Marcus Buckingham Quotes & Sayings

You will learn and grow the least in your areas of weakness. — Marcus Buckingham

The difference between a pebble and a mountain lies in whom you ask to move it. — Marcus Buckingham

Discover what you don't like doing and stop doing it. — Marcus Buckingham

CEOs hate variance. It's the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex. — Marcus Buckingham

As a manager your job is not to teach people talent. Your job is to help them earn the accolade "talented" by matching their talent to the role. To do this well, like all great managers, you have to pay close attention to the subtle but significant differences between roles. — Marcus Buckingham

Remember, what you focus on expands; results follow focus. — Marcus Buckingham

If you are innately skeptical of other people's motives, then no amount of good behavior in the past will ever truly convince you that they are not just about to disappoint you. Suspicion is a permanent condition. — Marcus Buckingham

Your strongest life is built through a continuous practice of designing moment by moment. — Marcus Buckingham

The hardest thing about being a manager is realizing that your people will not do things the way that you would. But get used to it. Because if you try to force them to, then two things happen. They become resentful - they don't want to do it. And they become dependent - they can't do it. Neither of these is terribly productive for the long haul. — Marcus Buckingham

Spend the most time with your best people ... Talent is the multiplier. THe more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield. The time you spend with your best is, quite simply, your most productive time ... Persistence directed primarily toward your non-talents is self-destructive ... You will reprimand yourself, berate yourself, and put yourself through all manner of contortions in an attempt to achieve the impossible. — Marcus Buckingham

Managers are encouraged to focus on complex initiatives like reengineering or learning organizations, without spending time on the basics. — Marcus Buckingham

We're all filled with naturally recurring patterns that make us unique - they're called talents. And our charge is to bloody well use them. — Marcus Buckingham

Every company wants to know how to find and keep highly talented women in the workplace. — Marcus Buckingham

People buy pads all the time, because they want to write stuff down. We're never going to get away from paper, ever. People like writing; that's why more people are writing more real thank-you notes now - not just to stand out, but because there's something about pen to paper, about holding something cool in your hands. — Marcus Buckingham

Talent is the multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield. The time you spend with your best is, quite simply, your most productive time. — Marcus Buckingham

You can find energizing moments in each aspect of your life, but to do so you must learn how to catch them, hold on to them, to feel the pull of their weight and allow yourself to follow where they lead. — Marcus Buckingham

Everyone can probably do at least one thing better than ten thousand other people. — Marcus Buckingham

Born of the impossibly varied options we have to amuse ourselves, cutting-edge companies are finding innovative ways to tailor our entertainment choices to who we are, relieving us of the burden of finding the diamond in the rough of 500 TV channels or thousands of movies and music albums released every year. — Marcus Buckingham

Remember the Golden Rule? "Treat people as you would like to be treated." The best managers break the Golden Rule every day. They would say don't treat people as you would like to be treated. This presupposes that everyone breathes the same psychological oxygen as you. For example, if you are competitive, everyone must be similarly competitive. If you like to be praised in public, everyone else must, too. Everyone must share your hatred of micromanagement. — Marcus Buckingham

Google and Facebook, each in their own way, have revolutionized the delivery of advertising based on search and social networking, creating a sort of anti-Spam: targeted, relevant ads that a consumer might actually welcome rather than spurn. — Marcus Buckingham

Forcing your employees to follow required steps only prevents customer dissatisfaction. If your goal is truly to satisfy, to create advocates, then the step-by-step approach alone cannot get you there. Instead, you must select employees who have the talent to listen and to teach, and then you must focus them toward simple emotional outcomes like partnership and advice.
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Identify a person's strenths. Define outcomes that play to those strengths. Find a way to count, rate or rank those outcomes. And then let the person run. — Marcus Buckingham

You grow most in your areas of greatest strength. You will improve the most, be the
most creative, be the most inquisitive, and bounce back the fastest in those areas
where you have already shown some natural advantage over everyone else your strengths. This doesn't mean you should ignore your weaknesses. It just means
you'll grow most where you're already strong. — Marcus Buckingham

My career expertise is as a psychometrician - somebody who builds tests to measure personality. Companies would employ me to build interviews to measure the talents of people before they were hired. — Marcus Buckingham

