10 years ago I interviewed @Marcus Buckingham prior to his Australian visit to deliver seminars on the Strong Manager at the Australian Institute of Management where I was Interim GM, Marketing, Membership & Communications. I just re-read it the transcript today as I referred a client to his books...and I believe every word he said, every concept and suggestion is so relevant to what we are facing today, both globally and as managers within our organisations, particularly as we are now witnessing more layoffs from some of the largest companies in Australia.
I wrote to Marcus and received his permission to post a transcript of that interview, due to its absolute currency and relevance... 10 years on. I hope you find, as I did, valuable information to help you on your career journey either as a leader or as an employee.
Interview with Marcus Buckingham
On the eve of his Australian visit in June to deliver The Strong Manager Seminar, Editor Deanna Lane had the opportunity to speak with Marcus Buckingham.
Ed: In this issue of Agenda, we are exploring the theme of a ‘people cycle’. We often talk about the property cycle, but it’s fair to say we also apply that to our workforce. As an example when there is an economic downturn some organisations make mass staff cuts and redundancies…an example of a major retailer that wiped 150 of their senior managers off their books …and then when the economy turned and we saw an upswing, those same organisations are out hiring and trying to find the good people they let go, much to the detriment of their company's reputation as an 'employer of choice'. Could you comment on this?
MB:
We do go in cycles but we do that at our peril – I mean there are economic cycles that we need to be responsive to, but it’s like the long term successful investors don’t change their strategies of investing according to the peaks and valleys of the stock market.
In the same way the best companies don’t change their strategy of how they deal with their people according to the peaks and valleys of the stock market either. You need to be building your company based upon your ability to leverage the natural strengths and abilities of your people – and you need to be the kind of company that excels at doing that, so that you are not only the best at attracting good talent but that you are the best and positioning and developing that talent.
That’s true in a down cycle as much as its true in an up cycle and the best companies don’t ditch that strategy just because have to reduce their head count due to financial imperatives. There is a cycle … but the best companies don’t succumb to it.
When you look closely you can see the best companies are saying “thank goodness for those organisations that ditched so many great managers, because it gives us an opportunity to cherry pick talent so that when the cycle comes around, we have a better army of talent than we had at the start of the cycle”.
This is a similar to analogy to investors. This is a fantastic time for investors. Because everyone is frightened, fear is the investor’s friend. When it is raining fear, you don’t hold out a thimble you hold out a bucket. Likewise when other companies are slashing people left, right and centre– the great companies are aggressively recruiting because now there is more talent on the street than ever before. This is once in a 3 decade opportunity to come out of this far stronger than you ever were before in terms of the quality of your people. This is a great time to be a deliberately people focused company.
Ed: What advice would you give an organisation who may have been too quick to cut their workforce and who is now trying to rebuild their reputation and convince new (and current) staff that they are a good ‘people focused employer’.
MB: Whatever you do, it better be authentic. If you just slashed, cut and gashed your organisation, if you reduced your head count in a way that was manifestly uncaring or non responsive to your employees, you are in a well of hurt because people will remember that for a long time. So whatever you do next you better make it authentic. If you don’t believe this, you should try and find another way to spend your time – because anything else will be a chronic waste of time.
If you as an organisation has cut too hard and too deep and made a mistake – then the first thing you should do is express that – the expressed values of your organisation is the best way to send a signal of the type of organisation you are.
It’s not the only way but it’s a very good way to start.
On your website, in your recruiting materials on your job websites, if you feel you have cut too hard and too deep –then the leaders of the organisation should say “mea culpa we cut too hard and we cut too deep - we made a mistake. Moving forward we are going to build our company based on the quality of our people, there’s something hugely powerful about that.”
Secondly you change the leadership behaviours of your organisation – people look at the leadership rituals. When you are going out on your recruiting drive to hire more people, at university or job fairs – you send your leaders out so that they are seen to be on the very front lines of recruiting, conducting the final interviews on candidates in the same way of any sports franchise worth its salt. The final pick of the team players is by the person who is finally responsible for the success of that team ie the coach or manager. You send out your leaders and completely shine a spotlight on them. No more leaders hiding away sending out HR people to do that kind of recruiting…you change your leadership rituals.
Third thing to do is to change your heroes. On your website you need to show that you are a different kind of company. You put your people in your ads. You put your people on your website talking about what they do and about your customers and you don’t do it in a clichéd way. Put your people front and centre and do it in an authentic unproduced way.
Ed: During the Global Financial Crisis we were told that as managers we needed to be resilient – to weather the storm. Some managers took this advice and concentrated on upskilling - learning new skills to improve their own value and the value they brought to the company… while others took it to mean, keep your head down, be invisible, work hard and don’t make waves. Each tactic in its own way may have worked… what advice would you give a manager in terms of their own job security, now that we are seeing signs of economic recovery?
