Motivational Speaker - Marcus Buckingham - Total Access Speakers Bureau

In a world where efficiency and competency rule the workplace, where do personal strengths fit in?

It's a complex question, one that intrigued Cambridge-educated Marcus Buckingham so greatly, he set out to answer it by challenging years of social theory and utilizing his nearly two decades of research experience as a Sr. Researcher at The Gallup Organization to break through the preconceptions about achievement and get to the core of what drives success.

First, he told you to break all the rules (First, Break All the Rules). Next, he called for a strengths revolution that would change the way organizations work and prosper (Now, Discover Your Strengths). Now, his latest book, Go Put Your Strengths To Work, calls you to action and shows you how to apply your strengths for maximum success in work and life.

With three books on the New York Times best sellers list, Marcus Buckingham uses over 150,000 interviews collected by the Gallup Organization to expose the fallacy of standard business practices � there is no standard model for success. Marcus outlines four keys to becoming an excellent manager: finding the right fit for employees, focusing on strengths of employees, defining the right results and selecting staff for talent - not just knowledge and skills. He also offers audiences specific techniques for helping people perform better on the job.

What would happen if men and women spent more than 75% of each day on the job using their strongest skills and engaged in their favorite tasks, basically doing exactly what they wanted to do?

According to Marcus Buckingham (who spent years interviewing thousands of employees at every career stage and who is widely considered one of the world's leading authorities on employee productivity and the practices of leading and managing), companies that focus on cultivating employees� strengths rather than simply improving their weaknesses stand to dramatically increase efficiency while allowing for maximum personal growth and success.

In his role as author, independent consultant and speaker, Marcus Buckingham has been the subject of in-depth profiles in The New York Times, Fortune, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, USA Today and is routinely lauded by such corporations as Toyota, Coca-Cola, Master Foods, Wells Fargo, and Disney as an invaluable resource in informing, challenging, mentoring and inspiring people to find their strengths and obtain and sustain long-lasting personal success.

Marcus Buckingham holds a master�s degree in social and political science from Cambridge University and is a member of the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Leadership and Management.

Marcus is truly a dynamic speaker with the abilty to change the way a company does business.

*** Programs Include:

* Measure What Really Matters: Numbers are crucial to running a company, and CEOs love them. Yet the numbers that most leaders use to manage the people who are part of their business are mostly off target. The CEOs who come to us are almost always fixated on two questions: How is our average performance improving over time? and How do we stack up against our competitors? Both of those questions obscure what's really important. Averages hide the fact that within any company are some of the most-engaged work groups and some of the least-engaged work groups. But this range is what is most revealing. You can divide any working population into three categories: people who are engaged (loyal and productive), those who are not engaged (just putting in time), and those who are actively disengaged (unhappy and spreading their discontent). The U.S. working population is 26% engaged, 55% not engaged, and 19% actively disengaged. In essence, then, the CEO's job is to improve the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged workers. But here's the problem: Few of the CEOs in our study could say which work units in their company were effectively engaged and which weren't. They didn't know where their culture was strong and where it was weak, whether it was getting better or getting worse. That's where the Q12 comes in. Survey the workforce every six months, and the result will be a vivid picture of which work units are engaged in a way that leads to the best performance and which workers are not.

* Stop Trying to Change People. Start Trying to Help Them Become More of Who They Already Are: CEOs hate variance. It's the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex. There is one resource inside all companies that will hinder any attempt to eliminate variance: each individual's personality. Human beings are the one irreducible complexity in every company and you can't eliminate that complexity by forcing people to become more like one another. You can't standardize human behavior. Of course, that's precisely what most leaders attempt to do. That goal--standardizing human behavior--is the driving force behind most executive-training programs and leadership-development courses. What's the quickest way to build a coherent culture? Get everyone to manage the same way. Not only is that approach psychologically daft, it's hugely inefficient. It's fighting human nature, and anyone who fights human nature will lose. People don't change that much, so don't waste your time trying to rewire them or trying to put in what was left out. Instead, spend your time trying to draw out what was left in. When it comes to getting the best performance out of people, the most efficient route is to revel in their strengths, not to focus on their weaknesses. The best strategy for building a competitive organization is to help individuals become more of who they are.

* You're Not the Most Important Person in the Company. Believe It or Not, Your Middle Managers Are:American culture is CEO obsessed. We celebrate the hard-charging heroes and mythologize the iconoclastic visionaries. Those people are important. But when it comes to getting the most productivity out of everyone in the company, they're not the most important people. Our research tells us that the single most important determinant of individual performance is a person's relationship with his or her immediate manager. Without a robust relationship with a manager who sets clear expectations, knows you, trusts you, and invests in you, you're less likely to stay and perform. The best managers start with a radical assumption: Each person's greatest room for growth is in the area of his greatest strength. Good managers believe that each person is wired in a unique way--and these managers are fascinated by this individuality. Rather than seek to round it out or fill it in, the best managers do everything they can to sharpen and amplify that uniqueness. And then those managers work with people to help them understand their strengths, to build on them, to give them the confidence to be different.

* Stop Looking to the Outside for Help. The Solutions to Your Problems Exist Inside Your Company: Talent is a multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield will be. That's why the best leaders are relentless at seeking out, shadowing, studying, and highlighting the lessons of their own top performers. The funny thing is that most CEOs spend their time benchmarking best practices in other companies.. You have some of the world's best managers working inside your own company. Look to them first. Learn from your own people first.

* Don't Assume That Everyone Wants Your Job--or That Great People Want to Be Promoted out of What They Do Best: There are two myths about talent that feed the conventional and misguided approach to career tracks and leadership development in most companies. The first myth: Talent is rare and special. Wrong. We all have talent. What's rare and special is a worker who finds a role that suits his or her talents. The second myth: Some roles are so easy that they don't require talent. Wrong again. We hear a lot about developing more respect for frontline workers and customer-facing employees, but peel the onion and you run into a rigid hierarchy of jobs. The compensation system evolves out of that hierarchy. So do titles and careers. We say that we want to build world-class organizations. That's meaningless if we don't value world-class performance in every role. Yet the people who touch customers the most--hotel housekeepers, outbound telemarketers--get the least respect and the lowest paychecks. Unfortunately, the only way we have to reward excellence on the front lines is to promote people out of the very roles that they do best. We turn great housekeepers into supervisors, virtuoso shelf stockers into salespeople, and managers into leaders. A major challenge for CEOs is to define excellence in every role--and pay on it, award titles on it, distribute prestige on it, and make it a genuine career choice.

Marcus Buckingham

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