“Nine Lies About Work” Book Summary

I highly recommend purchasing the book and using this article as a supplement or refresher.

Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World by Marcus Buckingham (Author), Ashley Goodall (Author)

Lie #1 People care for the company they work for.

TRUTH: People care which team they’re on.

The engagement level of the particular team is what determined whether or not an individual was likely to stay or leave the company.

A team leader should:

• make us feel part of something bigger, that you
• show us how what we are doing together is important and meaningful
• make us feel that you can see us, and connect to us, and care about us
• give us this sense of universality — all of us together
• recognize our own uniqueness, lift up what is special about each of us, to magnify what we all share

Engaged & productive employee say the following about their work:

1. I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company.
2. At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me.
3. In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values.
4. I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work.
5. My teammates have my back.
6. I know I will be recognized for excellent work.
7. I have great confidence in my company’s future.
8. In my work, I am always challenged to grow.

The first grouping is the odd-numbered items, and they deal with the person’s experience in their interactions with people at work. The authors call these the “Best of We” items.

The second grouping is the even-numbered items and they deal with the person’s individual experience at work. The authors call these the “Best of Me” items.

If you do not have a high ranking on the above 8 questions within your team then the likelihood of leaving the company increases by 45 percent (Cisco Statistics)

People come for the culture and they stay because of their team.

• Objective reality: a reality that exists independently of our attitudes or feelings about it. For example, if you stop believing in gravity, you’ll still fall to the ground if you jump.
• Subjective reality: defined precisely by your attitudes and feelings. If you have a toothache yet your dentist tells you she can’t find anything ( there is no objective problem ), your tooth still hurts.
• Intersubjective Realities: Combine objective and subjective reality as a collective belief and you get a company. A company, stock value, and culture is a third reality. People have to all agree it exists for it to be real.

A company culture’s focus leans toward conformity to a common core of behaviors; teams focus on the opposite. A good team is about unlocking what is unique about each of us, in the service of something shared. A team, at its finest, insists on the unique contribution of each of its members and is the best way we humans have ever come up with of harnessing those distinctive contributions together in the service of something that none of us could do alone.

LIE #2 The best plan wins

TRUTH: The best intelligence wins (because the world moves too fast for plans).

Problem: Quickly Obsolete

• Most plans created in companies are overly generalized and obsolete before they are ever put into action.
• When you put your plan together in September, it’s obsolete by November.
• Events and changes are happening faster than they ever have before, so dissecting a situation and turning it into a meticulously constructed plan is an exercise in engaging in a present that will soon be gone.
• The amounts of time and energy it takes to make a plan this thorough and detailed are the very things that doom it to obsolescence.
• The thing we call planning doesn’t tell you where to go; it just helps you understand where you are. Or rather, were. Recently. We aren’t planning for the future, we’re planning for the near — term past.

Solution: An Intelligence System

• When your people are doing their jobs, they need to engage in the world they are actually in, responding to real-world data.
• If you’ve hired the right people, you should be able to present them with reliable, accurate, and real-time data and trust them to make smart decisions.
• Not only will that end up generating better results, but your people will also be far more engaged in the work, leading to even better performance in the future. It’s a virtuous cycle.
• It’s far better to coordinate your team’s efforts in real-time, relying heavily on the informed, detailed intelligence of each unique team member.
• An intelligence system, not a planning system is accurate, real-time data, distributed broadly and quickly, and presented in detail so that team members can see and react to patterns in deciding for themselves what to do.
• We see them everywhere, sometimes called war rooms.

Steps

1. Meet with your team frequently
2. Drive as much intelligence and information as you can down to the front line. Not your interpretations of the information, but the information itself. It’s much more important to ensure that the data you are giving them is accurate than to overlay it with your interpretation
3. Pay attention to which data your people find useful. By not pre-filtering it, you’ll quickly find out what information helps and what doesn’t.
4. Trust your people to make sense of the data.
5. Have a weekly one-on-one check-in with your team members to make sure they are getting what they need to do their jobs.
6. During your weekly check-in, leaders should ask two simple questions:

• What are your priorities this week?
• How can I help?

