Nine Lies About Work | Marcus Buckingham, Ashley Goodall

You crave feedback. Your organization's culture is the key to its success. Strategic planning is essential. Your competencies should be measured and your weaknesses shored up. Leadership is a thing. These may sound like basic truths of our work lives today. But actually, they're lies. As strengths guru and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham and Cisco Leadership and Team Intelligence head Ashley Goodall tell there are some big lies--distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking--that we encounter every time we show up for work. Nine lies, to be exact. They cause dysfunction and frustration, ultimately resulting in workplaces that are a pale shadow of what they could be. But there are those who can get past the lies and discover what's real. These freethinking leaders recognize the power and beauty of our individual uniqueness. They know that emergent patterns are more valuable than received wisdom and that evidence is more powerful than dogma. With engaging stories and incisive analysis, the authors reveal the essential truths that such freethinking leaders will recognize immediately: that it is the strength and cohesiveness of your team, not your company's culture, that matter most; that we should focus less on top-down planning and more on giving our people reliable, real-time intelligence; that rather than trying to align people's goals we should strive to align people's sense of purpose and meaning; that people don't want constant feedback, they want helpful attention. This is the real world of work, as it is and as it should be. Nine Lies About Work reveals the few core truths that will help you show just how good you are to those who truly rely on you.

Culture really matters. It is potentially more important than what the company does—“Culture eats strategy for breakfast!”—how the company does it, how much the employees get paid, or even the company’s current stock price.

The first lie we’ll need to expose is precisely that people care which company they work for. It sounds so odd to label this a lie, since each of us does indeed feel some sort of connection to our company, but read on, and we think you’ll see that while what each of us truly cares about may begin as “company,” it quickly morphs into something else rather different.

When people choose not to work somewhere, the somewhere isn’t a company, it’s a team. The truth is that, once there, people care which team they’re on.

When you’re next looking to join a company, don’t bother asking if it has a great culture—no one can tell you that in any real way. Instead, ask what it does to build great teams.

The thing we call planning doesn’t tell you where to go; it just helps you understand where you are. Or rather, were. Recently. We aren’t planning for the future, we’re planning for the near-term past.

It’s not true that the best plan wins. It is true that the best intelligence wins.

What can you do as a team leader to create such an intelligence system for your team?

First, liberate as much information as you possibly can. Think about all the sources of information you have, and make as many of them as possible available to your team, on demand.

Second, watch carefully to see which data your people find useful. Don’t worry too much about making all this data simple or easy to consume, or about packaging it for people, or weaving it together to form a coherent story. The biggest challenge with data today isn’t making sense of it—most of us deal with complexity all the time, and are pretty good at figuring out what we need to know and where to find it. No, the biggest challenge with data today is making it accurate—sorting the signal from the noise. This is much harder, and much more valuable for our teams. So be extremely vigilant about accuracy; watch which information your people naturally gravitate toward; and then, over time, increase the volume, depth, and speed of precisely that sort of data.

Third, trust your people to make sense of the data. Planning systems take the interpretation of the data away from those on the front lines, and hand it off to a select few, who analyze it and decipher its patterns, and then construct and communicate the plan.

If you study the best team leaders you’ll discover that many of them share a similarly frequent sense-making ritual—not with two thousand people, but with two. It’s called a check-in, and in simple terms it’s a frequent, one-on-one conversation about near-term future work between a team leader and a team member.

How frequent? Every week. These leaders understand that goals set at the beginning of the year have become irrelevant by the third week of the year, and that a year is not a marathon,planned out in detail long in advance, but is instead a series of fifty-two little sprints, each informed by the changing state of the world. They realize that the key role of a team leader is to ensure that Sprint Number Thirty-Six is as focused and as energizing as was Sprint Number One.

Each check-in, then, is a chance to offer a tip, or an idea that can help the team member overcome a real-world obstacle, or a suggestion for how to refine a particular skill.

Frequency trumps quality. They realize that it’s less important that each check-in is perfectly executed than that it happens, every week. In the intelligence business, frequency is king.

Checking in is akin to teeth-brushing: you brush your teeth every day, and while you hope that each brushing is high quality, what’s most important is that it happens, every day. Twice-a-year super-high-quality teeth-brushing is as absurd as it sounds. So is twice-a-year super-high-quality intelligence. A team with low check-in frequency is a team with low intelligence.

The best, most effective way to create clarity of expectations is to figure out how to let your people figure it out for themselves. This isn’t a question of removing complexity, but is rather one of locating it in the right place—not hidden from view as the input for a grand plan, but rather shared for all to see. To do this, give your people as much accurate data as you can, as often as you can—a real-time view of what’s going on right now—and then a way to make sense of it, together. Trust the intelligence of your team.

