearing—how they metabolize it, and hook it into their own patterns of thought and behavior. Performance-transfusing advice, in other words, starts with the performer, not with the advice.

is that an “insight” is brain food.

“a feeling of knowing generated from within,”

the box-of-paints approach, if you will, containing some hues of present, some shades of past, and a few bright dabs of future.

If your team member approaches you with a problem, he is in it now. He is feeling weak, broken, or challenged, and you have to address that. But rather than dealing with it head-on, ask your colleague to tell you three things that are working for him right now.

doing that, you’re priming his mind with oxytocin—what

better thought of as the “creativity” drug.

deliberately altering his brain chemistry so that he can be open to new solutions, and new ...

(By the way, you can be totally up-front with him about what you are doing—the evidence suggests that the more active a participant he is in ...

“When you had a problem like this in the past, what did you do that worked?”

should not be on why questions (“Why didn’t that work?” or “Why do you think you should do that?”),

What do you actually want to have happen?” or “What are a couple of actions you could take right now?”).

These sorts of questions yield concrete answers, in which your colleague finds his actual self doing actual things in the near future. Each answer he comes up with is a brushstroke to his painting, making his images ever more vivid, more compelling, and more real.

praise leads to performance more than praise reflects performance.

How much do you think you can know about a person simply by watching him?

If you work with him every single day, do you think you can figure out what drives him? Could you spot enough clues to reveal to you whether he’s competitive, or altruistic, or has a burning need to cross things off his list every day? How about his style of thinking? Are you perceptive enough to see his patterns and pinpoint that he is a big-picture, what-if thinker, or a logical, deductive reasoner, or that he values facts over concepts? And could you parse how he relates to others, and discern, for instance, that he’s far more empathetic than he appears, and that deep down he really cares about his teammates?

Certainly, the best team leaders seem able to do this. They pay close attention to the spontaneous actions and reactions of their team members, and figure out that one person likes receiving praise in private, while another values it only when it’s given in front of the entire team; that one responds to clear directives, while another shuts down if you even appear to be telling her what to do.