BEST OF: Marcus Buckingham on the four questions he asks himself every week
Jan 22, 2020
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Marcus Buckingham, author of best-selling books on workplace truths, discusses the four questions he asks himself every week, the flaws of 'do what you love' advice, the unhelpfulness of 'work-life balance', his approach to networking and firing people, creating great keynote presentations, and why the annual planning process organizations use is broken.
Engaging in activities that bring strength and invigorate can reduce burnout risk.
Deep trust in the team leader can significantly increase engagement and productivity.
Challenging traditional annual planning processes and embracing real-time information can improve decision-making and address fast-changing realities.
Deep dives
Using Interviewing to Overcome Mingling
The speaker discusses their dislike for mingling and their love for interviewing. They use the technique of interviewing people at parties or meet and greets to make the interaction more enjoyable and purposeful.
Weekly Check-in and Teamwork
The speaker emphasizes the importance of a weekly check-in routine where they review their priorities for the week and identify who they need help from. They highlight the significance of teamwork in today's work environment, and how deep trust in the team leader can significantly increase engagement and productivity.
Love in Work and Avoiding Burnout
The speaker challenges the concept of work-life balance and suggests finding love in what you do instead. They emphasize the importance of engaging in activities that invigorate and bring strength, as doing so reduces burnout risk. They also provide strategies for navigating activities you dislike, such as reframing perspective or delegating.
Turning a Book into a Speech
The speaker shares their process of turning a book into a speech by using the metaphor of 'beads.' They gather and polish various anecdotes, jokes, and data points (beads), and string them together in a logical order based on the audience and context of the speech.
Flipping the Planning Process
The speaker challenges the traditional annual planning process used by businesses and suggests building an intelligent system instead. They highlight the need for real-time information from frontline employees and decentralizing decision-making to effectively address fast-changing realities.
Creating a Free-Thinking Leader Coalition
The speaker introduces the Free-Thinking Leader Coalition as a platform to engage with provable truths and challenge current practices in order to improve engagement and productivity in the workplace. They urge leaders to take part in uncovering the lies and embracing the truths that drive positive change.
My guest today is Marcus Buckingham. Marcus is the author of a stack of best-selling books, including First, Break All the Rules, Now, Discover Your Strengths, The One Thing You Need to Know, and Stand Out, to name a few. His latest book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Publishing, 2019) takes an in-depth look at the lies that pervade our workplaces and the core truths that will help us change it for the better.
Marcus has appeared on “Larry King Live,” “The Today Show” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and now leads People + Performance research at the ADP Research Institute and remains CEO The Marcus Buckingham Company (TMBC).
I was keen to get Marcus on the show as he is someone who challenges the status quo of how organisations operate, and I was keen to see how he had applied his advice in his own life.
In our chat, we cover:
The four questions Marcus asks himself every week
Why "do what you love" is bad advice
Why “work-life balance” is an unhelpful concept
How Marcus has reduced the amount of work he loathes and increased the amount of work he loves
How Marcus reframed how he thinks about networking and mingling to find it more enjoyable
How Marcus made firing people a less awful task
Marcus’s process for creating great keynote presentations
How Marcus thinks about the opening of his speeches
Why the annual planning process organisations use is broken - and how to fix it
Why Marcus thinks about work as a collection of projects
If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work, I write a short monthly newsletter that contains three cool things that I have discovered that help me work better, which range from interesting research findings through to gadgets I am loving. You can sign up for that at http://howiwork.co
