Quotes from Marcus Buckingham

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.

This can be both a blessing and a curse. You are blessed with a wonderfully unique filter but cursed with a systematic inability to understand anybody else's.

These four characteristics — simplicity, frequent interaction, focus on the future, and self-tracking — are the foundation for a successful "performance management" routine.

A note of caution: We can never achieve goals that envy sets for us. Looking at your friends and wishing you had what they had is a waste of precious energy. Because we are all unique, what makes another happy may do the opposite for you. That's why advice is nice but often disappointing when heeded.

This company didn't have one culture. It had as many cultures as it did managers. No

while people might care which company they join, they don't care which company they work for. The truth is that, once there, people care which team they're on.

Focus on each person's strengths and manage around his weaknesses. Don't try to fix the weaknesses. Don't try to perfect each person. Instead do everything you can to help each person cultivate his talents. Help each person become more of who he already is.

second, that everyone, regardless of who they are, will want to be promoted out of the job as soon as possible.

that all salespeople are different, that all accountants are different, that each individual, no matter what his chosen profession, is unique.

The secret to living a strong life is right in front of you, calling to you every day. It can be found in your emotional reaction to specific moments in your life.

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

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.

This thinking is well-intended but overly simplistic, reminiscent perhaps of the four-year-old who proudly presents his mother with a red truck for her birthday because that is the present he wants. So the best managers reject the Golden Rule. Instead, they say, treat each person as he would like to be treated, bearing in mind who he is.

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.

But the best managers have the solution: Ask. Ask your employee about her goals: What are you shooting for in your current role? Where do you see your career heading? What personal goals would you feel comfortable sharing with me? How often do you want to meet to talk about your progress?

This advice—be clear about whom you serve—appears straightforward, but it is surprising how many leaders allow their answer to be vague, imprecise, or, most damaging of all, complex.

Sustained success comes only when you take what's unique about you and figure out how to make it useful.

In companies with over 150 employees, 82 percent of people work on teams, and 72 percent work on more than one team. Even in small companies, of fewer than twenty people, this finding

The solution is as elegant as it is efficient: Define the right outcomes and then let each person find his own route toward those outcomes.

To keep track of your effectiveness at this, every three months you may want to take a moment to write down your answer to this question: what percentage of your day do you experience a feeling of self-efficacy, that optimistic, positive, challenged-yet-confident, authentic feeling? Phrased more simply, what percentage of your day do you spend doing those things you really like to do?

During Gallup's interviews with great managers, we found a consistent willingness to hire employees who, the managers knew, might soon earn significantly more than they did.

look at your life as a series of sprints, they say, rather than a marathon. Impose on your life a set of routines that allow you to stress yourself, then recover, stress, then recover, and you will find that, over time, your capacity, your resilience, and your energy will all expand.

Putting these conclusions together, this controlling insight can serve as the One Thing you need to know about happy marriage: Find the most generous explanation for each other's behavior and believe it.

A close scrutiny of excellence, however, reveals that our edge—our particular genius—is precise. We each have specific areas where we consistently stand out, where we can do things, see things, understand things, and learn things better and faster than ten thousand other people can.