Free Your Thinking from Management Lies

Book review: Nine Lies About Work by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall

Reading this book you start to feel as I imagine those standing in the crowd next to the child who pointed out that the Emperor was in fact starkers might have felt; a mix of realization, relief, and embarrassment at having gone along with the charade for so long.

Most of us buy into the competencies frameworks, the 360-degree feedback, the importance of company culture and the 90-day plan

These are the eponymous ‘lies’:

1. People care which company they work for (they don’t: they care which team they’re in)
2. The best plan wins (plans get in the way — give your people goals and real-time information and let them get on with it)
3. The best companies cascade goals (focus on cascading meaning, and let your people create their own goals around that)
4. The best people are well-rounded (No, the best people are spiky, playing to their unique strengths)
5. People need feedback (No, they need attention, and positive attention gets massively better results than negative — notice what’s working)
6. People can reliably rate other people (People suck at rating other people — all we can reliably rate is our own experience of people
7. People have potential (Not a lie, technically, just useless: EVERYONE has potential; they prefer the concept of momentum — direction plus velocity)
8. Work-life balance matters most (When people find love in work, the work = bad, life = good assumption simply evaporates)
9. Leadership is a thing (There’s no single ‘leadership’ quality — only being able to attract followers, and that comes down to being able to make people feel better about the future with you)

Some of these lies carry more ‘aha!’ in their exposing than others. For me, the most revelatory were 5 and 6: it was frankly astonishing to discover that positive feedback is 30 x more effective at improving performance than negative feedback (though even negative feedback is more effective than no attention at all). And it makes complete sense: when we give negative feedback, we’re effectively saying: ‘Not like that, like this.’ We’re telling them to do what works for us; but we’re not them. When we notice what’s working and show it to them, we’re helping them identify what works for them. The same logic lies behind our utter inability to reliably rate someone on their ‘leadership potential’, ‘strategic thinking’ or any other attribute we’re expected to be able to quantify. Not only do we all have very different ideas of what those attributes are supposed to look like, how on earth do we translate these vague impressions into meaningful numbers? The solution, Buckingham and Goodall suggest, is to ask people to rate their own experience of working with someone. It’s a more complex metric, but much more reliable.

Performance measurement and management is a multi-billion-dollar industry and the preoccupation of most managers. This book brings a bracing blast of common sense that should make every leader at every level reassess how they’re doing it and, just maybe, acknowledge that their tidy charts might actually be the Emperor’s new metrics.

Nine Lies About Work is available from Blackwell’s here.

Alison Jones (@bookstothesky) is a publishing partner for businesses and organizations with something to say. Formerly Director of Innovation Strategy with Palgrave Macmillan, she hosts The Extraordinary Business Book Clubpodcast, regularly speaks and blogs on publishing, business and writing, sits on the board of the IPG, and is the author of This Book Means Business (2018).