Marcus Buckingham People Quotations

Most of my work has been in corporations, studying how you build an organization that helps people to identify and work to their strengths.

I do still get extremely nervous before speeches. My biggest fear is that I'll be standing there in front of hundreds of people and be incapable of talking. I'm afraid that I'll make a complete fool of myself and be unable to go on.

My career expertise is as a psychometrician - somebody who builds tests to measure personality. Companies would employ me to build interviews to measure the talents of people before they were hired.

People leave managers, not companies

No idea will work if people don't trust your intentions toward them.

Great leaders rally people to a better future.

People quit managers, not jobs.

Remember the Golden Rule? "Treat people as you would like to be treated." The best managers break the Golden Rule every day. They would say don't treat people as you would like to be treated. This presupposes that everyone breathes the same psychological oxygen as you. For example, if you are competitive, everyone must be similarly competitive. If you like to be praised in public, everyone else must, too. Everyone must share your hatred of micromanagement.

In most cases, no matter what it is, if you measure it and reward it, people will try to excel at it

Emphasize your strengths on your resume, in your cover letters and in your interviews. It may sound obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people simply list everything they've ever done. Convey your passion and link your strengths to measurable results. Employers and interviewers love concrete data.

American culture is CEO obsessed. We celebrate the hard-charging heroes and mythologize the iconoclastic visionaries. Those people are important.

Everyone can probably do at least one thing better than ten thousand other people.

The corporate world is appallingly bad at capitalizing on the strengths of its people.