Meeting Frequency

• Span-of-control: how many team members every team leader should manage. It’s the number of people that you, and only you, can check in with every week.
• Meeting with your team members once a month is literally worse than useless.
• Team leaders who check in once a week see, on average, see a 13 percent increase in team engagement.
• Those who check in only once a month see a 5 percent decrease in engagement. 5 It’s as if team members are saying to you, “I’d rather you not waste my time if all we’re going to do is talk in generalities. Either get into the nitty-gritty of my work and how you can help right now, or leave me alone.”
• It’s less important that each check-in is perfectly executed than that it happens, every week.
• Think of meetings like brushing your teeth. Better to do it more often than try to brush a month’s worth of food off once a month.
• Weekly meetings even with a struggling leader is at least fifty-one more opportunities for that leader to practice and improve.
• The more information you will liberate, the more intelligence you will generate, and the more trust you will engender.
• Trust can never emerge from secrecy.
• Frequency creates safety.
• Give your people as much accurate data as you can, as often as you can
• Provide real-time views of what’s going on right now, and then a way to make sense of it, together.
• Trust the intelligence of your team.

Lie #3 The best companies cascade goals.

TRUTH: The best companies cascade meaning.

We cloister information in our planning system, and we cascade directives in our goal-setting system. Instead, we should unlock information through intelligence systems, and cascade meaning through our expressed values, rituals, and stories. We should let our people know what’s going on in the world, and which hill we’re trying to take, and then we should trust them to figure out how to contribute.

• There are many popular methodologies on the market these days that suggest that goals should cascade from the top of the organization all the way to the front lines.
• In theory, this makes complete sense and should create alignment within your company, with everybody rowing in the proverbial same direction.
• However, the authors suggest, the best companies don’t cascade goals. They cascade meaning.

Current Belief

1. Goals stimulate and coordinate performance by aligning everyone’s work
2. Tracking goals’ “percent complete” yields valuable data on the team’s or company’s progress throughout the year.
3. Goal attainment allows companies to evaluate team members’ performance at the end of the year.
4. Companies invest in goals because goals are seen as a stimulator, a tracker, and an evaluator — and these three core functions of goals are why we spend so much time, energy, and money on them. And this is precisely where the trouble begins.

Company Setting Goals

• The very best salespeople hit their quota months before the end of the year, whereupon they do the sales equivalent of vanishing off home — that is, they start to delay the closing of their deals so that they can “bank” them and ensure that they begin the next year with a head start
• Sales goals actually degrade the performance of top salespeople — they function, as a ceiling on performance, not a catalyst for more of it.
• The pressure to achieve company — imposed goals is coercion, and coercion is a cousin to fear
• fear-fueled employees push and push and, falling short, resort to inappropriate and sometimes illegal tactics in order to meet their goals. Think of Wells Fargo.
• None of which is to say that sales quotas are useless. In fact, they can be an excellent forecasting device.
• The best executives are good guesstimators — they have a sense, born of long experience, of what the median quota should be, the “line of best fit” around which the variation of salespeople’s performance will cluster. Some will outperform their quota by 10 percent, others will fall short by 10 percent, and thus at year’s end the sales goals, when guessed well, will be hit.
• But these sales goals don’t beget more sales; they just anticipate what the sales will be.
• Sales goals are for performance prediction, not performance creation.
• Cascaded goals, like plans, are tagging along behind the work, not out ahead of it: as used in the real world, goal setting is more a system of record-keeping than a system of work making.
• This doesn’t mean, though, that there is nothing we should cascade in our organizations
• The best companies don’t cascade goals; the best companies cascade meaning.
• It is shared meaning that creates alignment, and this alignment is emergent, not coerced
• Our people don’t need to be told what to do; they want to be told why.
• Many of the best leaders are storytellers.
• Cascade Meaning Instead of Goals by telling them what you value, show them, through rituals and stories

Using Goals for Performance

• Unless we can standardize the difficulty of each person’s goals it’s impossible to objectively judge the relative performance of each employee.
• As every marathon runner discovers, the first half of the marathon is the comparatively easy part. It’s the last half — in particular, the last six miles — that’s brutal.
• The company has asked you to evaluate yourself against a list of abstract goals that were irrelevant a couple of weeks after you wrote them down.
• The only way a goal has any use at all is if it comes out of you as an expression of what you deem valuable.

