3 minute read
Rethinking what matters in the workplace
Nine lies about work: A freethinking leader’s guide to the real world By Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019 280pp., $30.00 US)
This provocative book has been highly popular. It will likely be just as unpopular in some settings.
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Its popularity is evident from its ranking by readers of the Harvard Business Review and Amazon customers as one of the best business books of 2019.
It may be unpopular with people who believe in 360-degree feedback, the importance of strategic planning, organizational culture as the key to success, hiring well-rounded job applicants and other so-called basic truths.
Or as Mark Twain is reported to have quipped, “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Buckingham, a British author and head of the ADP Research Institute, has written nine books on unlocking people’s strengths and increasing their performance. His best-known works include First, break all the rules, Now, discover your strengths, and StandOut 2.0: Assess your strengths, find your edge, win at work.
Goodall, senior vice president of leadership and team intelligence at technology giant Cisco, previously co-authored an April 2015 article on Reinventing Performance Management in the Harvard Business Review. Nine lies debunks wrongheaded ideas “that we encounter every time we show up for work,” and provides analysis that shows thinking and replacement practices to replace these widely held faulty assumptions.
Among their discoveries: • People care less about what company they work for than the nature of the team they are part of.
• Shared meaning creates alignment with corporate goals “and this alignment is emergent, not coerced.” • Excellence is idiosyncratic. High-performance staff are spiky, not well-rounded. (One of the fascinating stories in the book is about an engineer named “Joe” who was overlooked for promotion by employers who didn’t seem him as fitting their concept of what a CEO or software engineer should look like. They were happy when he went off to find challenges elsewhere. Joe, better known as Elon Musk, sold one company to Compaq for $307 million and another to what is now PayPal to eBay for $15 billion before going on
to found Tesla and Space-X. Tesla is reshaping the automobile industry, while Space-X has the potential to do the same for off-planet travel. Heady achievements by a man who was dismissed by many earlier in his career.) • “Diversity isn’t an impediment to building a great team — rather, it’s the fundamental ingredient without which a great team cannot exist.” • Ratings-based tools such as annual engagement surveys, 360-degree surveys and performance-rating tools “do not measure what they purport to measure.”
• “Theoretical models of what people are supposed to feel about their work rarely, if ever, match up to what a particular person truly does feel.” • Trying to examine leadership is challenging “because it cannot be measured reliably. Followership is a thing, because it can (be measured).” When the Mayo Clinic asked doctors how much time they spent doing activities they loved most, they found much lower rates of burnout among physicians reporting they spent at least 20 percent of their time engaged in those activities.
Given that, thinking about worklife balance is framing the issue wrong, the authors suggest. “What we all wrestle with is not so much work and life as it is love and loathe.” The book ends with a list of nine truths to counter the commonly accepted “lies” they systematically tear down chapter after chapter.
Some of their more interesting conclusions are:
— The best intelligence wins “because the world moves too fast for plans.”
— The best companies cascade meaning “because people want to know what they all share.”
— People need attention “because we all want to be seen for who we are at our best.” ◆
