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

Think employee feedback is important?  Think again!  Employees are looking for attention - not feedback!

I love when someone challenges what we believe is true when it comes to HR and leadership. I really love it when that challenge is backed up with DATA - my love language.

Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall have teamed up to give us Nine Lies About Work which will really be with the reading time investment.

There are nine “lies” that this book looks at. While all of them are great to read - I’ll highlight my favorite one:

Lie #5 - People need feedback

For years, we HR people have been telling you that your team (especially your millenials) need feedback to thrive. With that, most people interpret this to mean more traditional sit down employee reviews - where we generally spend 90% of our time telling them the things that they don’t do incredibly well. And our response to needing to give more feedback - we are turning to constant feedback with technology applications as the “performance management” tool for 2020. But is this the best? Does this accomplish what we are trying to get as an outcome?

What do we want?

1. Employees who are engaged (only 17% of employees in the US are engaged)

2. Employees who are productive (if employees are more engaged, they are most productive)

What do the employees want?

They don’t want more feedback. The data shows that what they really want is ATTENTION. Look at these stats:

1. If you pay your team no attention, your team’s engagement will plummet.

2. If you give your team negative feedback (the typical employee review) - this is, at least 40 times for effective than ignoring people.

3. If you give your team mostly positive attention - that is attention to what they did best, and what was working most powerfully for them - the ratio of engaged to disengaged rises to 60 to one.

4. Thus, positive attention is 30X more powerful than negative attention and 1200X more powerful than ignoring the team (no attention).

Some tips:

• Negative feedback creates impairment in learning and improving

• Positive, future focus sets people up to greater learning

Action items to use today:

• Spend your days “alert” to those times when your team members do something easily and effectively - and tell them.

• Tell the person what you experienced when you saw them doing that incredible thing they did.

• If the team member has a problem - first ask them what are three things that are working “right”. By getting him to think about something that is going well, you are opening up his brain chemistry so that the can be open to new solutions. Then ask - “what do you already know you need to do”.

What are all the nine lies?

1. People care what company they work for

2. The best plan wins

3. The best companies cascade goals

4. The best people are well rounded

5. People need feedback

6. People can reliably rate other people

7. People have potential

8. Work-life balance matters most

9. Leadership is a thing

Thumbs Up!
I recommend this book to anyone who has the opportunity to impact people at his/her company and TO CHANGE the way things are done. This book makes you rethink traditional HR people issues - and you will want to augment how you do things. Try just one - and see what happens. The data shows that making any of these changes will create more engaged employees.

How Long?
This book will take 7-10 hours to read - maybe read one lie at a time! You will want to read the whole book. This is way too much to digest well in one sitting

Read This Book!
This book is for leaders of people - and not front line employees. Would be interesting to ready “one lie at a time” with other people leaders and discussing over lunch.