Lie #4 The best people are well-rounded.

TRUTH: The best people are spiky (uniqueness is a feature, not a bug).

No matter what kind of work your team is doing and no matter which part of the world you’re working in, your team will always be most productive when more team members feel delighted and joy in what they do every day. Each member of your team doesn’t need to be well-rounded, BUT your team as a whole should be well-rounded.

• You get better results from your people by helping them further develop their strengths.
• Somebody in your company creates or adopts a broad set of competencies that a person should possess if they want to progress in their career. As an example, one popular model has 118 competencies that it considers “core”. People wanting to progress up the ladder will find themselves ranked on each of those competencies.
• Then, they’ll find out the areas where they scored lowest and be told to remedy those shortcomings, or as they’ll likely phrase it, “development areas.”
• Why? Because well-rounded people are better.

However, there are two facts that quickly expose the shortcomings with this approach:

• First, it’s almost impossible to measure a competency. Quick — how would you rate yourself the competency of “strategic thinking?” It’s a nebulous concept at best, and whatever score you gave yourself is a shot in the dark.
• Second, all research into high performance shows that each high performer is unique, and they got that way because they understood their strengths and took great pains to develop them.

So, what should we do instead? According to the authors, here are the top three strategies:

1. Get into the outcomes business. Be laser-focused on unleashing your people to create results rather than trying to control what they do.
2. Define the outcomes you want and then encourage your team to use their strengths to achieve them. They’ll naturally rely on their strengths, and you’ll be amazed at how efficiently and creatively the job gets done.
3. Use team “technology.” The best part of working on and through a team is that weaknesses have a tendency to be made irrelevant by the combination of different strengths.

Strengths

• Strength is not “something you are good at.” You will have many activities or skills that, by dint of your intelligence, your sense of responsibility, or your disciplined practice, you are quite good at, and that nonetheless bore you, or leave you cold, or even drain you.
• Something you are good at is not a strength; it is an ability. And, yes, you will be able to demonstrate high ability at quite a few things that bring you no joy whatsoever.
• Strength is an “activity that makes you feel strong.”
• What makes a certain activity a strength, is this combination of three distinct feelings

1. positive anticipation beforehand
2. flow during
3. fulfillment afterward — that makes a certain activity a strength.

• A strength is far more appetite than ability, and indeed it is the appetite ingredient that feeds the desire to keep working on it, and that, in the end, produces the skill improvement necessary for an excellent performance.

Competencies

• Competency is a quality you are supposed to possess in order to excel in your job.
• We use competencies to try to create well-rounded people.
• Competencies are impossible to measure. Take “strategic thinking” as an example.
• Competencies can be impacted by a person’s mood, and you may be observing them differently on different days.
• Not everyone who excels in a particular job possesses a particular set of competencies.

Traits

• Skills and knowledge are states, and we expect them to change over time.
• Traits, on the other hand, are inherent in a person. Extroversion is a trait.
• Traits cannot be measured with a survey or a skills test.
• Instead, they have to be measured using a reliable and validated personality assessment
• The two most prevalent kinds of personality assessments are self — assessments ( involving a number of carefully worded statements measured on a strongly agree — to — strongly disagree scale ) and situational judgment tests ( involving a number of situations with a list of possible response options from which the test taker selects the one that fits her best ).

Well-Rounded

• The well-rounded high performer is a creature of theory world.
• In the real world, each high performer is unique and distinct and excels precisely because that person has understood his or her uniqueness and cultivated it intelligently.
• Growth, it turns out, is actually a question not of figuring out how to gain ability where we lack it but of figuring out how to increase impact where we already have ability.
• The best people are spiky, and in their lovingly honed spikiness they find their biggest contribution, their fastest growth, and, ultimately, their greatest joy.

