First, Break All the Rules

by Marcus Buckingham

  Walt Disney didn’t have to look far to find his brother, Roy. Through the good graces of their Stanford professor, William Hewlett found David Packard. Bill Gates and Paul Allen were fortunate enough to bump into each other in their high school computer club. None of these extraordinarily successful leaders were well-rounded. They may have had a broad knowledge of their respective businesses, but in terms of talent, each one was sharp in one or two key areas and blunt in many others. Each partnership was effective precisely because where one partner was blunt, the other was sharp. The partnerships were well-rounded, not the individuals.

  Even leaders who appeared to stand alone usually balanced their act with a complementary partner. At Disney the massively intelligent, insatiably competitive Michael Eisner benefited from the more practical, down-to-earth Frank Wells. And at Electronic Data Systems, behind the impetuous, inspirational Ross Perot you would have found the wise, guiding hand of the president, Mitch Hart.

  The lesson from these leaders is quite clear. You succeed by finding ways to capitalize on who you are, not by trying to fix who you aren’t. If you are blunt in one or two important areas, try to find a partner whose peaks match your valleys. Balanced by this partner, you are then free to hone your talents to a sharper point.

  This lesson is applicable across virtually all roles and professions. Since few people are a perfect fit for their role, the great manager will always be looking for ways to match up one person’s valleys with another person’s peaks.

  Jan B. had a highly creative researcher, Diane, who seemed to be congenitally incapable of turning in her expense reports on time. Instead of wasting time berating her for her constant failure, Jan simply told her: “Every time you get back from a trip, drop your expenses into an envelope and hand them to Larry. He’ll figure them out.” Larry isn’t an assistant; he’s a researcher like Diane. But he’s the most organized person on the small team, so he gets to handle his peer’s expenses. It may be unconventional. It certainly requires trust and respect between Larry and Diane. But in Jan’s mind, it is the only way to capitalize on Larry’s talent and simultaneously release Diane from her weakness.

  Jeff B., the software sales manager, is not only a sincere, passionate, and conceptual man, he is also, it turns out, a rotten planner. “I’ve never been good at tactics,” he confesses. “I am excellent at ground zero, building trust face-to-face. And I am excellent at twenty thousand feet, finding patterns, playing out scenarios. But I’m terrible in between. That’s where Tony’s so good. When we look at a situation he asks different questions than me. I’ll ask, ‘What if?’ or, ‘Why not?’ He’ll ask, ‘How many?’ or, ‘When?’ or, ‘Prove it.’ If I went to the board with my half-baked ideas, I’d get shot down every time. But with the two of us working on the same idea, our case ends up looking so convincing, they haven’t been able to turn us down once. As I say to Tony, individually we’re not much, but together we have a brain.”

  When you interview great managers, you are bombarded with examples like these. After a while the partnerships they describe begin to seem almost archetypal. Of course the creative but impractical thinker wound up partnered with the streetwise, business-savvy operator. Of course the administratively impaired salesperson teamed up with the “no detail too small” office manager. And of course the cocky, needy highflier found a mentor in the tough-loving veteran. It was inevitable. These things just happen.

  But they don’t. The partnerships great managers describe are not archetypes. There is nothing inevitable about them at all. Each partnership is, in fact, an anomaly, a surprisingly rare example of one manager bucking the system and figuring out how to make the most of uniquely imperfect people. Great managers talk about these partnerships so nonchalantly, it is easy to forget just how difficult they are to forge in the real world.

  HOW COMPANIES PREVENT PARTNERSHIPS

  A healthy partnership is based on one crucial understanding: Neither partner is perfect. If potential partners are afraid to admit their imperfections, or are trying diligently to correct them, or are reluctant to ask for help, neither will be on the lookout for a productive partnership. They will be nervous of confessing to too many faults and suspicious of anyone who offers.

  Strangely, most companies actively encourage this kind of behavior. Job descriptions, for even the simplest roles, run to two or three pages, presumably in hopes of capturing every minute task that the perfect incumbent should be able to perform. Training classes and development plans target those few behaviors where you consistently struggle. Everyone talks of the need to “broaden your skill set.”

  Perhaps the most pervasive example of “partnership prevention,” however, can be found in the conventional wisdom on teams and teamwork. Conventional wisdom’s most frequently quoted line on teams is “There is no ‘I’ in team.” The point here seems to be that teams are built on collaboration and mutual support. The whole is, apparently, more important than its individual parts.

  On the surface this appears to be eminently right-minded. Taking these sentiments as their starting point, many companies have dedicated themselves to creating self-managed teams. Here team members are encouraged to rotate into different roles on the team. The more roles they learn, the more they are paid. And everyone is supposed to focus on the team’s goals and performance, not his own.

  However, conventional wisdom’s view of teamwork is dangerously misleading. Great managers do not believe that a productive team has camaraderie as its cornerstone and team members who can play all roles equally well. On the contrary, they define a productive team as one where each person knows which role he plays best and where he is cast in that role most of the time.