MB: The best strategy in order to be valuable today is to stay as close to your customers as you possibly can, whether internal or external. You need to know the world through their eyes. You need to have a relationship with them, so they know you and you know what they want and need and you become their mouthpiece within your organisation. Whether you are in marketing, finance or sales it doesn’t matter, so long as you are known as someone in touch with the people that are on the receiving end of the services or products your company delivers.
Now that we are seeing signs of a recovery people want to know on what basis we will we build and sustain this recovery and the answer is of course – the only place to find it is in the needs of your customers and your ability to meet those needs. If you are the expert on that, if you are out ahead on that, if you see fine shades of distinction between what your customers want and what you are delivering, if you are consistently in touch with them, if you are seen as the conduit between the company and the customer or your department and the other departments you are providing a service to, then you are much less likely to be cut when things are being cut.
Value in a company is represented on the company’s balance sheet, but also the company’s value is held in the hearts and minds of their customers and so if you are seen as the gatekeeper of that customer relationship, your value is directly correlated to how valuable your internal or external customers see you. So I encourage people to stick their head into their customers business. If you don’t know that, or if you talk in generalities about the customers need, or if you are five steps away from the customer, then you are as vulnerable now as you were before.
Ed: We hear a great deal about employee engagement – we also hear companies proudly say that their people are their best assets, however what they say and what they do is often vastly different. Could you comment the importance of a consistent message by an organisation... and also on how a manager can feel valued in an inconsistent environment such as this?
MB: It’s an extraordinarily tricky situation to be in because you end up having to excuse the behaviour of your leaders. When you are caught in the middle of something like that you take stock of what you can control. You will drive yourself crazy if you believe that you can control the behaviour of leaders that are two or three levels above you. You obviously can’t. What you must not do, is to criticise the leaders to your people. You must know that as a manager your chief responsibility is to help your people do their best work. In the way that you select or position or pay attention to them or recognise them, you are helping them do their best work. As such you cannot be a spreader of negativity. You have to be a ‘runner of interference’ or a buffer, so you allow people to do their best work without being distracted by criticisms of the leaders above you that you see.
Second thing you should do, is do everything in your power to act in a way that you think is consistent with a people focused strategy. You can control how you behave with your own people, how you set expectations, how far down you push decision making, how much autonomy you give people and whether you are creating a recognition rich environment or recognition scarce environment. You can control whether your people feel that you understand what their strengths and weaknesses are and whether they feel understood. Control what you can control and then be a buffer for that other stuff. What does that mean? On one level it means don’t complain about it, on another level, it means keep pinpointing the places where the company is behaving consistently. One of your jobs as a manger is to shine a spotlight on that.
Ed: I read a comment from the brochure of your upcoming seminar in Sydney. You say The Strong Manager programme will help people to be the kind of leader people run through walls for. I must admit, it’s been a long time since we have witnessed that kind of leadership. What happened to our leaders and what traits/characteristics/skills do you think potential leaders should focus on to create this type of ‘followership” from their teams?
MB: Yes what happened to our leaders, it’s a good question – I think two things happened that that are incredibly challenging for our leaders to figure out and many leaders don’t.
The first is that most organisations have success defined for them in purely financial terms – so what is talked about are the numbers but numbers are a-moral. Part of the reason why you would run through a wall for somebody is because you feel as though you are part of something more important than yourself and part of a bigger better future.
The best leaders are good at painting a vivid picture of this better future – they are quintessentially hopeful that there is a better way of doing things, that there is a better world. Part of that future may be numbers based - it may be about meeting sales or financial goals, but that’s only part of it and it‘s an a-moral part and human beings are moral creatures, we like moral language. We like to know why something is good or worthwhile, why something matters. We like to know who were are going to serve and who will benefit in this better future and unfortunately the language of capitalism is bereft of that kind of moral sentiment. It’s an a-moral creed and the challenge for leaders is how do you bring an authentic not clichéd mission statement but a picture of a better world that has elements of morality to it.
The best leaders do that by bringing hope to people. Some struggle because all the language they struggle through in their morning meetings or annual report it is completely scraped of that kind of language.
The best leaders or managers are those that can individualise. The reason you will run through walls for them is because they understand or get you – sometimes they give bad news or they push you harder than you think is necessary but you never feel as though they are out of touch with you as an individual.
The problem is that companies or organisation aren’t very excited that each individual is different or unique. They are annoyed that they are different. In a perfect world they would create a bunch of employees that aren’t different but the same, predictable, delivering consistent service. Companies like consistency – they tell their managers to enforce consistency, that every sales person should have these competencies or every supervisor should have these traits. They like consistency. With companies telling their managers ‘enforce consistency of outcome - enforce a consistency of product delivery performance’.
That’s a hard message to square with the unique, gifted, great managers you may have in your organisation. What are the traits we need as leaders? A vividness around that moral language that we need to use to describe that hope of a better future and individualisation.
So where did our good leaders go – they got confused because we told them to do the opposite – we told them to emphasise consistency and we told them to take all the moral tones out of our language. …we chased them away.