Team Leaders

• On the best teams, the team leader can identify the strengths of each person and tweak roles and responsibilities so that team members, individually, feel that their work calls upon them to exercise their strengths on a daily basis.
• When a team leader does this, everything else — recognition, sense of mission, clarity of expectations — works better.
• As a team leader, you are in the outcomes business.
• You are being paid to create certain outcomes for your company, as efficiently, as predictably, and as sustainably as possible, and to do this with enough creativity and intuition and excitement to engage the sort of talent that you and your company will need tomorrow.

Steps

• Define the outcomes you want from your team and its members,
• Look for each person’s strength signs to figure out how each person can reach those outcomes most efficiently, most amazingly, most creatively, and most joyfully.
• The moment you realize you’re in the outcomes business is the moment you turn each person’s uniqueness from a bug into a feature.
• And what you will be doing, when you step back and look, is fitting the role to the person.
• Define the adjustable seat
• There is no one — size — fits — all when it comes to human beings
• There is no one — size — fits — all when it comes to great performance.
• We need to partner with people whose strengths — whose weirdness, whose spikiness — is different from ours if we are to achieve results that demand more abilities than any of us has alone.
• The more different we are, the more we rely on understanding and appreciating the strengths of others, and on building a shared understanding of purpose, and an atmosphere of safety and trust, so that those strengths can be most usefully put to work
• The more diverse the team members, the more weird, spiky, and idiosyncratic they are, the more well — rounded the team.

Lie #5 People need feedback.

TRUTH: People need attention

Observer bias lead us to believe that your performance ( whether good or bad) is due to who you are — your drive, or style, or effort, say — which in turn leads us to the conclusion that if we want to get you to improve your performance, we must give you feedback on who you are so that you can increase your drive, refine your style, or redouble your efforts. To fix a performance problem, we instinctively turn to giving you personal feedback, rather than looking at the external situation you were facing and addressing that.

Social Media

• Social media is more about publishing about a positive self-presentation.
• It matters less to us whether this “self” is truly us, or whether, as many have observed, our online selves are aspirational projections, than it matters to us that others see us, and like us.
• We aren’t looking for feedback. We’re looking for an audience.
• Social media is an attention economy.

Giving Attention

• Epidemiologists, psychometricians, and statisticians have shown that by far the best predictor of heart disease, depression, and suicide is loneliness — if you deprive us of the attention of others, we wither.
• If you make changes to your business environment that demonstrate an interest in your worker. You will increase productivity.
• People need attention — and when you give it to us in a safe and non-judgmental environment, we will come and stay and play and work.
• Positive attention is thirty times more powerful than negative attention in creating high performance on a team. (It’s also if you’re keeping score, twelve hundred times more powerful than ignoring people,
• Each person’s strengths are, in fact, her areas of greatest opportunity for learning and growth; and that consequently, time and attention devoted to contributing to these strengths intelligently will yield exponential return now and in the future.
• In the brains of the students who received negative feedback, the sympathetic nervous system lit up. This is the “fight or flight” system, the system that mutes the other parts of the brain and thus allows us to focus only on the information most necessary to survive. When this part of the nervous system is triggered, your heart rate goes up, endorphins flood your body, your cortisol levels rise, and you tense for action. This is your brain on negative feedback: it responds as if to a threat, and it narrows its activity. The strong negative emotions produced by criticism “inhibits access to existing neural circuits and invokes cognitive, emotional, and perceptual impairment,” psychology and business professor Richard Boyatzis said in summarizing the researcher's findings.
• Negative feedback doesn’t enable learning. It systematically inhibits it and is, neurologically speaking, how to create impairment.
• If you want your people to learn more, pay attention to what’s working for them right now, and then build on that.

Giving Recognition

• Recognition is to spot something valuable in a person and then to ask her about it, an ongoing effort to learn who she is when she is at her best.
• The trick to doing this is not just to tell the person how well she’s performed or how good she is.
• Instead, what you’ll want to do is tell the person what you experienced when that moment of excellence caught your attention — your instantaneous reaction to what worked
• For a team member, nothing is more believable, and thus more powerful, than your sharing what you saw from her and how it made you feel.
• If you see somebody doing something that really works, stopping them, and replaying it to them isn’t only a high — priority interrupt, it is arguably your highest — priority interrupt.
• Get into this habit, and you’ll be far more likely to lead a high — performing team.