  The founding principle here is that excellent teams are built around individual excellence. Therefore the manager’s first responsibility is to make sure each person is positioned in the right role. Her second responsibility is to balance the strengths and weaknesses of each individual so that they complement one another. Then, and only then, should she turn her attention to broader issues like “camaraderie” or “team spirit.” One team member might occasionally have to step out of his role to support another, but this kind of pinch-hitting should be a rarity on great teams, not their very essence.

  Jim K., a full bird colonel in the army — an organization that might be forgiven for emphasizing flexibility and camaraderie over individual excellence — gives this description of team building:

  “When I first assemble the platoon I ask each person to tell me what activities he is mostly drawn to. One will say sharpshooting. One will say radio. One will say explosives. And so on. I’ll go around the whole group, taking notes. Then, when I build each squad, I try to assign each person to the role he said he was drawn to. Obviously you won’t get a perfect match. And obviously every soldier will be required to learn every role on the platoon — we might lose a man in battle, and every soldier must be able to step in. But you’ve got to start by assigning the right duties to the right soldier. If you get that wrong, your platoon will falter in combat.”

  Whereas conventional wisdom views individual specialization as the antithesis of teamwork, great managers see it as the founding principle.

  If individual positioning is so important, then at the heart of a great team there must be an I. There must be lots of strong, distinct I’s. There must be individuals who know themselves well enough to pick the right roles and to feel comfortable in them most of the time. If one individual joins the team with little understanding of his own strengths and weaknesses, then he will drag the entire team down with his poor performance and his vague yearnings to switch roles. Self-aware individuals — strong I’s — are the building blocks of great teams.

  FIND AN ALTERNATIVE ROLE

  There are some people for whom nothing works. You trip every trigger imaginable. You train. You find partners. You buy Rolodexes, teach spell check, and cut through office walls. But nothing work
s.

  Faced with this situation, you have little choice. You have to find this employee an alternative role. You have to move him out. Sometimes the only way to cure a bad relationship is to get out of it. Similarly, sometimes the only way to cure poor performance is to get the performer out of that role.

  How do you know if you are at that point? You will never know for sure. But the best managers offer this advice:

  You will have to manage around the weaknesses of each and every employee. But if, with one particular employee, you find yourself spending most of your time managing around weaknesses, then know that you have made a casting error. At this point it is time to fix the casting error and to stop trying to fix the person.

  CHAPTER 6: The Fourth Key: Find the Right Fit

  * * *

  The Blind, Breathless Climb

  One Rung Doesn’t Necessarily Lead to Another

  Create Heroes in Every Role

  Three Stories and a New Career

  The Art of Tough Love

  The Blind, Breathless Climb

  “What’s wrong with the old career path?”

  Sooner or later every manager is asked the question “Where do I go from here?” The employee wants to grow. He wants to earn more money, to gain more prestige. He is bored, underutilized, deserves more responsibility. Whatever his reasons, the employee wants to move up and wants you to help.

  What should you tell him? Should you help him get promoted? Should you tell him to talk to Human Resources? Should you say that all you can do is put in a good word for him? What is the right answer?

  There is no right answer — any one of these answers might be the right one, depending on the situation. However, there is a right way to approach this question — namely, help each person find the right fit. Help each person find roles that ask him to do more and more of what he is naturally wired to do. Help each person find roles where her unique combination of strengths — her skills, knowledge, and talents — match the distinct demands of the role.

  For one employee, this might mean promotion to a supervisor role. For another employee, this might mean termination. For another, it might mean encouraging him to grow within his current role. For yet another, it might mean moving her back into her previous role. These are very different answers, some of which might be decidedly unpopular with the employee. Nonetheless, no matter how bitter the pill, great managers stick to their goal: Regardless of what the employee wants, the manager’s responsibility is to steer the employee toward roles where the employee has the greatest chance of success.

  On paper this sounds straightforward; but as you can imagine, it proves to be a great deal more challenging in the real world. This is primarily because, in the real world, conventional wisdom persuades most of us that the right answer to the question “Where do I go from here?” is “Up.”

  Careers, conventional wisdom advises, should follow a prescribed path: You begin in a lowly individual contributor role. You gain some expertise and so are promoted to a slightly more stretching, slightly less menial individual contributor role. Next you are promoted to supervise other individual contributors. Then, blessed with good performance, good fortune, and good contacts, you climb up and up, until you can barely remember what the individual contributors do at all.

  In 1969, in his book, The Peter Principle, Laurence Peter warned us that if we followed this path without question, we would wind up promoting each person to his level of incompetence. It was true then. It is true now. Unfortunately, in the intervening years we haven’t succeeded in changing very much. We still think that the most creative way to reward excellence in a role is to promote the person out of it. We still tie pay, perks, and titles to a rung on the ladder: the higher the rung, the greater the pay, the better the perks, the grander the title. Every signal we send tells the employee to look onward and upward. “Don’t stay in your current role for too long,” we advise. “It looks bad on the résumé. Keep pressing, pushing, stretching to take that next step. It’s the only way to get ahead. It’s the only way to get respect.”