Ed: I also noticed the two behaviours Strong Managers adopt to engage employees consistently: Paying attention to them and teaching them to attend to themselves. I liked the similarity to JFK's famous quote "Ask not what your country can do for you… ask what you can do for your country” and I guess you are saying that by attending to yourself you become a better manager yourself and for the company. Could you comment on some results you have seen when people are engaged in this way?
MB: One of the most interesting differences in terms of organisational performance is not between companies, it is within companies. When you go inside a company and talk to the senior leaders – one of the things they are most preoccupied by is variation of performance between teams doing exactly the same work in the same company, between factory shifts, between branches of a bank, between territories in a sales organisation or stores in a retail chain. They wonder ‘why it is that we have two stores a mile apart and one of them has a theft problem and one doesn’t. Or employees are showing up to work and haven’t missed a day of work – whereas over here we have a real attendance problem, or even accidents on the job or profit or sales, why do we get such a range in performance between teams doing exactly the same work’.
Many differences between highly productive teams within the same company the most powerful difference is found in this question “at work do I have an opportunity to do my best work every day”. The master lever is that question.
Those teams where somehow the manager has got everyone including themselves and their team to say ‘yes’ to that question – have better customer service scores, fewer accidents and better attendance.
If you can say that ‘the foundation of excellent performance on a team is my own personal feeling that I have a chance to do my best work’. It starts there. The best managers can get lots of people feeling as though they are doing their best work. But of course that presupposes that you know how to do that for yourself. Do you know how to carve your time at work so that the best of your work becomes the most of your work? Do you know how to do that, when you as a manager are caught in the middle with lots of competing demands on your time? If you don’t then you won’t be able to help anyone else do that and your team will become an underperforming team.
The airlines say put your own oxygen mask on first before you help everyone else. That‘s really intelligent and it applies to every manager. If you want to build a high performing team you will get people to feel that they can do their best work. The only way is to do that well, is to do that for yourself in a world that doesn’t care and even a people centred company doesn’t care about you and your own individual unique strengths. It cares about the customer and the bottom line and you are an instrument in making those two things happen - happy customers and a good bottom line. The company isn’t set up to help you find your use, your individual strength and it will never get to know you and be intrigued by you and everything you can do. Even if you have a great manager or great boss or work for a great company, it still starts with you taking yourself seriously and trying to figure out where you can do your best work. And that is a lifelong journey of discovery. But if you are not on the front line of that discovery then no-one else is going to do that for you and if you can’t do it for yourself, then you can’t do it for your people.
In closing, I think this is a wonderful time to be trying to strengthen your army and it is a wonderful time to prove as an individual just how good you are.
When I first came to America, I lived in Lincoln Nebraska for about 6 years, it’s one huge cornfield - a place that is known as the breadbasket of America. Corn grows to be incredibly tall but because it’s incredibly flat it’s on these plains with no water or hills around and you get incredible winds and tornados - quite extreme weather. It was only after the wind blew hard that the farmers would know how strong or healthy their crops were – when there is no wind every plant stands tall. If it isn’t strong it lies flat.
In a sense we have been facing a very strong economic wind blowing in all directions, a crazy wind and it’s an opportunity… yes it’s terribly hard for those who have been randomly laid off and you need to be resilient and figure out a way to move forward. But if you are going to find the positive in any of this, it’s that this wind will give you a chance to see who is really strong, who is really in touch with customers, who is really aware of where their best work is, who is really doing their work deliberately as opposed to those who are just doing it by accident or who fell into success. So, situations like this don’t come along every day but this is an opportunity for you to show that you are one of these people, doing your work deliberately and that you are standing tall.
When strong winds blow, only the strong are left standing.
About Marcus Buckingham
Marcus Buckingham has dedicated his career to helping individuals discover and capitalize on their personal strengths. Hailed as a visionary by corporations such as Toyota, Coca-Cola, Master Foods, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, and Disney, he has helped to usher in the “strengths revolution,” persuasively arguing that people are dramatically more effective, fulfilled and successful when they are able to focus on the best of themselves. In his nearly two decades as a Senior Researcher at Gallup Organization, Buckingham studied the world’s best managers and organizations to investigate what drives great performance. His research laid the foundation for a string of New York Times best-selling books that use empirical data to challenge preconceptions about achievement. First, Break All the Rules (co-authored with Curt Coffman) kicked things off in 1999, followed by Now, Discover Your Strengths(co-authored with Donald Clifton, 2001), The One Thing You Need to Know (2005), Go Put Your Strengths to Work (2007)and The Truth About You (2008). Buckingham founded TMBC in 2007 to create strengths-based management training solutions for organizations worldwide, and he spreads the strengths message in keynote addresses to over 250,000 people around the globe each year. A member of the US Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on Leadership and Management, Marcus Buckingham graduated from Cambridge University with a Master’s Degree in Social and Political Science. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Jane and children Jackson and Lilia.