8 Tips on the One Thing for Leadership & Management
October 29, 2007 by David Zinger
Filed under Business
What are the 8 nuggets you need to mine from the One Thing?
Marcus Buckingham has become a central leader in the workplace strengths movement. His current book is GO Put Your Strengths to Work – 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance.
We often want to embrace the new but we should not lose sight of the old.
I appreciated Buckingham’s previous book, The One Thing You Need to Know: About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success.
Here are 8 nuggets from that book:
- The chief responsibility of a manager is to turn a person’s talent into performance.
- Great managers find what is unique about each person and capitalize on it.
- Average managers play checkers while great managers play chess – they understand the differences in each piece and coordinate the team to take advantage of the individual strengths.
- Great managers spend 80% of their time working to grow an employee’s greatest strength.
- Great leader’s rally people to a better future.
- Great leaders find what is universal and capitalize on it.
- Great leaders muse, pick heroes with great care, and practice their words, phrases, and stories.
- Great leaders answer these questions: Who do we serve? What is our core strength? What is our core score? What actions can we take today?
Click the following link to reach a short 2 page overview of unlocking the key to great management and leadership: http://www.scribd.com/doc/30320/BuckinghamHarvard-Briefing.
What is the one thing that is most important to you in either leadership or management?
David believes the one thing is to
create workplace engagement for the benefit of all.
Photo Credit 8 – 20 to 1 by http://flickr.com/photos/spacepotato/802320225/
I like the point 2). What are the best methods (except observation) to find those “uniques” and strength in the employees?
A few things you can do. Know your own strengths. Ask them to talk about their strengths. See what activities strengthen them. Read StrengthsFinder 2.0 or GO Put Your strengths to Work.
For the next 5 weeks on Mondays at http://www.davidzinger.com I am systematically going through the top 5 strengths from the StrenghtsFinder 2.0 inventory. I will help guide people through a 5 weeks strength training using my top 5 strengths as a sample to guide people through their own
I hope this was helpfu.
David
Great post.
I totally agree with Marcus B’s views and have used and recommended his ‘works’ extensively.
I’ve had the privilege of seeing Marcus Buckingham in action. His presentation style is confident and captivating. He believes in three ‘truths’ that blow away the three ‘myths’ of Management and personal performance.
Myth 1 – Personality changes over time – Marcus says this is not true.
The truth is that as you grow you become more of who you are.
The lesson from this is that a business can’t change people’s character and shouldn’t attempt to do so. People are what they are.
Myth 2 – The best way to improve is to focus on your weaknesses.
Also not true according to Marcus. He says the truth is that you will
always grow most in your areas of strengths.
An interesting discovery for me about this, is that Marcus has found through research that in performance and behaviour, the opposite of BAD isn’t GOOD – it’s NOT BAD. But NOT BAD looks nothing like GOOD. So you don’t learn how to be good by studying what bad is and doing the opposite; you do it by studying what good is and doing more of it.
This means that most of us must have got it wrong many times. As individuals we spend far too much time worrying about what we do poorly and nowhere near enough time concentrating on what we do well and as leaders we focus too much on ‘where you need to improve’ and too little on ‘what you’re great at’. So why not try a change of focus, say for just six months and see if an intense focus on strengths, in you and your colleagues, will make the dramatic difference that Marcus is convinced it will?
Myth 3 – In a team you should suppress your personal strengths to focus on team strengths.
Marcus insists this also is not true. The truth is that you will contribute most to a team when you offer up your strengths.
We’ve all heard the saying ‘There is no I in TEAM’. That may be true but Marcus quoted Michael Jordan who responded to that statement with, ‘Yes, but there is an I in WIN!’.
The point is that individuals’ best serve a team, not by suppressing their strengths but by exaggerating them. The key therefore is to select team members that have different but complimentary strengths, so that synergy and high performance will result.
Andrew
http://www.acceleratedmanagementsystem.co.uk/
Andrew:
Thanks for the thoughtful comments. I enjoy watching Marcus’s DVD series Trombone Player Wanted. Another take on a lot of the fine things you offered here.
Keep being strong,
David