Author: Marcus Buckingham & Ashley Goodall

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

Date: 2019

Comments:Writer and speaker Marcus Buckingham, known among others for his TED Talk, and his co-author Ashley Goodall explode nine common myths about the workplace. For example, the widely accepted view:

• that people at work crave feedback;
• that an organisation’s culture is key to its success;
• that strategic planning is essential;
• that competencies should be measured and weaknesses shored up;

These are taken for granted truths of the workplace. According to the authors, however, they cause dysfunction and frustration, resulting in workplaces that are a mere shadow of what they could be. These “lies”, for the authors, constitute the fake news of the workplace. They emerge from a desire for conformity. Thus the emphasis and belief in work culture presumes a uniformity of experience across the company. In fact, the opposite is true, and work experience depends more of the team people are working with. The lie of company culture thus misses what is most valuable to companies and people.

Similarly, feedback puts people into fight or flight mode and impairs learning; it imagines that learning is a question of telling you what you can’t do, rather than understanding what you can do; and third, it presumes that excellence is the same for everyone and therefore that feedback can say how far you fall short of it, rather than understanding that excellence is profoundly and wonderfully different for each of us.

Freethinking leaders understand the power of individual uniqueness and that the goal should be to focus less on top-down planning and more on giving reliable, real-time intelligence; that rather than try to align people’s goals we should try to align people’s sense of purpose and meaning; that people don’t want constant feedback, but rather helpful attention. This is the real world of the subtitle.

 See videos by Marcus Buckingham

read: The Feedback Fallacy by Marcus Buckingham & Ashley Goodall