StandOut
S
TAND
O
UT
S
TAND
O
UT
The Groundbreaking New Strengths Assessment
from the Leader of the
Strengths Revolution
MARCUS BUCKINGHAM
© 2011 by One Thing Productions, Inc.
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.
Page design by Mandi Cofer.
Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].
ISBN 978-0-8499-4888-6 (IE)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Buckingham, Marcus.
StandOut : the groundbreaking new strengths assessment from the leader of the strengths revolution / Marcus Buckingham.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-4002-0237-9 (alk. paper)
1. Creative ability in business. 2. Employee motivation. 3. Executive ability. 4. Leadership. I. Title. II. Title: Stand out.
HD53.B83 2011
658.4’063--dc22
2011009101
Printed in the United States of America
11 12 13 14 15 QGF 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the entire Buckingham family,
who made the best of me;
and
To my extended TMBC family,
who made the best of StandOut.
Contents
CHAPTER 1
“Whistles for Everyone!”
The StandOut strengths assessment is an innovation delivery system. We designed it to reveal your edge, and then feed you practical innovations, tips, and techniques that you can use to sharpen this edge and win at work.
We all revere innovation. It is the mystical driver of progress, the secret sauce, the touchstone we reach for whenever our backs are against the wall. Our managers, our leaders, even our president cajole us to outthink, outsmart, “out-innovate” the competition. In these accelerated times, only innovation will keep us relevant, only innovation will allow us to keep thriving, only innovation can get us ahead and keep us there.
And when we say this, what do we mean by
innovation
? Usually we mean
invention
and we point back to that Golden Age of invention, the
Apollo
years, when anything was possible, when failure was not an option, when necessity created Teflon and freeze-dried food, the Stairmaster and digital photography, the technology inside every kidney-dialysis machine and the materials for your running shoes, solar panels and better golf balls, and, of course, ARPANet, the forerunner to the Internet. Heady times. No wonder our leaders hark back to them.
For most of us, though, innovation is a little less dramatic. We aren’t looking to invent the Internet. We just want a better technique, a better way of doing things. We are tantalized by the notion that someone in our field has devised a method or figured out a shortcut, the “control-C” or “control-P,” of our job, something that if we could just find and replicate, we would be able to take a giant leap forward in our performance and in our career.
And our employers are possessed by the very same notion. Every organization is on a near-constant search for “best practice.” They convene conferences of top performers, pick their brains for the precious few actions, and then capture what they hear in online “knowledge centers,” in videos, or in the course books of their corporate university. Though it is not always stated explicitly, the vision driving all of this activity is that innovation can be harvested and that, once harvested, it can be deployed at scale. Find a few key innovations, so the thinking goes, and we’ll spread them to the many.
And occasionally, very occasionally, it does work this way. In the early twentieth century, Dr. Henry Plummer of the Mayo Clinic was experimenting with the use of X-rays for medical purposes. Although he and his team of clinicians had all the right equipment, they kept getting blurred images of their patients. Dr. Plummer and his team tried telling the patients “Don’t move.” But they moved anyway. Then they phrased it more positively. “Hold still,” they said. But the patients couldn’t hold still long enough to avoid blurring the picture, particularly when their head or torso were being X-rayed. Undaunted, Dr. Plummer worked on the problem until finally he happened upon the one phrase that magically transformed his patients into statues. This phrase proved so effective that still, today, when you are waiting in the radiology room for your X-ray, the nurse will turn to you and say: “Please hold your breath.”
He had found one key innovation, and in the intervening century it has been deployed at massive scale.
Annoyingly, Dr. Plummer’s experience is the exception. It is very rare to discover a best practice that is transferable person to person at such scale, with no lessening of its effectiveness. Normally what happens is this: An enterprising employee will come up with a new way of doing things. This new practice will spring from within her as an irrepressible manifestation of her personality. It will be authentic and natural, and she will use it to outperform her colleagues. This success will bring her to the attention of her superiors, who will interview her to discover her secret. Her new practice will be elevated up the corporate ladder, vetted by Operations, Human Resources, Training, Communications, and Legal, until eventually, stripped of its unique characteristics and the person who made them, it will be introduced to the rest of the “field,” where it will end its life as just another corporate program, smoothed out and lifeless, inauthentic for everyone else and ineffective for the company.
A few years ago in a study of top-performing managers for Best Buy, I had the chance to interview Ralph Gonzalez. Ralph had successfully transformed one of Best Buy’s lowest-performing stores into a repeat award winner. On virtually every metric, from revenues to profitability to employee engagement to “shrink,” he had taken his team from the bottom 10 percent to the top. What had he done, I asked him, to effect such a dramatic transformation?
He told me that he had played on his likeness to a young Fidel Castro, that he had called his store “La Revolucion,” that he had posted a “Declaracion de Revolucion” in the break room, that he had made the supervisors wear army fatigues, and then, as I was scribbling all this down, he told me about the whistle.
It was a brilliant innovation. Since initially his store was at the bottom of every district performance table, he wanted to give his people a way to celebrate that excellence was indeed happening in his store, and that it was happening all the time. So he gave everyone a whistle and told them to blow the whistle whenever they saw anyone do anything good. It didn’t matter if the person they saw was their superior or was working over in another department; if they saw somebody go above and beyond, they were to blow the whistle.
“Didn’t it make the store incredibly loud?” I asked.
“Sure,” he replied, with a glinty Castro grin. “But it energized the store. It energized me. Heck, it even energized the customers. They loved it.”
I was so taken with this innovation I wrote about it in
Now, Discover Your Strengths
. What I didn’t describe is what happened next. Having been shared at a number of company gatherings, the “whistle story” started to take on a life of its own. All of a sudden it began cropping up in different districts and regions around the country. “Whistles for everyone!” There was even talk of devising a system to properly implement the whistle inside a store. Managers would have green whistles, supervisors white, and frontline blue-shirts regular silver whistles. Here are the twelve conditions when whistles can be blown—and here are the twenty conditions when the whistle must
not
be blown, no exceptions. What had begun as a vibrant expression of a particular person’s personality was fast mutating into a “Standard Operating Procedure.”
Fortunately, some wise Best Buy executives, realizing that this innovation was almost entirely dependent on the presence of Ralph himself, stepped in and killed the mutation before it could spread.