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

by Marcus Buckingham

It is therefore his responsibility to identify these red threads, see them for what they are, and then deliberately weave them into the rest of his work.

No one can do this for him—neither the identification, nor the weaving. Only he, with discipline and intelligence and intention, can bring love into his work.

Your world has an n of 1, and that 1 is you.

When you start to think about your life in this way, you’ll quickly realize not only that “balance” is an unhelpful idea but that we have the categories wrong.

What we all wrestle with every day in the real world is not so much work and life as it is love and loathe.

Watch for your red threads. Take them seriously. They are light, they are strong, they ar...

because technical mastery absent love always equals burnout.

Burnout isn’t the absence of balance but the absence of love.

We ask the same of you. Spend a week in love with your work. Hold tightly to your red threads. Yes, so you can blossom. But mostly, so you can figure out ways to share what’s unique about you with the rest of us.

It’s become something of a cliché, in the business literature, to bemoan the vast volume of writing on the topic; to list the number of books on leadership that come up if you search on Amazon; to point to the great library of articles and blog posts and videos and inspirational speeches as evidence that leadership is either a Really Important Subject or else a Really Over-Analyzed Subject.

We can say that there appears to be broad agreement that certain people exhibit a definable, consistent, and meaningful quality called leadership.

That there are some characteristics of a person that are in some way above and different from that person’s technical skills (whether he or she can write good code, for example, or good English) and that also transcend that person’s interpersonal or “soft” skills (whether he or she can make the sale, or negotiate a deal) and that make the person a leader.

We can also say that we tend to agree that all the best leaders possess this quality, or set of qualities—so, leadership is something that lives, specially, in those who lead and is in some way responsible for their ability to do so. And we can say that, as a consequence, most of us would a...

There is a frustrating circularity to this argument—that there’s a thing called leadership, and we know it’s a thing because leaders have it, otherwise they wouldn’t be leaders. It’s like saying your cat has catness because he’s a cat: it might be true, but it’s...

vulnerability (the courage to be imperfect in public, to relinquish the need to be right or to be the smartest person in the room).

For leadership does not live in the abstract, does not live in the average. It lives, instead, in the real world. And if we look at that world, this is what we see. First, the ability to lead is rare.

these point not to its ubiquity but to its scarcity—and

If leading were easy, there would be more good leaders. If there were more good leaders, we might be just a little less focused on it.

And this is confounding, because it challenges the notion that there is in fact a list of leadership qualities, each of which is essential. For every quality on the list, we can think of a respected leader in the real world who lacks it.

If it’s about ethics, what do we make of Steve Jobs’s buying a new car every six months to avoid registering it, so as to be able to park in handicapped spots whenever he wanted to?

we don’t see the most respected leaders spending much time trying to round themselves out, trying to develop abilities in areas where they have none. Instead, we see them trying to make the best use of what they already have, with the result that whenever we look closely, we see them going about the task of leading in very different

It is rather that others chose to follow him.

a leader is someone who has followers, plain and simple.

The only determinant of whether anyone is leading is whether anyone else is following.

The idea of leadership is missing the idea of followers. It’s missing the idea that our subject here is, at heart, a question of a particularly human relationship—namely, why anyone would choose to devote his or her energies to, and to take risks on behalf of, someone else.

So the question we should really be asking ourselves is this one: Why do we follow?

What made those eleven men entrust their well-being and their hopes to Number 7089?

Broadly speaking, we want to feel part of something bigger than ourselves—the “Best of We”—while, at the same time, feeling that our leader knows and values us for who we are as a unique individual—the “Best of Me.”

we follow leaders who connect us to a mission we believe in, who clarify what’s expected of us, who surround us with people who define excellence the same way we do, who value us for our strengths, who show us that our teammates will always be there for us, who diligently replay our winning plays, who challenge us to keep getting better, and who give us confidence in the future.

When we say to ourselves that leadership is indeed a thing, because we know it when we see it, we’re not really seeing any definable characteristic of another human. What we are “seeing” is in fact our own feelings as a follower.

we should not expect every good leader to share the same qualities or competencies, we can hold all good leaders accountable for creating these same feelings of followership in their

We need not dictate how each leader should behave, but we can define what all good leaders must create in their followers.

Leadership isn’t a thing, because it cannot be measured reliably. Followership is a thing, because it can.

your challenge is to find and refine your own idiosyncratic way of creating in your team these eight emotional outcomes.

Your ability to create the outcomes you want in your followers is tied directly to how seriously and intelligently you cultivate your own idiosyncrasy, and to what end.

What each of these leaders had in common was that they were really good at something—each was, in their different way, an extremist.

the best people aren’t well-rounded, but are instead spiky

What we see in the best leaders is a similar extremism—a few signal abilities refined over time.

And so this truth: we follow spikes.

There aren’t many human universals—the anthropologist Donald Brown’s book Human Universals lists sixty-seven of them—but one of them is that every human society ever studied ritualizes death.2 Each

This particularly human characteristic presents a challenge for you, the modern day leader. You are charged with rallying your team toward a better future, yet many on your team are fearful of this future. And this fear isn’t unjustified. It’s adaptive. Those of our forebears who lacked it, who paddled their little rafts toward the horizon, asking themselves “Ooh, I wonder where the sun goes to sleep?” often didn’t return to pass on their genes. Being a bit cautious can be a sensible thing.

As a leader, you can’t be dismissive of this fear. You can’t tell your people to “embrace change” and to “get comfortable with ambiguity.”

Your greatest challenge as a leader, then, is to honor each person’s legitimate fear of the unknown and, at the same time, to turn that fear into spiritedness.

We follow people who are really good at something that matters to us. We follow the spikes.

We don’t necessarily follow vision, or strategy, or execution, or relationship building, or any of the other leadership things. Instead we follow mastery.

John F. Kennedy was a master at getting us to see and engage with the near-term future in a way that made it morally enlarging—even

The truth that no leader is perfect—and that the best of them have learned how to work around their imperfections.

The truth that leaders are not good or bad—they are just people who have figured out how to be their most defined selves in the world, and who do so in such a way that they inspire genuine confidence in their followers. This isn’t necessarily good or bad. It just is.

Then a facilitator steps to the front of the room and explains the model. The model takes whatever we’ve just seen and experienced and makes it boring. The model is usually a two-by-two grid of little boxes, and in each of the boxes is written some sort of abstract word:

Stop debating whether it’s authenticity or tribal leadership or situational leadership or level-five leadership or whatever the latest leadership-nirvana thing is. Stop with the one-size-fits-all.