conversations With
The daily grind? With
marcus Buckingham ,
going to work is anything
but that. Buckingham
is a world-renowned
researcher and an
expert on amplifying
your strengths, rather
than improving your
weaknesses, to a create a
more productive and
fulfilling workplace.
Buckingham recently co-
authored Nine Lies About
work, released in April, about
the data-driven truths that
contradict long-held beliefs
about how people work.
In advance of his keynote
at #ISPA2019 this month,
Pulse chatted with Marcus
about his book, his research
and how it can be applied to
improve your staff’s
performance.
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PULSE
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SEPtEmbEr 2019
marcus Buckingham
Pulse: What drove your initial
interest in researching the role
of strengths in the
workplace?
marcus Buckingham:
Right out of university I went
to the Gallup Organization. I
didn’t do polling—I did
psychometric research,
which is studying things
about people that are
important but that you
can’t count: level of
engagement, aspects of their
personality, their talents. As
part of that, we did 80,000 inter-
views with really great managers, and
we were looking for what the best
managers have in common.
Although each individual leader was very different, the most
important thing they had in common was their awareness that each
person on their team is unique, and that the challenge isn’t to make
each person the same. Rather, the challenge is to use the
uniqueness of people by capitalizing on their strengths. That’s the
big difference maker. The best managers realize that time is much
better spent trying to capitalize on who a person naturally is, as
opposed to trying to change them into someone else.
That’s really what began my focus on strengths—it wasn’t a
belief system; it wasn’t a philosophy. It was a finding from studying
all these really great managers.
P: Tell me a little bit about your new book, nine
lies About Work. Why did you decide to research
and write on the topic?
B: Two reasons, really. The first is that over the past thirty or forty
years, we haven’t seen any change at all in very low levels of
engagement, purpose and productivity. I run the ADP Research
Institute, and we just finished a nineteen-country study of
engagement; although it varies a little bit country to country, on
average only about 16 percent of people are fully engaged at work,