YouSaid · the spoken record

Marcus Buckingham

lines on the record: 126
first: 2022-05-05
most recent: 2022-05-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, when it comes to psychometrics, you have a listen for and you code it, plus when you hear the listen for and zero for everything else, like boiling and not boiling. So when you're actually building an instrument, this may be two inside baseball, as it were, but inside cricket. But that's how you do it when you're building an instrument. So for example, you take a question like, how do you know if you're doing a good job of listening? Let's say that you're trying to figure out empathy and you decide that one of the ways to measure empathy would be a question like”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are you an overchiever or an underachiever? Or do you like overcoming people's resistance to your ideas? So you can. If you're not careful, you close the answer down. Best questions are always like tell me about a time when you built something that you didn't expect to build. It's just open.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Open not yes, no's, like just open ended. What did you love most about? So that's the, it sounds like an obvious thing, but it's amazing how close-ended our questions are.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“250 questions, 250 questions, and you see which questions elicit patterns of answers that the best people in a role do versus ones that are less successful. And many of the questions that you thought were great questions you have to throw out because they don't work as in the most successful people don't answer them in any way that's similar to each other and different than these people. So that's really what the business was, trying out lots of different questions to figure out what are the best questions you can ask. In this case, for a particular role or job. But in general, if you want to ask really good questions, the first thing to know is you should be asking open-ended questions. So, you're asking, what did you love most about your previous work?”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you're right, that's what the product is, and you would test it out, you would do what's called a concurrent validity study where you take 100 really good managers and 100 average ones and you try out.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Detailed around it, but a strength is what strengthens you. And you are the only genius when it comes to your strengths. 17 years with Gallup, that's sort of the biggest takeaway. And Strength Finder or other tools like that can help you sort of get in the vicinity of what are your strengths? But really, a strength is an activity that strengthens you. And life, frankly, is waking up every day, kind of putting on a show for you, going, what about this? What about this? What about this? What about this And yeah, you're on the receiving end going, hmm, how about that? What is it about that?”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, means if her strength is what your strength is you and her weakness is what weakens you, what's super cool about that is that you're the best judge of both. No one knows better than you what weakens you and what strengthens you. From the nine years old, we could be saying to people, hey, what strengthens you about even video games? Okay, which video game? What? What about it? Is it multiplayer game? Is it first-person shooter? We could start to get people to be cultivating their own genius about what are your strengths. Somebody else is the judge of your performance. No question. So if you say, I really, really love remembering people's names. No one can come in and say, no, no, you don't. They can say, well, you should probably use that to give better customer service. And here's how you might want to do that. But no one can come in and say, you don't love that. Because if you say, no, no, no, I do, then you're the best judge of that. Now, we might want to help you learn the detail of that. Well, what do you mean?”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a weakness. I don't care how good you are at it. If that's how you feel after it, and then somebody were to say to you, build your career around that. That's sadistic. But that's the proper definition of a weakness. If it weakens you, definition of a strength is any activity that strengthens you. Before you do it, you lean into it. You sort of just can't stop yourself from volunteering. While you're doing it, time whips by and you're like, you look up, you thought it was an hour, right? And it's now, you've been doing it for seven hours and you're like, oh my. And then when you're done with it, you're like, I don't know, I feel completed. Do I feel like me or I feel authentic? I don't feel drained. I might not want to do it right away again, but I'm like, from the Latin, right? You're invigorated. You're strengthened.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But actually, if you push on that, even just a little, Steve, you bump into people going, yeah, but I'm really good at that and I hate it. What's that? What's it where you're really good at it, even in school when you got an A and you're like, thank goodness that class is over because I don't want to take it again. But your parents go, well, you got an A? In fact, you got an in biology. So you might want to do medicine. You should be a doctor. But deep down yourself going, but I don't like sick people. I actually don't like sickness at all. And yet no matter as a doctor, you keep curing them. There's another one the next day. They keep coming into my darn office. You know, I'm never done. And so from a very early age, we start telling people that our strength is what you're good at. But yet our own human experience is, I'm good at some things I hate. What's that? Well, when you push on that, that's a weakness. And so we should change our definition. A weakness is any activity that weakens you. Any activity where before you do it, you don't want to do it. While you're doing it, time drags on. When you're done with it, you feel drained.