Goals are everywhere at work—it’s hard to find many companies that do not engage in some sort of annual or semi-annual goal-setting regimen. At some point in the year, usually at the start of a fiscal year or after bonuses and raises have been paid, the organization’s senior leaders set their goals for the upcoming six or twelve months, and then share them with their teams. Each team member looks at each of the leader’s goals, and figures out what to do to advance that goal, and thus sets a sort of mini goal that reflects some part of the leader’s goal. This continues down the chain, until you, and every other employee, has a set of goals that are mini versions of some larger goal further up in the organization.

And, at the end of the year, you’re asked to write a brief self-assessment reflecting how you feel you’ve done on each goal, after which your team leader will review this assessment and add her own, in some cases also saying whether she thinks each goal was actually met, or not. After HR has nudged her a couple of times, she’ll input all this information into the company performance management system, whereupon it’ll serve as a permanent record of your performance for the year, and will guide your pay, promotion opportunities, and even continued employment.

Can we evaluate a person based on how many goals he or she has achieved? Many companies do, for sure. But here’s the snag: unless we can standardize the difficulty of each person’s goals it’s impossible to objectively judge the relative performance of each employee.

In the real world, there is work—stuff that you have to get done. In theory world, there are goals.

Work is ahead of you; goals are behind you—they’re your rear-view mirror.

Work is specific and detailed; goals are abstract.

Work changes fast; goals change slowly, or not at all.

If a goal is going to be useful, if it is going to help you contribute more, then the only criterion is that you must set it for yourself, voluntarily. Any goal imposed upon you from above is an un-goal.

The best companies don’t cascade goals; the best companies cascade meaning.

The best leaders realize that their people are wise, that they do not need to be coerced into alignment through yearly goal setting. These leaders strive instead to bring to life for their people the meaning and purpose of their work, the missions and contributions and methods that truly matter. These leaders know that in a team infused with such meaning, each person will be smart enough and driven enough to set goals voluntarily that manifest that meaning. It is shared meaning that creates alignment, and this alignment is emergent, not coerced.

Our people don’t need to be told what to do; they want to be told why.

Goals set by others imprison us. In creating his own, Ethan had found freedom.

We are drawn to activities in which we find joy. We can’t always explain why, but some activities seem to contain ingredients that breathe life into us, that lift us up out of ourselves to reveal something finer, more resilient, and more creative. Each of us is different, of course, so each of us finds this joy in different activities, yet each of us knows this feeling. And when our work does indeed bring us this joyful ingredient, when we do indeed feel love, even, for what we do, then we are truly magnificent. Stevie Wonder, who clearly knows a thing or two about cultivating and contributing one’s strengths to the world, said it best: “You will never feel proud of your work if you find no joy within it. Your best work is always joyful work.”

During annual talent reviews, the competencies will be the language used to describe your performance and potential: if the consensus is that you possess them all, you will be considered for promotion, or paid more, or selected for plum assignments; whereas if you do not possess them, or display gaps in a few of them, you will be told to take the relevant training programs, and work on proving to your company that you have plugged your gaps. These competencies will become the lens through which your company sees you, understands you, and values you.

The team leader first selects which competency to evaluate, from the required list for the team member; then picks from a list of behaviors that someone is supposed to exhibit if they are either failing at, meeting, or exceeding this competency; then watches as the system generates a sample sentence to convey this feedback; then is given the opportunity to adjust this sentence to sound more or less positive, using buttons that adjust the feedback in one direction or the other; and then clicks a final button to add the finished sentence to someone’s feedback form—all without typing a single word.

In the real world each of us learns to make the most of what we have. Growth, it turns out, is actually a question not of figuring out how to gain ability where we lack it but of figuring out how to increase impact where we already have ability. And because our abilities are diverse, when you look at a great performance you see not diversity minimized but rather diversity magnified; not sameness but uniqueness.

The best people are not well-rounded, finding fulfillment in their uniform ability.  Quite the opposite, in fact—the best people are spiky, and in their lovingly honed spikiness they find their biggest contribution, their fastest growth, and, ultimately, their greatest joy.

“Pain + Reflection = Progress” is the mantra at Bridgewater, the hedge fund run by Ray Dalio, and in some way we thrill to the hard clarity of this prescription. The pain of working on our deficits seems like a worthy pain, a way to pay our penance and make our restitution with the world, and we are drawn to its salutary austerity.

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.

Diversity isn’t an impediment to building a great team—rather, it’s the fundamental ingredient without which a great team cannot exist. 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. We need to partner with people whose strengths—whose weirdness, whose spikiness—is different from ours if we are to achieve results that demand more abilities than any of us has alone.

The real world is right there, Dalio says: it is what it is. We must face it with all of our intelligence unfettered, and we can’t allow our politeness or our fear of repercussion to prevent us from seeing what is there to be seen, and thereby changing it for the better.

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.

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.

Negative feedback is forty times more effective, as a team leadership approach, than ignoring people.

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.

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.”

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.

