conversations With
marcus Buckingham continued
you go inside a company that has a “great culture”—
Google, for example— you should be able to find that
culture. You should be able to ask people some questions
about their experiences and find two simple things: first,
that there is a consistent experience of working at
Google, and two, that that experience is measurably
different from the experience at another company.
But we can’t find that. It doesn’t exist.
What we find instead is that the experience of people
at Google varies massively between which team they’re
on at Google, and that there’s far greater diversity inside
Google than between Google and another company. Once
someone joins a company, how long they stay—and how
productive they are—depends on the team they’re on,
not the size or type of company.
So, if you’re running Canyon Ranch spa + fitness in the
Venetian, for example, you have 400 staff. But you don’t
actually have 400 people—you have 40 teams of ten. As
the leader of team-leaders, do you know what happens
on your best teams? Do you know some of the rituals and
practices of those teams? Do you know who your best
leaders are? Size doesn’t matter, because it’s all about
teams. Think about all work as teamwork.
P: So, in the end, why do we tell ourselves
these lies about work?
B: Mainly because we don’t like mess. We spend a lot of
our time trying to tidy the world up, and, on some level,
we are just annoyed by the sheer variety of human
beings—the fact that they’re motivated by different
things, build relationships differently and have different
levels of energy.
One of the brilliant things that the best leaders under-
stand is that the power of human nature is that each
human’s nature is unique. And teams are a really
wonderful way to make use of that uniqueness. That’s
what teams are for: to capitalize on the fact that different
people on the team can complement each other.
When you peel the lies back, what you get is
wonderful diversity. And I don’t mean diversity of gender
and race and age, necessarily—although you do get
that—I mean diversity of motivation, thought process,
relationship building, sense making, personality.
54
PULSE
■
SEPtEmbEr 2019
P: What’s your one tip to improve
engagement?
B: There are three secrets to engagement: attention,
attention and attention. That’s what drives engagement:
do you pay attention to me and my work? My tip would
be to check in with each of your people once a week,
every week, for 15 minutes. Just ask two questions each
week: what are your priorities this week, and how can I
help you? Don’t offer a to-do list—you’re not checking up
on people, you’re checking in with people. We have a ton
of data on this that show if you do this every week, your
engagement is twice as high as if you do it every other
week, and so on. Frequency trumps quality when it
comes to engagement. n
QuIck
QueStIonS:
hometown: “Los Angeles.”
favorite vacation destination:
“Avignon, in the south of
France, in late June when all
the lavender is out.”
Personal motto:
“ABC – always be curious.”
favorite color: “bLUE.”
favorite food: “Penne
all’amatriciana. When it’s
made well…you can’t even
speak to me.”