Marcus Buckingham Thinks Your Boss Has an Attitude Problem

Attitude Adjustment #1

Measure what really matters. (By the way -- the numbers you're using now don't matter.)

Numbers are crucial to running a company, and CEOs love them. Yet the numbers that most leaders use to manage the people who are part of their business are mostly off target. The CEOs who come to us are almost always fixated on two questions: How is our average performance improving over time? and How do we stack up against our competitors?

Both of those questions obscure what's really important. Averages hide the fact that within any company are some of the most-engaged work groups and some of the least-engaged work groups. But this range is what is most revealing.

You can divide any working population into three categories: people who are engaged (loyal and productive), those who are not engaged (just putting in time), and those who are actively disengaged (unhappy and spreading their discontent). The U.S. working population is 26% engaged, 55% not engaged, and 19% actively disengaged.

In essence, then, the CEO's job is to improve the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged workers. But here's the problem: Few of the CEOs in our study could say which work units in their company were effectively engaged and which weren't. They didn't know where their culture was strong and where it was weak, whether it was getting better or getting worse.

That's where the Q12 comes in. Survey the workforce every six months, and the result will be a vivid picture of which work units are engaged in a way that leads to the best performance and which workers are not.

I work closely with Best Buy, the big electronics retailer. When they started surveying their employees in 1997, they were in the 45th percentile of our Q12 database. By the end of last year, they were in the 70th percentile. More important, in those four years, 99 stores improved their Q12 scores significantly, while just 18 stores had scores that fell. The 99 stores that improved their engagement level dramatically improved their P&L budgets. The stores whose engagement level fell missed their P&L budgets. These are the numbers that matter.

Attitude Adjustment #2

Stop trying to change people. Start trying to help them become more of who they already are.

CEOs hate variance. It's the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.

There is, however, one resource inside all companies that will hinder any attempt to eliminate variance: each individual's personality. Human beings are the one irreducible complexity in every company. And you can't eliminate that complexity by forcing people to become more like one another. You can't standardize human behavior. Of course, that's precisely what most leaders attempt to do. That goal -- standardizing human behavior -- is the driving force behind most executive-training programs and leadership-development courses. What's the quickest way to build a coherent culture? Get everyone to manage the same way.

Not only is that approach psychologically daft, it's hugely inefficient. It's fighting human nature, and anyone who fights human nature will lose. The best managers don't even try to fight that fight. We studied 80,000 of them from 400 different companies -- people who excelled at getting great performance from their people. These managers followed the same basic set of principles: People don't change that much, so don't waste your time trying to rewire them or trying to put in what was left out. Instead, spend your time trying to draw out what was left in. When it comes to getting the best performance out of people, the most efficient route is to revel in their strengths, not to focus on their weaknesses.

Let me give you an example from my company. Our senior VP of marketing, Larry Emond, doesn't have a lick of empathy. It was surgically removed at birth. He also lacks a quality that I call "developer": getting a kick out of seeing someone else grow. Now, I could spend my time admonishing Larry. I could try to explain to him why that blistering email he dashed off had a crushing effect on several people. But he still wouldn't get it.

You might think that Larry is doomed to be a poor manager. Absolutely not. Larry's strength is that he has the qualities of self-assurance and a strategic mind-set. He doesn't need to have empathy to achieve results. People feel that Larry encourages their development, because he keeps thinking about how they can be part of this future he's describing.

Now Larry's approach seems obvious -- why would you do anything else? And yet, in most organizations, Larry would be confronted by some nice, well-intentioned HR person -- probably going off of feedback from a 360-degree survey -- who would say, "Larry, as a leader, you need to be more responsive to your direct reports." There would be a lot of, "Tone that down, Larry." Well, how about, "Dial that up, Larry"?

If you are clear about the outcome that you want, instead of standardizing the qualities and steps that you think are required to get to that outcome, you should honor the fact that Larry's nature is irreducibly unique -- rather than wasting time and money wishing that it weren't so. What goes for Larry goes for all kinds of people in companies. The best strategy for building a competitive organization is to help individuals become more of who they are.