Dear Learners,
A Marcus Buckingham teaches CEOs how to get the most out of their people
and their organizations. His first lesson: Forget everything you think you
know about being a leader. ( Polly LaBarre)
Because I said (explicated -at gut level) just that quite recently, I
found this number cruncher's expose interesting, to say the least...
'There is a noble promise at the heart of the new world of business:
Everyone has the right to meaningful work, and people who do meaningful
work create the most value in the marketplace. Even as the talent wars
have fizzled into pink-slip parties, few senior executives would dispute
the vital importance of finding, engaging, and developing the best people.
Ask any CEO, "What's your company's most precious asset?" Without
hesitation, the answer will be, "Our people." Ask the same CEO, "What's
the primary source of your competitive advantage?" Chances are, the reply
will be, "Our unique culture." This kind of talk drives Marcus Buckingham
nuts. It's not that he disagrees with the sentiments -- he's spent his
15-year career as a pioneering researcher and a global-practice leader at
the Gallup Organization, making the link between people, their
performance, and business results. What troubles him is the lack of rigor
behind the rhetoric. "There's a juicy irony here," says the 35-year-old
Cambridge-educated Brit. "You won't find a CEO who doesn't talk about a
'powerful culture' as a source of competitive advantage. At the same time,
you'd be hard-pressed to find a CEO who has much of a clue about the
strength of that culture. The corporate world is appallingly bad at
capitalizing on the strengths of its people."
His mission, as he describes it, sounds almost quaint: "to create a better
marriage between the dreams of workers and the drive of companies to win."
His methodology is anything but quaint. Buckingham has led an effort inside
Gallup to crunch three decades' worth of data on worker attitudes into
actionable insights on human performance and productivity. First, he and his
team tapped into a database of more than 1 million Gallup surveys that
focused on workers from around the world. Although these workers had been
asked many questions, there was one big question behind the interviews: "What
does a strong and vibrant workplace look like?" Buckingham eventually
distilled 12 core issues ( called the "Q12" in Gallup-speak ) that represent
a simple barometer of the strength of any work unit.
Next, Buckingham's team ran massive number-crunching studies to analyze how
answers to the Q12 shaped hard-core business results. The link between people
and performance was vivid. The most "engaged" workplaces ( those in the top
25% of Q12 scores ) were 50% more likely to have lower (staff?) turnover, 56%
more likely to have higher-than-average customer loyalty, 38% more likely to
have above-average productivity, and 27% more likely to report higher
profitability.
Buckingham and his colleagues made one other finding that startled them:
There was more variation in Q12 scores within companies than between
companies. That is, in each of the more than 200 organizations that he
analyzed, Buckingham found some of the most-engaged groups and some of the
least-engaged groups. His conclusion: There is no such thing as a corporate
culture. Companies are made up of many cultures, the strengths and weaknesses
of which are a result of local conditions.
"It's staggering," he says. "Few of the CEOs in our study could say which
work units in their company were engaged effectively and which weren't. They
didn't know where their culture was strong and where it was weak, whether it
was getting better or getting worse -- or how much this variation was
costing."
I will not embarrass any luminary reading here by saying who it was, but
someone pretty esteemed in the world of LO;-) once offered the advice that
most corporation's CEO's and Executive Directors could go on a three year
extended leave, shareholders could elect to put monkeys in the board room to
look after the business and the results wouldn't show in the bottom line
accounts for five years;-) (I may have turned the figures a twiddle or two).
You know, the Metropolitan police in London did random checks on ten and
twenty pound 'cash notes' in and around the City of London two years ago,
they found that nearly all were impregnated with cocaine...and Mr Greenspan
thinks that something as elusive as 'confidence' is what maintains 'stock'
superiority and hence our security in a tumbling world...I do hope not...but
somehow it's fitting. Just look at a Picasso portrait. Way out, way ahead
Pablo...
Well Mr. Buckingham, with information like yours (knot knowledge;-) you
should make a fortune...and you may...(he is;-) but nothing's going to
change because, in the end, I suspect that the connections are not going
to be 'made' because they will ring all the numbers in your 'directory'
and still find a grinning ape staring back at them...eh! Mr Darwin?
Mr Campbell! Mr Campbell!! Where are you?...it's time to go back into your
chamber now for another session of...Mr Campbell....
Love,
Andrew
Mr. Andrew Campbell
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