For a team member, nothing is more believable, and thus more powerful, than your sharing what you saw from her and how it made you feel. Or what it made you think. Or what it caused you to realize. Or how and where you will now rely on her. These are your reactions, and when you share them with specificity and with detail, you aren’t judging her or rating her or fixing her. You are simply reflecting to her the unique “dent” she just made in the world, as seen through one person’s eyes—yours. And precisely because it isn’t a judgment or a rating, but is instead a simple reaction, it is authoritative and beyond question. It’s also humble: when someone says to you “I want to know where I stand” she doesn’t actually mean this, and you, frankly, are in no position to tell her—you are not the ultimate and definitive source of truth for where she stands. Instead, what she means is “I want to know where I stand with you.” And happily, here your truth is unimpeachable.

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.

We think that rating tools are windows that allow us to see out to other people, but they’re really just mirrors, with each of us endlessly bouncing us back at ourselves.

The rating given to you tells us, in the main, about the rating patterns of your team leader, and yet, in the room, we act as though it tells us about the performance patterns in you.

The people you work with simply don’t interact with you enough to be able to pinpoint the extent to which you possess, say, influencing skills, or political savvy, or strategic thinking, or frankly any abstract attribute. People at work are preoccupied (with work, mainly), and paying attention to you closely and continuously enough to be able to rate you on any of these abstractions is a practical impossibility.

Business acumen is keenness and speed in understanding and deciding on a business situation.

The key to understanding performance is to stop thinking of it as a broad abstraction, and instead start finding elements of it that we can measure reliably and act on usefully.

Your company is a maximization machine—it wants to make the best use of its finite resources—so it is greatly interested in identifying precisely who to invest in, and how.

More simply, we can all get better, and we will all get better at different things, in different ways, and at different speeds.

In the world of physics, there’s a name for the discrete, measurable, definable, and directional thing that is produced when mass and velocity combine. It’s called momentum. In the world of teams and team members, the same applies.

Potential is a one-sided evaluation. Momentum is an ongoing conversation.

Work, our experience teaches us, is toil—a stressor, a drainer of our energy—and if we are not careful, it can lead to physical exhaustion, emotional emptiness, depression, and burnout. It’s a transaction—we sell our time and our talent so that we can earn enough money to buy the things we love, and to provide for those we love. Indeed, the term we use for the money we earn in this transaction is compensation, the same word we use for what we get when we’re injured or wronged in the eyes of the law. Our wages are not just money, then: they are money to make up for the inherent badness of work—a bribe, if you will, to tough it out.

And because the effects of work are so potentially toxic, the obvious and sensible precaution to take, so that we don’t all expire at our desks, is to balance it out with something else, with something better.

We lose ourselves in work, and rediscover ourselves in life. We survive work, but live life. When work empties us out, life fills us back up. When work depletes us, life restores us.

Life is about trade-offs.

More than striving for balance between work and life—love-in-work matters most.

This person didn’t find this work—she didn’t happen upon it, fully-formed and waiting for her. Instead, she made it. She took a generic job, with a generic job description, and then, within that job, she took her loves seriously and gradually, little by little and a lot over time, she turned the best of her job into most of her job. Not the entirety of it, maybe, but certainly an awful lot of it, until it became a manifestation of who she is. She tweaked and tweaked the role until, in all the most important ways, it came to resemble her—it became an expression of her. You can do the same.

Twice a year, spend a week in love with your work. Select a regular week at work and take a pad around with you for the entire week. Down the middle of this pad draw a vertical line to make two columns, and write “Loved It” at the top of one column and “Loathed It” at the top of the other. During the week, any time you find yourself feeling one of the signs of love—before you do something, you actively look forward to it; while you’re doing it, time speeds up and you find yourself in flow; after you’ve done it, there’s part of you looking forward to when you can do it again—scribble down exactly what that something was in the “Loved It” column.

These are all choices that only you can make, and the only way to make them wisely is to honor the truth that your life will give you strength if you can but pay attention to your emotional reactions to the events and activities and responsibilities you choose to fill it with.

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

The power of human nature is that each human’s nature is unique. This is a feature, not a bug. So your responsibility is to take seriously the uniqueness of your uniqueness, and design the most intelligent, the most honest, and the most effective ways to volunteer it to the rest of us.

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.”

Leading isn’t a set of characteristics but a series of experiences seen through the eyes of the followers.

TRUTH #1 People care which team they’re on

(Because that’s where work actually happens.)

TRUTH #2 The best intelligence wins

(Because the world moves too fast for plans.)

TRUTH #3 The best companies cascade meaning

(Because people want to know what they all share.)

TRUTH #4 The best people are spiky

(Because uniqueness is a feature, not a bug.)

TRUTH #5 People need attention

(Because we all want to be seen for who we are at our best.)

TRUTH #6 People can reliably rate their own experience

(Because that’s all we have.)

TRUTH #7 People have momentum

(Because we all move through the world differently.)

TRUTH #8 Love-in-work matters most

(Because that’s what work is really for.)

TRUTH #9 We follow spikes

(Because spikes bring us certainty.)