  These signals, although well-intended, place every employee in an extremely precarious position. To earn respect, he knows he must climb. And as he takes each step, he sees that the company is burning the rungs behind him. He cannot retrace his steps, not without being tarred with the failure brush. So he continues his blind, breathless climb to the top, and sooner or later he overreaches. Sooner or later he steps into the wrong role. And there he is trapped. Unwilling to go back, unable to climb up, he clings to his rung until, finally, the company pushes him off.

  A RUNG TOO FAR

  Marc C. was pushed. He was pushed off, down, and out. Standing on Pennsylvania Avenue, Marc gazed up at the White House and tried to piece together what had happened.

  Two years earlier he had still been living out of his suitcase. As the leading foreign correspondent for a European television station, one week he would find himself in Zaire covering the fall of a dictator, and the next week he would turn up in Chechnya to record the retreat of rebel insurgents. Wherever he went, everyone acknowledged Marc as the master. Somehow he was able to find the center of all the anger and the confusion and extract some meaning from the madness. When armies shelled marketplaces, or snipers picked off civilians on their walk to work, Marc would be found at the scene explaining what happened, why it happened, and what it all meant. To his viewers he was a calming, authoritative presence. They trusted him. So no one was surprised when he was posted to Jerusalem.

  On the foreign correspondents’ ladder, Washington is the top rung. It has the most prestige, the most money, and, important, the most air time. It is the posting everyone wants. But if Washington is number one, then Jerusalem runs a close second. More interesting than the European parliament in Brussels, more important than post-cold war Moscow, Jerusalem is one of the few places where local clashes have such global significance. It is a foreign correspondent’s dream.

  In Jerusalem Marc refined his talents. Israel is a small country, and Marc was able to report live from the scene no matter where the action erupted. Israeli settlers protesting the latest peace accords? Marc would be in their midst, marching with them, shouting his report over the noise of the crowd. Palestinian youths hurling paving stones at Israeli troops? Marc would be filmed in one of the narrow side streets, explaining the reasons for their anger simply and clearly. In the overheated climate of the Middle East, Marc became the cool voice of reason.

  A year later his European managers offered him the top rung. They offered him the money, the prestige, and the exposure of Washington. Marc loved what he was doing, but there was no way he was going to turn this down. It was the plum job of all reporting assignments. He willingly unpacked his suitcases for the last time and settled in to become the newest, best Washington bureau chief. And very quickly things started to fall apart.

  Outside of the occasional titillating scandal, not much happens in Washington — at least not during his tenure. Yes, there might be a presidential veto one week and a filibuster the next, but back in Europe few understand these events and even fewer care. Most of the action is dry and repetitious, important but uninteresting. The Washington bureau chief’s role is to take the tedious business of politics and inject it with heroes and villains, daring triumphs and crushing defeats. His job is to spice things up.

  And Marc couldn’t do it. He was brilliant at giving real-life drama a political context. But he was terrible at giving politics the sheen of real-life drama. Marc was surefooted in the aftermath of a mortar attack. But in a town where a State of the Union address was big news, he didn’t know what to do. The stories went begging. His reporting became bland. He was lost.

  Back in Europe, his audience turned away. His European managers couldn’t put their finger on it, but they noticed the difference. They stuck with him for a while — he deserved that much — and then they pulled the plug. In s
ix months the hero of Jerusalem had shriveled into the embarrassment in Washington. He was removed.

  Marc’s role might seem quite exotic, but his fate is commonplace. In his desire to grow and to please his managers, he kept climbing the ladder until, one day, he climbed one rung too far. Sadly, this happens all the time. In order to gain money, title, and respect, teachers must become administrators. Managers must reach for leadership. Nurses must aspire to be nurse supervisors. Craftsmen must yearn to be managers of other craftsmen. And reporters must yearn to be bureau chiefs. In most companies Marc’s fate awaits us all.

  Laurence Peter was right. Most employees are promoted to their level of incompetence. It’s inevitable. It’s built into the system.

  IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY

  This system is flawed, for it is built on three false assumptions.

  The first fallacy is that each rung on the ladder represents a slightly more complex version of the previous rung. Consequently, if a person excelled on one rung on the ladder, it is a sure sign that with just a little more training, he will be able to repeat his success on the rung above. The best managers reject this. They know that one rung doesn’t necessarily lead to another.

  Second, the conventional career path is condemned to create conflict. By limiting prestige to those few rungs high up on the ladder, it tempts every employee, even the most self-aware, to try to clamber onto the next rung. Each rung is a competition, and since there are fewer rungs than there are employees, each competition generates many more losers than winners. Great managers have a better idea. Why not resolve the conflict by making prestige more available? Why not carve out alternative career paths by conveying meaningful prestige on every role performed at excellence? Why not create heroes in every role?