Giving Advice

• Your brain is wired uniquely, such that the world you see and the sense you make of it, the things in it that draw you in, or repel you or drain you, or light you up, and the insights these things spark in your mind — all these are utterly different from everyone else’s, and become even more different as you grow. As a result, the advice given to you by a leader who is not you will not necessarily work for you.
• Insight — “a feeling of knowing generated from within,” to use their phrasing — feels good and is brain food.
• The most helpful advice is not painting a picture of what you think someone should do but is instead a box of paints and a set of brushes. Here, the best team leaders seem to say, take these paints, these brushes, and see what you can do with them. What do you see, from your vantage point? What picture can you paint?
• Instead of focusing on what isn’t working. Tell me three things that are working right now? Might be related to the situation, or they might be completely separate from it.
• In doing that, you’re priming his mind with oxytocin — what we sometimes call the “love drug,” You are deliberately altering his brain chemistry so that he can be open to new solutions, and new ways of thinking or acting.
• Then ask, when you faced a problem like this in the past, what did you do that worked?
• Finally, ask, what do you already know you need to do? What do you already know works in this situation?
• These questions tend to create concrete answers and help them formulate a plan for action based on what has already worked for them.
• If they come up with a stressed-related solution, it’s because they may feel overwhelmed. Put a couple of smaller brushes in his hand and direct his gaze to one corner of the canvas.

Lie #6 People can reliably rate other people.

TRUTH: People can reliably rate their own experience.

We’ve already touched on this briefly above, but it’s a big enough issue that it warrants its own section.

1. Human beings can never reliably rate other human beings,
2. Rating data obtained by human judgment is contaminated because it says more about the rater than the person being rated and
3. You can’t get good data from a combination of bad data

• What you can rely on, however, is your experience with the person you are trying to evaluate.
• We think that rating tools are windows that allow us to see out to other people, but they’re really just mirrors, with each of us endlessly bouncing us back at ourselves.
• The rating given to you tells us, in the main, about the rating patterns of your team leader, and yet, in the room, we act as though it tells us about the performance patterns in you.

Wisdom of the Crowd

• Informed crowds are wise, and very often wiser than a small, privileged, expert elite. But the critical qualifier in that sentence is well — informed.
• It is a fallacy that although one person’s rating of you might be bad data, if we combine it with six other people’s equally bad ratings data, we will magically turn it into good data
• Noise plus noise plus noise never equals signal; it only ever equals lots of noise

Reliable Data

• Unreliable data, on the other hand, is wobbly data
• Reliable doesn’t mean accurate. Reliable means something doesn’t fluctuate randomly.
• People can reliably rate their own experiences.
• If we ask you to rate yourself on performance or on growth orientation or on learning agility, you are most definitely not an accurate rater of these things — if these things even exist. Instead, we should ask about your internal experiences and intentions.
• Rather than asking whether another person has a given quality, we need to ask how we would react to that other person if he or she did — we need to stop asking about others, and instead ask about ourselves.
• Here are a few more example questions you could ask:
• Do you choose to work with this team member as much as possible?
• Do you think this person has a performance problem that you need to address immediately?
• Would you promote this person today if you could?

Lie #7 People have potential.

TRUTH: People have momentum (we all move through the world differently).

Potential

• The first thing to consider is that as soon as you label someone as high-potential or low-potential (which, in real-world terms means anybody not labeled as high-potential), you are defining their destiny. It’s a label that is almost impossible to shake, for better or for worse.
• High potential is the corporate equivalent of Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket: you take it with you wherever you go, and it grants you powers and access denied to the rest of us
• Potential is not a trait. You don’t have it or not have it. It’s true that some people have the capacity to grow more quickly than others, but even that is something that can change over time.
• The ability to learn exists in us all. It shows up differently in each of us, and that while we can all get better at anything, none of us will ever be able to rewire our brains to excel at everything.

