Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader's Guide to the Real World

Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader's Guide to the Real World

by Marcus Buckingham (Author), Marcus Buckingham (Author), Ashley Goodall (Author), Marcus Buckingham (Author), Ashley Goodall (Author)

Synopsis

How do you get to what's real?

Your organization's culture is the key to its success. Strategic planning is essential. People's competencies should be measured and their weaknesses shored up. People crave feedback.

These may sound like basic truths of our work lives today. But actually, they're lies. As strengths guru and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham and Cisco Leadership and Team Intelligence head Ashley Goodall show in this provocative, inspiring book, there are some big lies--distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking--running through our organizational lives. Nine lies, to be exact. They cause dysfunction and frustration and ultimately result in a strange feeling of unreality that pervades our workplaces.

But there are those who can get past the lies and discover what's real. These are freethinking leaders who recognize the power and beauty of our individual uniqueness, who know that emergent patterns are more valuable than received wisdom, and that evidence is more powerful than dogma. With engaging stories and incisive analysis, the authors reveal the essential truths that such freethinking leaders will recognize immediately: that it is the strength and cohesiveness of your team, not your company's culture, that matters most; that we need less focus on top-down planning and more on giving our people reliable, real-time intelligence; that rather than trying to align people's goals we should strive to align people's sense of purpose and meaning; that people don't want constant feedback, they want helpful attention. This is the real world of work.

If you embrace each person's uniqueness and see this as key for all healthy organizations; if you reject dogma and engage with the real world; if you seek out emergent patterns and put your faith in evidence, not philosophy; if you thrill to the power of teams--if you do all of these, then you are a freethinking leader, and this book is for you.

$24.65

Quantity

2 in stock

More Information

Format: hardcover
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published:

ISBN 10: 1633696308
ISBN 13: 9781633696303

Author Bio

Marcus Buckingham is a global researcher and thought leader focused on unlocking strengths, increasing performance, and pioneering the future of how people work. Building on nearly two decades of experience as a Senior Researcher at Gallup Organization, he currently guides the vision of ADP Research Institute as Co-Head and Talent Expert. He founded The Marcus Buckingham Company in 2006 and is the author of several bestselling books including StandOut 2.0: Assess Your Strengths, Find Your Edge, Win at Work (Harvard Business Review Press).

Ashley Goodall is currently Senior Vice President of Leadership and Team Intelligence at Cisco. In this role he has built a new organization focused entirely on serving teams and team leaders--combining talent management, succession, coaching, assessment, executive talent, workforce and talent planning, research and analytics, and technology to support leaders and their teams in real time. Previously he was Director and Chief Learning Officer, Leader Development, at Deloitte. He is the coauthor, with Marcus Buckingham, of Reinventing Performance Management, the cover story in the April 2015 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Author social media/website info:
Buckingham: tmbc.com/, @mwbuckingham
Goodall: linkedin.com/in/ashley-goodall-73a4b25/, @littleplatoons