Marcus Buckingham Quotes

Innovation and best practices can be sown throughout an organization - but only when they fall on fertile ground.

The difference between a pebble and a mountain lies in whom you ask to move it.

Focusing on strengths is the surest way to greater job satisfaction, team performance and organizational excellence.

Talent is the multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield. The time you spend with your best is, quite simply, your most productive time.

The secret to living a strong life is right in front of you, calling to you every day. It can be found in your emotional reaction to specific moments in your life.

Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in.

People leave managers, not companies

In the minds of great managers, consistent poor performance is not primarily a matter of weakness, stupidity, disobedience, or disrespect. It is a matter of miscasting.

Your strongest life is built through a continuous practice of designing moment by moment.

Always work hard. Intensity clarifies. It creates not only momentum, but also the pressure you need to feel either friction, or fulfillment.

The true genius of a great manager is his or her ability to individualize. A great manager is one who understands how to trip each person's trigger.

The opposite of a leader isn't a follower. The opposite of a leader is a pessimist.

As a general rule, people tend to do best what they enjoy doing most.

If you want to be clear, act.

Discover what you don't like doing and stop doing it.

We live with them every day, and they come so easily to us that they cease to be precious.

Clarity is the answer to anxiety. Effective leaders are clear.

Many of us feel stress and get overwhelmed not because we're taking on too much, but because we're taking on too little of what really strengthens us.

The best strategy for building a competitive organization is to help individuals become more of who they are.

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

A strength is what you do that makes you feel strengthened.

Authenticity is your most precious commodity as a leader.

Passion isn't something that lives way up in the sky, in abstract dreams and hopes. It lives at ground level, in the specific details of what you're actually doing every day.

If we have to know without a doubt that the choices we are making are the perfect ones, we risk never making any choices at all.

You will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses.

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

All the great organizations have great managers at all levels who recognize where their culture is getting stronger and where it is getting weaker. There are always reasons why.

Companies don't have one culture. They have as many as they have supervisors or managers. You want to build a strong culture? Hold every manager accountable for the culture that he or she builds.

Teach your children how to identify their own strengths and challenge them to contribute these strengths to others.

We're all filled with naturally recurring patterns that make us unique - they're called talents. And our charge is to bloody well use them.

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

Clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.

The best way to find out whether you're on the right path? Stop looking at the path.

There's something unique and different that makes a leader, and it's not about creativity or courage or integrity.... A leader's job is to rally people toward a better future.

Great leaders rally people to a better future.

What do we know to be important but are unable to measure?

Every time you make a rule you take away a choice, and choice, with all of its illuminating repercussions, is the fuel for learning.

People quit managers, not jobs.

Convey your passion and link your strengths to measurable results. Employers and interviewers love concrete data.

To get the best coaching outcomes, always have your 1-on-1's on your employee's turf not yours. In your office the truth hides.

There is no shortage of mechanisms by which to measure almost anything.

Remember, what you focus on expands; results follow focus.

My point is, people really don't change very much.

Too many companies waste time trying to eliminate their employees' weaknesses when, in fact, they should concentrate on developing their strengths.

Sustained success means making the greatest possible impact over the longest period of time

Getting after this terrible, avoidable waste of human potentiality is what gets me out of bed every morning.

Obviously, you have to know what you need now and what you will soon need, then hire or promote from within to meet those needs.

True individuality can be lonely.

The first step is to recognize what you need to know and why you need to know it.

Life's tricky for women because they have to make more choices than men. And yes, choice is good, but boy, you better be an expert choice-maker.