That all salespeople are different, that all accountants are different, that each individual, no matter what his chosen profession, is unique. — Marcus Buckingham

American culture is CEO obsessed. We celebrate the hard-charging heroes and mythologize the iconoclastic visionaries. Those people are important. — Marcus Buckingham

You won't find a CEO who doesn't talk about a 'powerful culture' as a source of competitive advantage. At the same time, you'd be hard-pressed to find a CEO who has much of a clue about the strength of that culture. — Marcus Buckingham

Define excellence vividly, quantitatively. Paint a picture for your most talented employees of what excellence looks like. Keep everyone pushing and pushing toward the right-hand edge of the bell curve. — Marcus Buckingham

The true genius of a great manager is his or her ability to individualize. A great manager is one who understands how to trip each person's trigger. — Marcus Buckingham

You have a genius. — Marcus Buckingham

Focus on each person's strengths and manage around his weaknesses. Don't try to fix the weaknesses. Don't try to perfect each person. Instead do everything you can to help each person cultivate his talents. Help each person become more of who he already is. — Marcus Buckingham

Men have the choice to arrange their schedules so they can pick up the kids from school twice a week. And they have the choice not to, and then to feel guilty about this choice. — Marcus Buckingham

Sustained success means making the greatest possible impact over the longest period of time — Marcus Buckingham

Of the twelve, the most powerful questions (to employees, guaging their satisfaction with their employers) are those witha combination of the strongest links to the most business outcomes (to include profitability). Armed with this perspective, we now know that the following six ar ethe most powerful questions:
1) Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2) Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3) Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4) In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?
5) Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
6) Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
As a manager, if you want to know what you should do to build a strong and productive workplace, securing 5s to these six questions would be an excellent place to start. — Marcus Buckingham

Women have lives that become increasingly empty. They're doing more and feeling less. — Marcus Buckingham

Focusing on strengths is the surest way to greater job satisfaction, team performance and organizational excellence. — Marcus Buckingham

Strengths are not activities you're good at, they're activities that strengthen you. A strength is an activity that before you're doing it you look forward to doing it; while you're doing it, time goes by quickly and you can concentrate; after you've done it, it seems to fulfill a need of yours. — Marcus Buckingham

When it comes to exploring your creative side, it's very easy to think of all the reasons you can't do it-you don't have the time, you don't have the money, etc.-but if you are truly passionate about expressing yourself, you can find a way. When you feel as though you can't do something, the simple antidote is action: Begin doing it. Start the process, even if it's just a simple step, and don't stop at the beginning. Take the next step and the next until what you've dreamed about begins to become reality. — Marcus Buckingham

If you want execution, hail only success. If you want creativity, hail risk, and remain neutral about success. — Marcus Buckingham

Many of us feel stress and get overwhelmed not because we're taking on too much, but because we're taking on too little of what really strengthens us. — Marcus Buckingham

Second, that everyone, regardless of who they are, will want to be promoted out of the job as soon as possible. — Marcus Buckingham

In fact, over the last twenty years, authors have offered up over nine thousand different systems, languages, principles, and paradigms to help explain the mysteries of management and leadership. — Marcus Buckingham

There's something unique and different that makes a leader, and it's not about creativity or courage or integrity ... A leader's job is to rally people toward a better future. — Marcus Buckingham

This company didn't have one culture. It had as many cultures as it did managers. No — Marcus Buckingham

Life's tricky for women because they have to make more choices than men. And yes, choice is good, but boy, you better be an expert choice-maker. — Marcus Buckingham

The best way to find out whether you're on the right path? Stop looking at the path. — Marcus Buckingham

The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor. — Marcus Buckingham

A strength is what you do that makes you feel strengthened. — Marcus Buckingham

Any recurring patterns of behavior that can be productively applied are talents. — Marcus Buckingham

Always work hard. Intensity clarifies. It creates not only momentum, but also the pressure you need to feel either friction, or fulfillment. — Marcus Buckingham

Sir, I'm afraid that the quality of this airline is partly measured by on-time departures. And unfortunately, on-time departures are measured by when we left the gate, not by wheels-up. — Marcus Buckingham