Mass

• Instead of asking if someone has potential, ask what they love doing about the different aspects of the jobs, and their attitude, enthusiasm can show if they can lean into that job.
• These are the loves and aspirations that are uniquely hers, and that she carries around with her everywhere she goes, just as surely as she carries her own body.
• Wherever she goes, they are there. You can call these her mass.

Velocity

• Things she’s acquired as she’s applied herself in the world to move in a particular direction: her current and past record of performance, and her tested certifications
• How she’s done it, how well she’s done it, how quickly, and in what direction — you can usefully label these her velocity.

Momentum

• Momentum is a combination of Mass and Velocity.
• Everyone has momentum.
• One team member might be more powerful than another, or speedier than another, or pointed in a different direction, but everyone has some.
• More simply, we can all get better, and we will all get better at different things, in different ways, and at different speeds.
• The speed and trajectory of her momentum at this very moment are a ) knowable, b ) changeable, and c ) within her control
• When you talk to her about her momentum, you help her to understand where she is at this moment in time, not so that she can be catalogued and categorized and put into one box instead of another, but so that she can understand what paths are possible next.
• Her career is moving on a particular trajectory at a particular speed, and she — with your help — can take the measure of her accomplishments, her loves and loathes, her skills and knowledge, and see where she can accelerate, or shift the path slightly, or even attempt a great leap.
• Where potential is assumed to be a fixed, inherent quality — she’s a hi-po or a lo-po — momentum is, by definition, always in a state of change. If she wants to speed it up, or alter its direction, she can.
• Power (how strong the momentum is), speed (how quickly it’s progressing), and direction (where it’s pointed).
• The power in reframing the discussion about potential in this way is that it conveys to the person you are assessing that a) there’s something there that’s measurable, b) it’s changeable, and c) that it’s in their control.
• Help her identify which parts of her current career are a function of who she is as a person — parts she will therefore likely bring with her, situation to situation — and which parts are entirely situation-dependent, and which she could change if she so chose.
• Given how close we all are to our own performance, and given that we are sometimes misguided in our career desires, this kind of subtle and specific insight could very well prevent her from making an ill-advised career move.

Lie #8 Work-life balance matters most.

TRUTH: Love-in-work matters most (that’s what work is really for).

Instead of striving for a balance between work and life, you should encourage your team to search for love-in-work. Look at a human being in love, and you’ll find somebody at their most productive, creative, generous, resilient, innovative, collaborative, open, and powerful. You’ll find the list of qualities that every CEO wants their people to have.

• We lose ourselves in work and rediscover ourselves in life. We survive work but live life. When work empties us out, life fills us back up. When work depletes us, life restores us.
• Neither you nor your life is in balance, nor will you ever be. It varies daily.
• The Greeks word eudaimonia means “the fullest and purest expression of you in your most elevated state.” Their idea was that each of us had a spirit, or daimon, that embodied our greatest and most unique possibilities — our natural strengths or talents — and that the state we should all seek was one where, because of the happy intersection of our role, our skills, our team, and our context, we turned these possibilities into contribution, and thus liberated our good spirit.
• You often hear, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life again.” but not everyone has that luxury.
• More than striving for balance between work and life — love — in — work matters most
• Those who reported that they spent at least 20 percent of their time doing things they loved had a dramatically lower risk of burnout.
• You can control this, tweak your role until, in all the most important ways, it resembles you.
• Select a regular week at work and take a pad around with you for the entire week. Down the middle of this pad, draw a vertical line to make two columns and write “Loved It” at the top of one column and “Loathed It” at the top of the other.
• Think of these activities you love as your “red threads.” Your work is made up of many activities, many threads, but some of them feel as though they’re made of particularly powerful material.
• These red threads are the activities you love, and your challenge is to pinpoint them so you can ensure that, next week, you’ll be able to recreate them, refine them, and add to them.
• You are weaving red threads into the fabric of your work, one thread at a time.
• These red threads are your strengths.
• Typically we think of our strengths as what we’re good at and our weaknesses as what we’re bad at and that our team leaders, or our colleagues, are, therefore, the best judges of both. But as we saw in chapter 4, this is not the best definition of either strengths or weaknesses.
• A strength is any activity that strengthens you, and weakness is any activity that weakens you, even if you’re good at it.
• Performance is what you have done well or poorly, and your team leader can be the judge of that.
• Team leaders and colleagues, however, can’t judge what strengthens or weakens you.
• The only person who can stop and be attentive enough to identify these threads, and weave them intelligently into the fabric of your work, is you.
• By being braided with one of your red threads, they can become less draining for you. When you start to think about your life in this way, you’ll quickly realize not only that “balance” is an unhelpful idea but that we have the categories wrong.
• What we all wrestle with every day in the real world is not so much work and life as it is love and loathe.
• What if we made the purpose of work to help people discover that which they love?
• What if we take our loves seriously, interlacing them with craft and discipline, and contributing something passionate, rare, and pure? You will see, from the inside out, that this is the fullest, most authentic, and richest expression of a unique person.
• If the people coming to work on your team could feel more like this, if you could help them take their red threads this seriously — not to make your people feel good about themselves, although that helps, but so they could share more with the world — what a beautiful and lasting contribution you and your team would make.