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So when you dive into what a strength is, what you find is it's shot through with emotion. It's what do you love to do? What do you lean into? What do you find yourself unable to stop doing? There's an obsessive and joyous quality to a strength. So when you push and push and push on a strength, people think that a strength is what you're good at, a weakness is what you're bad at.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Resilience, talent. How do you measure that? Could I figure out a set of questions that would help me discover something about you in terms of your strengths, your talents, your advantages, your attributes that you don't even know yourself? Like, I just loved that idea. And so half of Gallup was polling and half of Gallup was psychometrics. And so I was there for the first 17 years of my career and we built this tool that 25 million people have taken called Strength Finder. Strengthfinder is all about exactly what it says. Let's try and measure you on 34 strengths and then we'll give you a top five. So that was the side that I spent my first 17 years of my career with is trying to measure the uniqueness of human beings.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hundred thousand people because you're 100,000 people might be skewed, but if you have what's called a representative sample in your 10,000, then you've actually extrapolated from your 10,000 to 100 million. Now, there's subtleties around that, but that's where it started. After George died, Don Clifton bought the company and Don's focus was psychometrics. So how do you measure things about a human that are really, really important but that you can't count? How can you measure engagement? How can you measure strengths? How can you measure?”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, well, Gal's the first company I joined after school, after university. Gallup was founded by George Gallup, who was the inventor of polling. You like polling, I hate it. He figured out something, which was, if you talk to 10,000, very carefully selected people, your predictions of what they're going to do or vote for or anything is more accurate than taking”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't own it. If I go all the way back to nine or ten, I wouldn't have known what I wanted to be. I did know that I started to pay attention to things that other people didn't pay attention to. And that was interesting. Then at 16, I bumped into this titan of positive psychology, whose name was Dr. Don Clifton, who was the chairman of Gallup, but also its chief scientist. And so at 16, he said, you're going to go study psychology. And I had chosen psychology. He was like, come to Lincoln, Nebraska, and I'll teach you about positive psychology and studying what's right with people. And I was like, all right, I'll do that. Didn't know where I would lead, but knew that research and psychology, real world observed human behavior. I just was always interested in that.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I know certainly in the company that I built, it's like you don't hire people like that. You tend to hire people that are completely lovely and smart, but really quite inarticulate at describing where they find love and what they do, where they're at their best, and where they struggle. We just haven't grappled with the beautiful, wonderful extensive variation of us as individuals.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we could help you learn to have a language around that and how to describe it without bragging or how to be interested in other people's network. We could do all of that. And of course, as you know, as an entrepreneur, you want to hire people like that because then they have mastery of themselves. So when they join a team, they can start going, well, you can lean into me for this. And, you know, here's a bit where I struggle. Actually, I need some help. And here's where things come really fast. And here's where I'm like a deer in the headlights.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Version of who you are, you don't rewire your brain to become someone else. The question in life isn't really growth or no growth. It's where will you grow the most? So I don't think we've ever really grappled with the 11-year-old who's basically asking herself, who am I? Is there a me in there? We could have 10 years of school. Yes, where we learn geometry, but you could have 10 years going, here's how to use the raw material of a week of school to start helping you know a little bit more about that weird, massive and massively fill agreed network in your brain.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the time you get to be about 18, 19, you have a hundred trillion synaptic connections in your brain that lead you to love some things and loathe others. Things that shouldn't go together, go together, things that you lean into that you shouldn't lean into, but you do. Like for me, I shouldn't have loved public speaking. But for some daft reason idea. Why? No idea. But we have this unbelievably intricate network of synaptic connections that makes us completely different from the person we grew up in the same house with. And what no one's ever taught us is, A, how do you understand that uniqueness? Like, what are the signs life is giving you? And B, how do you use it? Like, can you rewire your brain to become someone else? What happens if you put your $10,000 in? Can you rewire your brain and become a different human being? Can you rewire that network in your brain? Well, if you have a growth mindset, supposedly, you should. And yet, actually we know that's not what happens at all. You grow more.