Our talents come so easily to use that we acquire a false sense of security: Doesn't everyone see the world as I do? Doesn't everyone feel a sense of impatience to get this project started? Doesn't everyone want to avoid conflict and find the common ground? Can't everyone see the obstacles lying in wait if we proceed down this path? Our talents feel so natural to us that they seem to be common sense. — Marcus Buckingham

As with all catalysts, the manager's function is to speed up the reaction between two substances, thus creating the desired end product. Specifically, the manager creates performance in each employee by speeding up the reaction between the employee's talent and the company's goals, and between the employee's talent and the customer's needs. — Marcus Buckingham

Americans just love convening. They are a convention-happy country and they love to get together to talk. — Marcus Buckingham

Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. — Marcus Buckingham

We dream of having a clean house - but who dreams of actually doing the cleaning? We don't have to dream about doing the work, because doing the work is always within our grasp; the dream, in this sense, is to attain the goal without the work. — Marcus Buckingham

Leaders are fascinated by future. You are a leader if and only if, you are restless for change, impatient for progress and deeply dissatisfied with status quo. Because in your head, you can see a better future. The friction between 'what is' and 'what could be' burns you, stirs you up, propels you. This is leadership. — Marcus Buckingham

Change the ideas and keep the forms the same, and you will have changed little. — Marcus Buckingham

Many managers make a distinction between talent and drive. They often find themselves counseling someone by saying: "Look, you are very talented. But you need to apply yourself or that talent will go to waste." This advice sounds helpful. More than likely it is well-intended. But fundamentally it is flawed. A person's drive is not changeable. What drives him is decided by his mental filter, by the relative strength or weakness of the highways in his mind. His drives are, in fact, his striving talents. — Marcus Buckingham

You cannot learn very much about excellence from studying failure. — Marcus Buckingham

If you want to be clear, act. — Marcus Buckingham

What do we know to be important but are unable to measure? — Marcus Buckingham

Great leaders rally people to a better future. — Marcus Buckingham

If we have to know without a doubt that the choices we are making are the perfect ones, we risk never making any choices at all. — Marcus Buckingham

So this is (a manager's) dilemma: The manager must retain control and focus people on performance. But she is bound by her belief that she cannot force everyone to perform the same way ... The solution is as elegant as it is efficient: Define the right outcomes and let each person find his own route toward these outcomes. — Marcus Buckingham

It's a special person - and personality - who can lead a start-up to soaring success and sustain that success for the long term. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg are star examples. — Marcus Buckingham

In most cases, no matter what it is, if you measure it and reward it, people will try to excel at it — Marcus Buckingham

The power of skills and knowledge is that they are transferable from one person to another. Their limitation is that they are often situation-specific - faced with an unanticipated scenario, they lose much of their power. In contrast, the power of talent is that it is transferable from situation to situation. — Marcus Buckingham

The best strategy for building a competitive organization is to help individuals become more of who they are. — Marcus Buckingham

When you feel as though you can't do something, the simple antidote is action: Begin doing it. Start the process, even if it's just a simple step, and don't stop at the beginning. — Marcus Buckingham

The greatest managers in the world do not have much in common. But despite their differences, these great managers do share one thing: Before they do anything else, they first break all the rules of conventional wisdom. — Marcus Buckingham

The Four Keys of Great Managers:
1. "When selecting someone, they select for talent ... not simply experience, intelligence or determination."
2. "When setting expectations, they define the right outcomes ... not the right steps."
3. "When motivating someone, they focus on strengths ... not on weaknesses."
4. "When developing someone, they help him find the right fit ... not simply the next rung on the ladder. — Marcus Buckingham

The only truth is your own. The world you see is seen by you alone. What entices you and what repels you, what strengthens you and what weakens you, is part of a pattern that no one else shares. — Marcus Buckingham

procrastination in the face of poor performance is a fool's remedy. — Marcus Buckingham

How can we all grow? — Marcus Buckingham

Every time you make a rule you take away a choice and choice, with all of its illuminating repercussions, is the fuel for learning. — Marcus Buckingham

Simply put, this is one insight we heard echoed by tens of thousands of great managers:
People don't change that much.
Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out.
Try to draw out what was left in.
That is hard enough. — Marcus Buckingham

