It would be easy to overlook the nine lies of this book as something akin to a myth-busters moment: all fireworks and bang, great for pop trivia. But listen to this: The best plan wins and the best companies cascade goals. People need feedback and the best people are well-rounded. People have potential and can reliably rate other people. Work-life balance matters and leadership is a thing. Yes, you read those right: they’re the lies, not the truths. Each one is exposed cleverly by the authors.
It’s possible that the set of propositions that authors Marcus Buckingham (a former Gallup senior researcher) and Ashley Goodall (a former SVP of leadership at Cisco) have laid out are nothing short of radical. Each lie attacks a core set of beliefs on which today’s organisations are run. Collectively they mount a compelling case for a fundamental rethink of the entire leadership and talent construct followed by most organisations today. But more on that later.
Marcus Buckingham was one of the group of people from Gallup who spearheaded the strengths-based management theory that gained traction in the 1990s. Gallup’s research suggested that the one differentiating factor of high performance is that people believe they have the opportunity to use their strengths every day. What doesn’t matter in this equation is whether people are slightly deluded about their strengths – people only need to believe that their strengths are in play for the performance of the team to lift on all dimensions.
The radical core of this idea is that ‘performance’ is based on an entirely subjective premise, and team performance happens when that subjective premise is shared by a team of people. This idea runs counter to how most leaders think (performance results from objectively measurable skills) and how most organisations get things done (try to build competencies in individuals). Consequently, most organisations ignore this insight entirely. Even organisations that I have worked with who claimed to take a strengths-based approach tend to make two big mistakes: one, they still try to assess strengths objectively and two, they teach the theory in a leadership classroom and ignore all the other factors that systemically undermine the effectiveness of being a strengths-led organisation. The nine lies start picking apart those other factors at play.
Lie #4, for example, claims the best people are well-rounded. According to Buckingham and Goodall, ability is something you’re good at, and strengths are something that make you feel strong. It’s the anticipation, the flow and the fulfilment that leads to a reinforcing loop with strengths: when we feel that doing something makes us feel strong, we keep doing it and we become better at it. Finding joy, or “love in what we do”, is the ultimate performance enhancer. The joy comes from an entirely different place for every one of us, even those of us supposedly doing the same job. Intuitively, we know this. Yet organisational processes are built on standardised performance models and ‘objective’ assessments that assume the best people are well-rounded, measured against competency frameworks that describe a set of skills which are supposedly critical for the job. The assumption is that if you don’t measure up against the performance framework, it’s you, the person, who needs to be fixed, just like a faulty piece of code in a program, or a faulty component in a machine.
The problem with the standardised model is not that it’s inhumane (it is) but rather that it’s useless at predicting performance. Buckingham and Goodall argue that no scientific peer-reviewed paper proves the necessity of possessing certain competencies and none prove that getting better at competencies you lack will improve your performance. That’s because the competency-based theory is founded on constructs that are impossible to measure reliably. They’re basically just a made-up mess of states and traits that say nothing and predict nothing.
What the research does say, however, is that excellence is idiosyncratic. That is, every high performer achieves this uniquely – there’s no pattern at all. A casual look at the sports and entertainment world gives us the right intuition for this. It turns out that, even in the business world, there are many ways to excel. Objectively and scientifically, it doesn’t matter which combination of strengths you have. What matters is finding what you love and cultivating and growing your own unique set of strengths. “The best people are spikey”, surmise Buckingham and Goodall.
In similar fashion, Buckingham and Goodall debunk the objectivity of measuring someone’s potential, of leadership being “a thing”, of the presumed objectivity of people ratings systems, and the efficacy of cascading goals – it’s ‘meaning’ that should be cascaded, they argue. And another thing: teams matter more than culture. “In the last few years, there has been a lot of talking and writing about teams in corporate circles. Sadly, much of it has yet to grasp the main point. The general discussion so far has been that we should pay attention to teams because there are a lot of them at work […] but this isn’t the big thing. The big thing is that only on a team can we express our individuality at work and put it to highest use.”
The central theme of each lie is that most of us are spending a lot of money and time performing activities that we are convinced make our organisations better, which objective evidence clearly shows make no difference at all. Going beyond the conclusions of the book, it’s likely that the activities we base our organisational talent management practices on are worse than ineffective: they may also be value-destructive, stripping away the real drivers of great teams, engaged people and sustained value creation. As someone who once plied the trade of those very talent management practices over many years, this stuff is confronting. I’ve made all the mistakes that this book outlines. Let’s face it, we all have.
I would have liked to see Buckingham and Goodall tackle a bit more of the ‘why’ in this book. What’s the management history of these missteps? Why have we collectively gone so astray in our thinking? What beliefs perpetuate these practices even when common sense tells us they don’t work? How do these practices, for example, serve power structures in organisations, even if they don’t serve the organisation as a whole. Some readers might be convinced, but won’t change what they do because the case is more compellingly made in the negative (squashing our delusion) than in the positive (what can be done about it). There are also claims made that while well-argued, need to be backed with more substantial evidence. For example, the idea that culture differs more within organisations than between organisations. It’s a bold claim already demonstrated by some of Buckingham’s research. But is it universally true?
Nonetheless, Nine Lies About Work is a radical book that throws stones at the Goliaths of management theory dominating organisational practices today. From my perspective, it hits the bullseye nine times. Written simply, it could easily be dismissed as just another business book containing just another management theory. It’s more than that. While Buckingham and Goodall haven’t yet laid out a systemic way in which organisations could wean themselves off the nine lies and develop alternative practices, each lie is an important wake-up call. If you are worried that your organisation might be wasting its time on people practices that are just not working and more than likely harming yours and your organisation’s success, grab this book. Read it twice. Stop doing what doesn’t make sense, and start with the few simple things that Buckingham and Graham suggest you can do instead.