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. It's like we're mysterious. And that's what I read about in the book. I don't think we've really grabbed hold of this huge variability in variety that lives in human beings. We have talked about it in terms of race or gender or age or nationality or religion, but we haven't really talked about it in terms of why you're different from your brother.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was faking public speaking when I was just speaking, and I was doing it as a coping mechanism so that I didn't stammer. And it worked.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The whole thing, and what occurred to me was I love. Eyes on me. It sounds really weird, but the more people I'm talking to Better, brain comes faster, words come out better, stories, I don't know why. I didn't work at it. I didn't struggle with it. It was just that worked on me in the same way that some people ever stand when they sing. They don't have a stammer. So I took that away. I was blown away. Didn't understand it. But then I just went, you know what? That should be an unlock for me. We often go to our deep traumas to try to understand how to fix ourselves. And if you have social anxiety, well, what caused it? Where did it start? And we sort of, we pathologize ourselves with the best of intentions. But I went the other way and I was like, I know so much about this dance demo. I've been more speech pathology sessions and read more books and I know so much about it. I just can't fix it. Instead, I'm going to decide that when I talk to one person, I'll just pretend I'm talking to 400. I'll just literally pretend I'm talking to 400. And the stammer went away in a week.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, you can see what I'm going to read. And girls and boys about ages, you know, can be pretty cruel. So I'm like, I'm done. I'm just baked. Stick a fork in me. But anyway, I woke up and I turn around and I look at all the faces. And Was like a stimulus. And then my response, my brain felt different. So I can say about it. It just felt different, felt warmer. It felt fluid. And I just read the whole piece with not a single stammer.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He can't talk. So I'd never really spoken in front of anyone at all. When I was talking to you, like if I was seven years old and talking to you like this, I couldn't say anything. Like I wouldn't, I would try. And then you would be like, this is mortifying. So I'd never been asked to read aloud anywhere. Anyway, that day my palms are sweating even just thinking about it because you realize my life's over. Every single child in the school is going to see me now stand up. I can't fake the words because they've got the Bible study books because it was in chapel. So they can see what I'm supposed to read. So I can't substitute words that I could say for words that I couldn't. It's an old stammerous trick.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can't put words together. So for the first 12 years of my life, not being able to speak was what I thought about every single moment of every day. And everyone's got their own traumas and their own difficulties. And I had lots of blessings in my life, but I couldn't speak and I had a lot to say. So I would keep trying and then it wouldn't work. And I didn't know why. And a stammers are really, it's a perfect metaphor for everything that parents try to do with their kids. The more you try to fix a stammer, the worse it gets. So I went to the speech pathologist and they did the whole Peter Piper, pick a pecker pickle pecker's thing. Trying to sort of get the muscles to kick in. And it just got worse and worse and worse and worse. And then I was one of five boys that was asked to read aloud in chapel. I had kept volunteering to be in Christmas plays and stuff, and I was never picked because everyone rightly was like, ugh.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so when I first started to speak, and this happens for quite a lot more boys than girls, actually, as it happens, my synapses didn't fire right. And so you have almost immediate disfluency. So my earliest memories, Steve, are not being able to say my name. One of my very earliest fears was not ever being able to be married because I couldn't say, will you marry me? So you start off and you start trying to communicate at three and four, and then you realize that something's really wrong, but you're so young you don't really understand what's wrong. And then you get older and older, and you realize you can't.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I couldn't say my own name until I was 12. The more you try to fix a stammer, the worse it gets. From a very early age, we start telling people that strength is what you're good at. But yet, I'm good at some things I hate. What's that? That's a weakness. I had got myself into a position where I was solely responsible for one huge client, Disney. I look like I sort of feel confident, but I had years of panic attacks. It was super psychologically damaging to be trying to be somebody that you're not. The first relationship you better have is a really good one with yourself. The best people in any job, they find love in the activities themselves. Love is for work and work is for love, and if we do that, it's not just individualistically satisfying, it's what companies want from us.”
2022-05-05 · The Diary of a CEO · How To Find Ultimate Fulfilment At Work: Marcus Buckingham · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT