Voice of Influence

Marcus Buckingham

To a growing number of human-resources specialists and professionals, former Gallup Organization senior researcher Marcus Buckingham ranks as today’s leading authority on how organizations and managers should best engage their employees to propel loyalty and productivity. He is co-author of the best-selling First Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently and author of the popular The One Thing You Need to Know that defines the controlling insights that drive great managing.

The 40-year-old Cambridge-educated Buckingham has spent the past decade counseling countless organizations about how to enhance their employees’ strengths rather than eliminate their weaknesses. He is a passionate, articulate and charismatic advocate for engaging employees, all characteristics that have made him one of the most popular speakers before companies, human-resources groups and other forums.

But, in his just-published book, Go Put Your Strengths to Work, Buckingham suddenly switches gears to engaging employees directly and outlining what he calls six “powerful” steps they can take to achieve outstanding performance on their own. Why has he turned to advising employees, not employers? His answer and other observations make for fascinating reading in this interview with Perspectives and with Stromberg Consulting’s Victoria Brown.

On his sharp switch in focus to individual employees from managers and employers:

My focus has moved to the individual to say, “You can’t afford to wait for a great manager…you can’t afford to hang around in hopes you’re going to get someone who is able to individualize in the way that great managers do.” There are about 100 million employees in the United States, and so there are probably 10 million managers out there. How many have the talent to be really great at finding the uniqueness of you and then figuring out a way to employ it at work? Probably 25 percent. So, in light of that, you’ve got conservatively 75 percent of the working population who probably never will have the good fortune to come upon a great manager.

So the focus of where I went with employee engagement was, “Don’t take the chance.  Figure out for yourself what it means to make your greatest contribution at work with or without a great manager.” The analogy I suppose to managers also would be, “Put your own oxygen mask on first before you charge around trying to help everyone else become more engaged.” You have to figure out how to do it for yourself. I think 10 years ago, we didn’t place managers on a high enough pedestal and today, I don’t think we teach people very well how to put the best of themselves to work every day.

On the personal revelation that he needed to switch gears with his employee-engagement research:
When push comes to shove, there’s probably only one question you should ask in an employee survey and that is, “What percentage of a typical day do you spend playing to your strengths?” In 2005, 17 percent of people said they played to their strengths most of the time at work. In 2006, 14 percent said most of the time. It’s going down. I’ve chosen to focus on that one question so the needle begins to move in the opposite direction. And that’s what led to my change in focus – we need to make a difference in the real experience of people going to work.

We need to see that number move to a third, [where] a third of the workforce comes to work and goes, “My strengths are in play most of the day at work.” Now this might be a change in attitude. People might have to reassess what their strengths are. It might be a change in perspective, it might be a change in action, they might be doing different things, it might be a change in conversation – there are a lot of different ways to move the needle, but we’ve got to get a third of the workforce [there]. That will make a difference.

On what “Our people are our greatest assets” really means:

When people say, “Our people are our greatest assets,” what they really mean is that “our people’s strengths are our greatest assets.” But, as I said, we are still very ineffective at helping people match what they do every day with the strengths they possess. Fewer than 2-in-10 people say they use their strengths at work for most of the day.

The reasons for that are probably many. Maybe some people don’t know what their strengths are. Maybe some people are delusional about their own strengths. It’s surprising that two of the reasons that often are trotted out aren’t true because, first, people say, “Well, at most jobs you can’t tweak your job to fit your strength.” In fact, if you ask people, “Do you have the freedom to modify your job to fit your strength,” 51 percent agree or strongly agree that they do whether they are housekeepers or senior executives.

The other reason given: “We really want to, but the performance-management system or the company won’t allow us to.” Yet, when you ask people about the whole idea of strengths and whether they believe that building on your strengths and fixing your weaknesses is the best way to achieve success, most people don’t believe that. So is finding your weaknesses and fixing them the best way to achieve success at work?  Eighty-seven percent of people in America agree or strongly agree with that.

We’ve still got a workforce that believes quite passionately that the secret to succeeding at work is identifying your flaws and fixing them. You’ve got a workforce that believes it has the freedom to change the job to fit the best of you but doesn’t know how and, on some level, doesn’t believe they should. At the same time, on the far right-hand side, you have a bunch of leaders saying, “Our people are our greatest assets.” It’s a bit of a mess, really. Obviously, we’re treating people far better than we did probably 50 years ago, and work is probably more engaging than it was 50 years ago. And yet really, getting people to use the best of themselves at work, we’re still kind of functionally blind when it comes to that.

On the response he’s getting from companies interested in turning their weakness-focused management system on its head:

Some companies are riveted by this. I just did a benchmark study with 13 companies that include Accenture, Coca-Cola, Universal Studios, Chick-fil-A, McKesson, Black & Decker, among others. I asked them just to give me their best highest-performing teams and let me ask them 10 questions about their strengths and 5 questions about how often they feel an emotional high from their work, how often they get so involved in what they’re doing that they lose track of time. I just got the data back and I’m so excited about what they show. I’m very optimistic that once these companies really come to grips with this data, they will start asking, “How can we build more teams like these high-performing teams?” They’ll examine what that means in terms of everything, from selection, to performance management to succession planning, to manager training to on-boarding of employees.

On the three skills managers can teach their employees to engage them:

The idea that we all have some ideal job out there is a rather empty idea. No matter how engaged they are at work, no one has a job that incorporates one activity that they love. Everyone’s job has a whole welter of different activities and relationships and expectations. And these things come down on each and every one of us like a tidal wave or a mud slide every week.

The first skill we have to learn is to help people identify specifically which activities invigorate us and which deplete us. Most of us are terrible at that. We seem to think our strengths are what we’re good at and our weaknesses are what we’re bad at. And then, of course, many of us have things we’re quite good at but we hate to do, or that bore us or that drain us. Those can’t be strengths because we never want to do them again.




The second skill is, “What is the best way to have a strong week?”

When you look at the most successful people, they seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time doing activities that invigorate them. What we have to realize is that didn’t happen overnight or by accident. It happened deliberately and gradually. So what each one of us needs to learn how to do is each week have a strong week plan. How do you each week push your time toward certain activities that seem to invigorate you and away from those that seem to deplete you? How do you do that when, frankly, the world and the company you work for is ambivalent about you and your strengths?




The third skill we have to teach people is how to talk about strengths without boasting or talk about weaknesses without whining. We don’t know how to talk about activities that invigorate us without sounding pompous. And we don’t know how to talk about activities that deplete us without sounding wimpy and weak. In fact, if you talk to your manager about performance, under a quarter of people say, “We talk about my strengths.” We don’t have a language in the workplace to talk about strengths and weaknesses. That language would have to be a very emotional language. When speaking about strengths, you would have to use words such as “I love it when,” “I get a kick out of it when,” “I’m thrilled by.” And, with weaknesses, you would have to learn a language such as “it depletes me when,” “it drains me when,” “it sucks the life out of me when,” “I can’t stand it when.” We don’t use that language at work. We talk about skill sets and high potential and goals and career pathing and all kinds of anemic terms like that.

A final thought:
A lot of investigation needs to be done on our people processes and I see a lot of companies beginning to get intrigued by that, even though they don’t yet know quite how to change their people processes to be explicitly strengths-based. We have applied the principles of process improvement to people improvement, and the problem is that processes are endlessly malleable and people aren’t. People aren’t endlessly tweakable. A system for baggage handling you can probably tweak until you’re blue in the face. But I can’t tweak you.

Along the way I believe we will get better and better at engaging our employees using communication and other methods. I think it will be a fantastic next 10 years.