Phil's blog

…how some people interpret what he is saying. I have a lot of time for Marcus Buckingham. But, I think there is a BIG problem with how he and Gallup (the company whose ‘strengths-based’ research provides the foundation for his current work) have been interpreted.

Clifton’s Strengthsfinder, the basis of the ‘play to your strengths’ argument, did and does, help leaders identify areas they are naturally weak at and then think team-wide to plug their own weaknesses with other members of the team who have strengths in that area.

But, what we really need to identify is not areas that we are naturally bad at and will never be good at. We need to identify areas that we may not be paying enough attention to or may not realize are important.

There’s a whole realm of ‘what we don’t know’ that the ‘play to your strengths’ argument can encourage us (unintentionally) to ignore.

Yes, play to your strengths. But weaknesses in performance can be down to a lack of awareness that a particular area of leadership is indeed important and could improve our overall performance (rather than something that we have tried and know we aren’t good at and never will be good at).

Donald Rumsfeld once clumsily tried to divide the world’s dangers into things we know, things we don’t know and things we don’t know we don’t know, and to say that the last is the most dangerous.

This was a clumsy rendering (ahem: excuse that word) of Fernando Flores’s taxonomy in which he splits the world into things we know we know, things we know we don’t know and things we don’t know that we don’t know. The last is the area for growth that concentrating exclusively on what you already do well can lead you to miss.

So, I feel there is a problem with how Buckingham’s work is interpreted, in my view (though I applaud much of it), in that it can be interpreted in a way that stifles our own growth as leaders, and the growth of others.

As a footnote, the puritan in me also sees a bit of 1960s hippy culture in Buckingham’s “Play to your strengths and stop focussing on weaknesses” mantra that appeals to the Boomer generation that is now in senior and mid-manager positions (I’m at the tail end of it, so count myself in and have to work against this tendency myself). It’s a self-indulgent “Life’s short. I’m at the stage of my career where If I don’t like it, I shouldn’t have to do it,” Boomer tendency.

I agree with a vast part of the Gallup work. But, I think a lot of its enthusiastic takeup is based on that last point, above: a justification for “Wow, at last I have a big business consultancy giving me permission and a rationale for not doing the things I don’t like doing any more.”

And if you ask Buckingham and Gallup, they’ll tell you that’s not what they mean at all.

In his book The Halo Effect, Phil Rosenweig lays out 9 specific delusions and shows how they distort the advice you find in management books. You can reduce most of his nine points to one: looking at successful organizations then mis-connecting cause and effect; trotting out one or a series of ’causes’ that are presumed, but often not causal at all. The nine delusions are:

1. The Halo Effect
Tending of analysis of a company to reflect only the overall results

2. The Delusion of Correlation and Causality
The lack of proof of causality in many situations

3. The Delusion of Single Explanations
One factor is unlikely to be the reason for success or failure

4. The Delusion of Connecting the Winning Dots
Problems with only considering “winners” is “losers” may have the same dots.

5. The Delusion of Rigorous Research
Mistaking large volumes of data for good data

6. The Delusion of Lasting Success
Most companies tend to the mean eventually

7. The Delusion of Absolute Performance
Companies can do well and still fail if a competitor does better

8. The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick
Successful companies may do various things but that does not mean that doing those things will make you successful

9. The Delusion of Organizational Physics
Business organizations are just not that predictable

To which you could add a tenth: The delusion that a leader at the top is the cause of the organization’s current success.

Source: Adapted from Phil Rosenweig’s book The Halo Effect

I like the distinction in this slideshare between the ‘Wizard Merlin’ approach to insight – the Feynmanesque brilliance that allows a few ‘magicians’ to spot patterns the rest of us can’t see until they are pointed out to us – and the ‘Prepared Mind’ approach that Columbo is credited with, and that us plebs can cultivate in ourselves.

Leading innovation depends on cultivating a ‘prepared mind’ (see the post on happy accidents), though I’m pretty sure it was Pasteur who coined the phrase ‘the prepared mind’, not Posner, as credited in this slideshow. I’m looking forward to Harry Palmer on strategy…

Here’s a slideshow of my free eBook The Little Book of Leadership (Powerpoint version). If you like it, you can download it from Slideshare and email it to anyone else you feel may like it, too. If you’d rather have the pdf version, click on the little cover of the book right at the top of this page, in the masthead, to download the pdf version. I think it works better as a slidecast, myself.Click on the play button, below.

“In a neurological sense, laughing represents the shortest distance between two people because it instantly interlocks limbic systems. This immediate, involuntary reaction, as one researcher puts it, involves “the most direct communication possible between people – brain to brain – with our intellect just going for the ride, in what might be called a ‘limbic lock’.”
– Daniel Goleman, Primal Leadership

I’m pretty sure he stole that from the comedian Victor Borge, by the way, whom I recall saying “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.”

Anyway, Goleman goes on to say that research shows that interviewees who laugh are more likely to get the job and that bosses who laugh are more likely to get on with, and get the most out of, the people they work with.

“We are here on earth to do good for others.
What the others are here for, I do not know.”

– W. H. Auden