A book on management processes, about the problems they cause for employees and organizations by Marcus Buckingham.

Summary

The book begins with a paradox: “why do so many of the ideas and practices that are held as settled truths at work wind up being so deeply frustrating to, and unpopular with, the very people they are supposed to serve?”

This paradox leads to the core idea of the book: the world of work today is overflowing with systems, processes, tools, and assumptions that are deeply flawed and that push directly against our ability to express what is unique about each of us in the work we do everyday. These flaws are called lies by the author, and as the title suggests, there are nine of them. Here they are, with what the corresponding truths should be according to the author, along with my notes of explanations and thoughts.

1. Lie: people care which company they work for. Truth: people care which team they are on, because that’s where work actually happens.

   Notes: People may care which company to join initially, but once joined, they don’t care much about which company they work for, but rather what team they work on. Almost all work is team work, and just like in life, people seek for belongings with a group at work. What company leaders should aim to do therefore, is to build teams like how their best teams are.

2. Lie: the best plan wins. Truth: the best intelligence wins, because the world moves too fast for plans.

   Notes: An intelligent framework for making good decisions in real time, based on data, is more important and useful than plans. This means that facilitating easier and faster communication of accurate and useful information within the organization is key. Because of this, team leader check-ins are very important. All good teams have frequent and regular check-ins, usually weekly. Since this is so key, it can help determine the optimal span of control of a manager: you should manage exactly the number of people that you can still perform adequate weekly check-ins with.

3. Lie: the best companies cascade goals. Truth: the best companies cascade meaning, because people want to know what they all share

   Notes: Cascading goal systems have changed and evolved over time, from MBOs (management by objectives) by Peter Drucker, to KPIs, to the now popular OKRs by Google. Cascading goals can help build alignment, help track progress, and motivate performance, but in practice they often don’t work like this. For high-performance people, goals serve more as a ceiling on performance; for low-performance people, goals can be a form of unproductive pressure that hurts performance.

   Effective goals must be set by the individual, not dictated from above. The best companies cascade meaning instead of goals, as meaning allows individuals to then set goals themselves. Meaning is most effectively communicated through what you do.

4. Lie: the best people are well-rounded. Truth: the best people are “spiky”¹, because uniqueness is a feature, not a bug

   Notes: People don’t need to be well-rounded; almost no one is really well-rounded. For teams to be effective, people must feel like they can utilize their strengths, whatever they are, to contribute every day. Growth is often not about gaining abilities, but rather about figuring out how to contribute more effectively with the abilities we already have. So striving to be more well-rounded is somewhat misguided. Data (from measuring top performers in various fields, such as athletes and managers) also show that even within the same field, people who performed well excelled at different sets of things, and did well for different reasons.

5. Lie: people need feedback. Truth: people need attention, because we all want to be seen for who we are at our best

   Notes: Feedback given is often not reliable or helpful, people don’t usually take into account the context around other people’s actions, which is very important when assessing feedback. People need attention, not feedback. More specifically, positive attention (e.g. compliments on great work) is very powerful at engaging employees, more effectively than negative feedback on what people are bad at, as it gets people to do even better on where they do well.

6. Lie: people can reliably rate other people. Truth: people can reliably rate their own experience, because that’s all we have

   Notes: People’s rating of others, on anything at all, is unreliable (no matter how complex the rubric, tool, or process of rating is). This is validated from several experiments and data sets by the authors. Why ratings are unreliable essentially comes down to: many skills cannot be easily quantified, people are bad at rating, and aggregating ratings from more people does not help. Instead of organization-level rating systems, it is enough to simply let team members know of their team leader’s opinion and reaction about them.

7. Lie: people have potential. Truth: people have momentum, because we all move through the world differently

   Notes: Data and research shows that there is no evidence whatsoever for the concept of general potential as a trait in people. Everyone can get better at some things and not others, this is just a natural part of being human. The idea of “potential” that people have is more like a type of “momentum”. Momentum can be increased or decreased (not binary like potential, which is you either have it or not), and can be directed purposefully. Momentum is a function of mass (i.e. where and what you are now) and velocity (i.e. how fast and where you are headed), and much more closely models how people really grow and improve.

8. Lie: work-life balance matters most. Truth: love-in-work matters most, because that’s what work is really for

   Notes: There is a prevailing idea that work is bad (toil and stressful), life is good, and you need a balance to survive. But in practice, this balance is unachievable, and striving for it is more bane than beneficial. Practically this means you need to find love in what you do, not try to find something to do that you love. Since this is a very personal thing, only you can figure out how to do this, the organization cannot possibly do this for you, as nobody else knows you as well as you know yourself. Burnout is not from lack of work-life balance, but from the lack of love of what you do.

   How to slowly “weave” love into your work: find pieces of what you love about your work, and gradually try to focus on them so that eventually most of what you do are the things you love. Of course this requires your team leader to recognize and help you, and you will never be able to do this with everything (i.e. you will always have to do some things that you don’t love, but you can minimize this).

9. Lie: leadership is a thing. Truth: we follow spikes, because spikes bring us certainty

   Notes: Attempts to breakdown leadership into its constituent components (e.g. confidence) are not helpful, because many of these attributes are contradictory (e.g. confidence vs. humility), and exactly when and how much to manifest each of the attributes is indeterminable. In addition, there are infinitely many styles of leadership that are effective in various situations. Great leaders are all different and have their unique sets of shortcomings, yet can still all lead effectively in their respective environments (and they may not be effective in other situations).

   Plain and simple, a leader is someone who has followers. The key question to ask about leadership then is what makes people want to follow the leader. Generally people follow “spikes”, the few extreme characteristics or abilities of the leader that make them stand out greatly (from lie 4, great leaders are not well-rounded, but rather are spiky extremists). They act as something for the followers to “hook on to” when heading into the unknown. A great leader needs to show and inspire genuine confidence about the future for their followers.

Commentary

On some level the book is about the disconnect between the processes to make management easier and the things that improve the productivity of individuals. Often we mistake the former processes as capable of performing the latter function as well. A lot of the problems talked about in the book comes down to “X is difficult or impossible to quantify” yet “management processes ask to quantify X”, causing the disconnect.

All the lies mentioned are created from management’s desire to keep track of and, well, manage things, so even though most things in business are not definable, measurable, nor intelligible, they must be defined, measured, and explained, which became (partial) lies.

Most of the conclusions in the book are drawn from factor analysis based on surveys in various companies (centered around 8 key high level questions). So this seems relatively a-theoretical and should not be too biased, at least methodologically.

Many of the things that the author characterizes as “lies” are not really lies, but more “this isn’t the whole idea, there is another side” or “there is a tradeoff with X, and you cannot just maximize this”. To call these lies is a bit misleading.

The book has the sub-theme throughout that people should focus more on improving what they are already good at, rather than trying to fix what they are bad at.