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

by Marcus Buckingham, Ashley Goodall

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781633696310
Publisher:	Harvard Business Review Press
Publication date:	04/02/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	541,819
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Marcus Buckingham is a global researcher and thought leader focused on unlocking people's strengths, increasing their performance, and pioneering the future of how people work. He is head of all people and performance research at the ADP Research Institute and 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 Senior Vice President of Leadership and Team Intelligence at Cisco. Previously he was Director and Chief Learning Officer, Leader Development, at Deloitte. He is the coauthor, with Marcus Buckingham, of two Harvard Business Review cover stories, "Reinventing Performance Management," in April 2015 and "The Feedback Fallacy," in March/April 2019.

Change the world of work. Join the coalition: freethinkingleader.org

Author social media/website info:
Buckingham: MarcusBuckingham.com, @mwbuckingham
Goodall: linkedin.com/in/ashleygoodall/, @littleplatoons

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Lie #1 People care which company they work for 7

Lie #2 The best plan wins 33

Lie #3 The best companies cascade goals 51

Lie #4 The best people are well-rounded 77

Lie #5 People need feedback 105

Lie #6 People can reliably rate other people 133

Lie #7 People have potential 163

Lie #8 Work-life balance matters most 181

Lie #9 Leadership is a thing 207

Truths 235

Appendix A The ADPRI's Global Study of Engagement 237

Appendix B Seven Things We Know for Sure at Cisco 247

Notes 261

Index 267

Acknowledgments 277

About the Authors 281

Editorial Reviews

"Nine Lies About Work, by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, the year's best management book, challenges the assumptions that underlie contemporary managerial practices, many of which date back to Drucker's day. In doing so, the book offers a glimpse of a new management paradigm that may prove to be better suited to the times." -- strategy+business magazine

Named one of "Our 10 favorite new books for people managers" by SHRM (Society for Human Resource Managers)

One of the Financial Times "Business Books of the Month"

Named a Bloomberg Businessweek pick

Named one of "14 business books everyone will be reading in 2019" by Business Insider

Named one of "10 Leadership Books to Watch for in 2019" by the Washington Post

Named one of "10 Business Books You Need to Read in 2019" by Inc. magazine

Named one of "The 19 New Leadership Books to Read in 2019" by Adam Grant on LinkedIn

"Nine Lies is utterly readable, often entertaining, and not just polite, but carefully reasoned and argued using some unusual real-world examples and even some from literature." - Human Resource Executive (hrexecutive.com)

"leads to some free thinking about the way we do our jobs and how we can approach what we do in a different way." -- Financial Times

"If a business book teaches me something new--and offers a fresh perspective on leadership--then I know it's a rare find in the category. Nine Lies About Work is just such a book. It's so thought provoking, I contacted the authors to speak with them directly." -- Forbes

"…should be on every boss's bookshelf." -- Management Today

"a stimulating, no-nonsense, research-based look at things you likely believe that aren't true – and how to apply the new findings." -- The Globe and Mail

"The act of work is human. Leading and following and working together is about human interaction and human relationships. The workplace, and the marketplace beyond it, is about emotions and attention and the desire to be seen. It is about trust and, yes, it is about love. I am always grateful to be reminded of that, to see it again clearly, to have it acknowledged. Nine Lies About Work is a great reminder, and a great guide." -- 800 CEO READ

"Give a copy of this book to everyone in your organization who's leading a team and make it essential reading." -- The Hamilton Spectator

"If you're looking for a refreshing read that challenges the conventional wisdom of the business world, this is a book for your shelf." -- TD magazine (Association for Talent Development)

"There is much we can learn about managing and leading our schools from its pages." -- Inside Higher Ed

Advance Praise for Nine Lies About Work:

In today's complex world, we instinctively seek simplicity. But in many cases, it's easier to lie to ourselves than it is to face the harsh reality--to see more of what want to see than how things really are. In Nine Lies About Work, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall shine a light on just how dangerous those lies can be, especially in the context of our careers. Combining engaging stories about the modern workplace with nuanced quantitative analysis, Nine Lies About Work debunks the myths that surround leadership, planning, and balance in the corporate world. Everyone who reads this book is sure to be a better employee, but more importantly, a better leader. -- Gen. Stan McChrystal (Ret’d), United States Army

From the Publisher