You Need To Know

The One Thing You Need to Know:
About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success
Marcus Buckingham

What a pleasant surprise this book is. I admit I was reluctant to pick it up because in my experience as a management consultant there is always more than “One Thing” to managing a situation successfully.

Buckingham has a gift for narrative, choosing stories that are engaging and illustrate his point. The average-person nature of his anecdotes is appealing. We all work with regular people, and there is so much to be learned from what they do well. He is a tad self-deprecating which is entertaining from someone so high profile, admitting, for example that he is not a good coach. “The annoying thing about people is that… they are works in progress. And to me this progress is frustratingly hard to detect.”

This book is well organized into three basic sections: Leading, Managing and Individual Success. He does not try to resolve the debate about which is better: leadership or management. It is also unusual to address individual success with the common yet distinct perspective the author provides.

It is time to challenge the rock start status (or is it followers’ yearning) that the idea of leadership holds. Extensive discourse on leadership (not always research) reflects our fascination with the people in leader roles. In addition, the notion that all of us can be leaders has taken hold in some circles. “It is inaccurate and ...unhelpful to say everyone must be a leader. Leaders play a distinct, discrete and enormously difficult role.” He does acknowledge the benefit of core innate qualities and characteristics (born vs. made), while emphasizing that it is certainly possible and necessary to continually develop skills.

Manager
The manager’s unique contribution is to make other people more productive, which indicates that staff should have the experience that their personal success is the primary goal of the manager. The successful manager embraces the organization’s strategy, and implements it through successfully challenging and supporting the staff who implement.

Successful managers may achieve this through intuitive means, but others who have the necessary core qualities can also learn the steps. In other words, they can develop the essential skills as long as there is a tendency to be “... immediately intrigued by you [staff] and by the challenge of figuring out... how you can experience the greatest success possible.”

The core inherent quality of outstanding managers is a coaching instinct, to be simultaneously satisfied and attracted to the activity of drawing people out to achieve their best. “A great manager turns talent into performance.”

This is not a how-to book, it is rather focused on research which demonstrates the single most important contribution of a manager. Shining the light on this distinction is extremely useful, as are the examples from every day workers. The distinction of excellent managers is to treat each person differently. This contradicts the sometimes deeply held belief that one must treat everyone equally. It is also quite different from the role of an effective leader.

How do you treat each person differently? The focus of effective management is to help staff succeed. That’s the primary role of a manger. And the best way to do that is to discover what the person is good at and what makes them optimize their skills. The manager’s role, in other words, is not so much to motivate, as it is to identify what each person’s inner motivation drive is already, and tap into that to create circumstances which optimize contribution. Good management has more to do with revealing an employees talents and abilities, uniquely to their personality, rather than trying to change them into something.

In addition to this instinct for developing others, are four skills:
1. Select good people.
Although recruiting can be enormously time consuming, you can’t afford not to invest in this.
2. Define clear expectations.
Less than 50% of employees say they know what is expected of them. Good managers provide focus constantly, and hold people accountable.
3. Praise & Recognition
To keep this up, employees need to receive clear feedback about what is working, working well, and why. Similarly they need to know specifically when they have missed the mark. Effective managers continually praise. Praise should be predictable for those activities and contributions that you want to see continue.
4. Care
“The data supports the idea that employees are more motivated when they believe others care about them. The good news is that bonding is an innate human behavior, and that people are generally oriented to wards connecting.”

It saves time to capitalize on each person’s uniqueness. It may be more effective to modify a job to meet the person, provided the key skills are strong. In summary, “Discover what is unique about each person and capitalize on it.”

Leadership

So much has been written about leaders, about different styles of leaders, successful leaders, whether or not leadership is innate. The distinguishing feature of this book is to identify what it is that is unique about an effective leader’s activities. This research does not include steps to effective leadership, but rather highlights the activities of effective leaders. One of the real strength’s of Buckingham’s books is they are so research based. They are substantiated by facts and research, by taking the data and extrapolating implications without having an initial hypothesis to provide or disprove.

So it turns out that this research reveals that the one thing outstanding leaders do is provide a shared vision. This is quite distinct form the individual, customized approach required of effective managers. A leader provides a shared vision that all participants can buy into. It is compelling clear, and attractive. It is the universal applicability of the shared vision which marks an outstanding leader.

While commenting on the need for integrity, optimism, inquisitiveness, and clear eyed in assessing challenges those are not the distinguishing features of good leadership. The author’s conclusion (born vs. made): leaders are born.

In summary, “Great leaders rally people to a better future.”

Individual

Very little is written in a generic context about individual success. Certainly there are resources about how to be the best sales person, or a creative force, or an accurate engineer. This section of the book is devoted to the general idea, outside of functional expertise, that helps an individual contributor stay successful.

Buckingham’s research offers this statistic: only 20% of people are in a role where they have a chance to do what they do best every day.

Strengths are self-reinforcing. Unlike working on weaknesses, which like new year’s resolutions which come with unsustainable and unsatisfying rigor, doing what you’re good at improves your talents. The act of improving your skills improves your energy. This energy reinforces and strengthens your abilities in a way that is continually satisfying, and quite sustainable.

The path to being an outstanding individual contributor is to decline opportunities that take you away from those core strengths, even if they may appear to be a promotion. It is even possible to excel at a weakness. You will recognize the difference because the victory (excelling at a weakness) will have no satisfaction, will drain or frustrate you.

The recommendation then for individual success is not to exhaustively try to improve on areas of weakness, but rather to drop them. Continually expand those activities for which you have an increasing amount of talent, skills and energy.

In fact Buckingham is bold enough to offer this advice in the negative: “Discover what you don’t like and stop doing it.” That’s the key to individual success.

Review by Janet Britcher