Lie #9 Leadership is a thing.

TRUTH: We follow spikes. Followship is a thing, not leadership.

We’ve made the mistake of thinking of leadership as a trait — as something you can acquire.

Rather, the authors point out, leadership is a state — you either have people following you (and so you are a leader), or you don’t.

• We don’t follow people who fit the mythical standard of a leader who is a stable blend of the traits more commonly associated with great leaders — visionary, great strategists, excellent communicators, etc.
• How do we know this? Because history is littered with examples of great leaders who don’t have all of those traits.
• In fact, the best leaders are often missing most of what we could consider to be table stakes for great leaders.
• Instead, we follow spikes. We follow people who have harnessed singular strengths and developed them to a level of mastery.
• We follow them not only because of their ability to excel in that area but in how they change the way we feel about the future.
• In particular, they make us feel more confident about it.
• Leadership isn’t a thing, because it cannot be measured reliably, and no two leaders create followers in quite the same way.
• Followership is a thing, it can be measured reliably.
• A leader is someone who has followers.
• Followers want to feel part of something bigger than ourselves — the “Best of We” — while,
• At the same time, feeling that our leader knows and values us for who we are as a unique individual — the “Best of Me.”
• Your ability to create the outcomes you want in your followers is tied directly to how seriously and intelligently you cultivate your own idiosyncrasy, and to what end.
• You are charged with rallying your team toward a better future, yet many on your team are fearful of this future. And this fear isn’t unjustified. It’s adaptive.
• As a leader, you can’t be dismissive of this fear. You can’t tell your people to “embrace change” and to “get comfortable with ambiguity.”
• Their followers want an increasingly vivid picture of the future, not another reminder of its inherent uncertainty.
• Your greatest challenge as a leader, then, is to honor each person’s legitimate fear of the unknown and, at the same time, to turn that fear into spiritedness
• So when we find something, anything, however slight, that lessens our uncertainty, we cling on for dear life.
• Each truly effective leader cultivates his or her mastery in a way that communicates to us something certain and vivid.
• It’s as if we trust leaders only when they’ve proven to us that they’ve opened more doors than we have seen round more corners than we have, dived deeper than we have taken themselves more seriously than we have. We trust the seriousness of this. We trust its predictability. We are drawn to its specialness. We sense its authenticity.
• We are attracted to the beautiful clarity of great ability, the brief moments of awe. We ignore everything else.
• The truth that no leader is perfect — and that the best of them have learned how to work around their imperfections.
• The truth that a person who might be a great leader for one team, or team of teams, or company, might not be a great leader for another.
• The truth that leaders are not good or bad — they are just people who have figured out how to be their most defined selves in the world, and who do so in such a way that they inspire genuine confidence in their followers.
• The truth that leading isn’t a set of characteristics but a series of experiences seen through the eyes of the followers.

We Follow Leaders who:

• Connect us to a mission we believe in.
• Clarify what’s expected of us.
• Surround us with people who define excellence the same way we do.
• Value us for our strengths.
• Show us that our teammates will always be there for us.
• Diligently replay our winning plays.
• Challenge us to keep getting better.
• Give us confidence in the future.