You will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses. — Marcus Buckingham

As oblivious as we can be to our own strengths, it's even easier to ignore the particular and unique strengths of others. — Marcus Buckingham

Innovation and best practices can be sown throughout an organization - but only when they fall on fertile ground. — Marcus Buckingham

The opposite of a leader isn't a follower. The opposite of a leader is a pessimist. — Marcus Buckingham

"Freedom, individualism, authenticity and being yourself so long as you don't hurt another's physical person or property: Sustained success comes only when you take what's unique about you and figure out how to make it useful!" — Marcus Buckingham

The secret to living a strong life is right in front of you, calling to you every day. It can be found in your emotional reaction to specific moments in your life. — Marcus Buckingham

Most of my work has been in corporations, studying how you build an organization that helps people to identify and work to their strengths. — Marcus Buckingham

You will have your own examples of a work environment that seems to be firing on all cylinders. It will be a place where performance levels are consistently high, where turnover levels are low, and where a growing number of loyal customers join the fold every day. — Marcus Buckingham

MICHAEL: Maybe just this: A manager has got to remember that he is on stage every day. His people are watching him. Everything he does, everything he says, and the way he says it, sends off clues to his employees. These clues affect performance. So never forget you are on that stage. — Marcus Buckingham

Have you ever suffered through a bad relationship, the kind of relationship where the pressures of each day sapped your energy and made you a stranger to yourself? If you can stand to, think back to how you felt during that relationship and remember: A bad relationship is rarely one where your partner didn't know you very well. Most often, a bad relationship is one where your partner came to know you very well indeed ... and wished you weren't that way. Perhaps your partner wanted to perfect you. Perhaps you were simply incompatible and your weaknesses grated on each other. Perhaps your partner was a person who simply enjoyed pointing out other people's failings. Whatever the cause, you ended up feeling as though you were being defined by those things you did not do rather than those things you did. And that felt awful. — Marcus Buckingham

This thinking is well-intended but overly simplistic, reminiscent perhaps of the four-year-old who proudly presents his mother with a red truck for her birthday because that is the present he wants. So the best managers reject the Golden Rule. Instead, they say, treat each person as he would like to be treated, bearing in mind who he is. — Marcus Buckingham

Authenticity is your most precious commodity as a leader. — Marcus Buckingham

Companies don't have one culture. They have as many as they have supervisors or managers. You want to build a strong culture? Hold every manager accountable for the culture that he or she builds. — Marcus Buckingham

If you want to change your life so that others may benefit from your strengths, then change your values. Don't waste time trying to change your talents. — Marcus Buckingham

People leave managers, not companies — Marcus Buckingham

You shouldn't take pride in your natural talents any more than you should take pride in your sex, your race or color of your hair — Marcus Buckingham

I think a good business book has one coherent idea that is richly played out. — Marcus Buckingham

MICHAEL: Well ... I suppose the first would be, pick the right people. If you do, it makes everything else so much easier. And once you've picked them, trust them. Everyone here knows that the till is open. If they want to borrow $2 for cigarettes or $200 for rent, they can. Just put an IOU in the till and pay it back. If you expect the best of people, they'll give you the best. I've rarely been let down. And when someone has let me down, I don't think it is right to punish those who haven't by creating some new rule or policy. — Marcus Buckingham

Gen Y is really quite distinct from Gen X; it's really self-involved and very narcissistic - their cameras are filled with pictures of themselves; Facebook, it's about me. It's a generation that's been pampered by their parents and their schools, given prizes for just taking part. — Marcus Buckingham

We live with them every day, and they come so easily to us that they cease to be precious. — Marcus Buckingham

A note of caution: We can never achieve goals that envy sets for us. Looking at your friends and wishing you had what they had is a waste of precious energy. Because we are all unique, what makes another happy may do the opposite for you. That's why advice is nice but often disappointing when heeded. — Marcus Buckingham

To get the best coaching outcomes, always have your 1-on-1's on your employee's turf not yours. In your office the truth hides. — Marcus Buckingham

Though women begin their lives more fulfilled than men, as they age, they gradually become less happy. Men, in contrast, get happier as they get older. — Marcus Buckingham

True individuality can be lonely. — Marcus Buckingham