Marcus Buckingham Thinks Your Boss Has an Attitude Problem

Attitude Adjustment #3

You're not the most important person in the company. (Believe it or not, your middle managers are.)

American culture is CEO obsessed. We celebrate the hard-charging heroes and mythologize the iconoclastic visionaries. Those people are important. But when it comes to getting the most productivity out of everyone in the company, they're not the most important people. Our research tells us that the single most important determinant of individual performance is a person's relationship with his or her immediate manager. It just doesn't matter much if you work for one of the "100 Best Companies," the world's most respected brand, or the ultimate employee-focused organization. Without a robust relationship with a manager who sets clear expectations, knows you, trusts you, and invests in you, you're less likely to stay and perform.

I admit, it seems like the most obvious point in the world. But do we revere the role of the middle manager? Hardly. We don't even like the term! We'd rather transform everyone into grassroots leaders, change agents, intrapreneurs. We look at managers as costs to be cut -- or, at best, as leaders-in-waiting, people who are putting in time before they get the big job.

So what exactly do great managers do? First, the best managers start with a radical assumption: Each person's greatest room for growth is in the area of his greatest strength. It goes back to my last point. Good managers believe that each person is wired in a unique way -- and these managers are fascinated by this individuality. Rather than seek to round it out or fill it in, the best managers do everything they can to sharpen and amplify that uniqueness. And then those managers work with people to help them understand their strengths, to build on them, to give them the confidence to be different.

Attitude Adjustment #4

Stop looking to the outside for help. The solutions to your problems exist inside your company.

Talent is a multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield will be. That's why the best leaders are relentless at seeking out, shadowing, studying, and highlighting the lessons of their own top performers.

The funny thing is that most CEOs spend their time benchmarking best practices in other companies. They want to know how they're doing relative to their peers. I tell my clients, Don't go on a tour of Disney, Southwest Airlines, or Discover Financial Services. You have some of the world's best managers working inside your own company. Look to them first. Learn from your own people first.

At Gallup, we've spent years documenting the simple, charming secrets of these extraordinary people. In the corners of every big company that we've studied, there are hundreds or thousands of them toiling away in relative obscurity. If you find them and shine a light on them, they will point the company's way to the future.

Take another look at Best Buy. It's like a controlled laboratory that is devoted to understanding the power of local managers and local work groups. In a sense, the company's strategy is built on uniformity -- everything from store layout to product positioning to uniforms to operations manuals are standardized across the country. Yet even across 400 nearly identical environments, there's an amazing range of employee engagement and business performance. In the Best Buy store that has the highest Q12 scores, 91% of employees strongly agreed with the statement, "I know what's expected of me at work." In the store with the lowest score, just 27% agreed.

Not incidentally, the store with the highest Q12 score ranks in the top 10% of Best Buy stores as measured by P&L budget variance -- and the store with the worst Q12 score falls in the bottom 10%. To improve overall corporate performance, Best Buy's leaders don't need to look outside the company. They just need to figure out how to build on the strengths of its best stores.

Building on these strengths means identifying internal best practices and shining a light on your best managers -- people like Ralph Gonzalez. Ralph is a store manager who was charged with resurrecting a troubled Best Buy in Hialeah, Florida. He immediately named the store the Revolution, drafted a Declaration of Revolution, and launched project teams, complete with army fatigues. He posted detailed performance numbers in the break room and deliberately over-celebrated every small achievement. To drive home the point that excellence is ubiquitous, he gave every employee a whistle and told them to blow it loudly whenever they "caught" anybody -- whether coworker or supervisor -- doing something "revolutionary." Today, the whistles drown out the store's soundtrack, and, by any metric -- sales growth, profit growth, customer satisfaction, employee retention -- the Hialeah store is one of Best Buy's best.