146 Quotes by 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.

This is the same feeling that many managers unwittingly create in their employees. Even when working with their most productive employees, they still spend most of their time talking about each person’s few areas of nontalent and how to eradicate them. No matter how well-intended, relationships preoccupied with weakness never end well.

There has to be a way to redirect employee’s driving ambition and to channel it more productively. There is. Create heroes in every role. Make every role, performed at excellence, a respected profession.

The Four Keys, select for talent, define the right outcomes, focus on strengths, find the right fit, reveal how they attack this goal.

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.

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.

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

Actually, the data reveals that checking in with your team members once a month is literally worse than useless. While team leaders who check in once a week see, on average, a 13 percent increase in team engagement, those who check in only once a month see a 5 percent decrease in engagement.

You will have to manage around the weaknesses of each and every employee. But if, with one particular employee, you find yourself spending most of your time managing around weaknesses, then know that you have made a casting error. At this point it is time to fix the casting error and to stop trying to fix the person.