Book SummaryNine Lies About Work, by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Nine Lies About Work

Published in 2019, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World explains why many of our workplace norms and practices are flawed and, thus, prevent people and organizations from flourishing. Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall argue that to build a thriving organization, today’s leader should be a freethinking leader, one who questions established systems and beliefs and who values individuality over conformity.

Buckingham is the best-selling author of First, Break All the Rules. He worked at the Gallup Organization, a US analytics and advisory company, before starting his own coaching and software company. Co-author Goodall has first-hand leadership experience at large organizations—he’s a senior vice president at Cisco Systems and previously oversaw leadership development at...

Nine Lies About Work Summary Lies About Organizations

The typical organization has rules and processes that dictate how to evaluate, train, retain, pay, and promote employees. However, Buckingham and Goodall argue that these pervasive systems are lies, based on outdated or faulty beliefs. As a...

Nine Lies About Work Summary Lie #1: Corporate Culture Is Important

According to Buckingham and Goodall, organizations emphasize building a strong corporate culture, because they believe that it can attract and retain employees. They offer perks and implement policies that reinforce the culture they want to cultivate—for example, they offer free lunches to demonstrate that they’re people-centric or install solar panels to send the message that they’re eco-conscious.

(Shortform note: People are so fascinated by corporate culture and its connection with success that the Netflix Culture Deck, made public in 2009, was a Silicon Valley sensation. It was viewed 15 million times by 2017 and garnered praise from the likes of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. The deck described the company’s culture of “freedom and responsibility,” which Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings would later detail in No Rules Rules.)

However,...

Nine Lies About Work Summary Lie #2: Planning Leads to Success

The second lie that’s pervasive in organizations is that planning leads to success. The authors write that, in a typical company, senior leadership comes up with a strategic plan and then communicates it to their direct reports. The message is then passed down until it reaches your team, which makes its own plans based on the directives from the higher-ups.

While the authors concede that planning allows senior leaders to gain a better understanding of the challenges the company is facing, plans are largely ineffective because the senior leaders who make them tend to be out of touch with the real world. They aren’t exposed to the daily issues that your team faces, so their plans are based on assumptions and second-hand information about things that have already happened. As a result, their plans quickly become obsolete and irrelevant to the team tasked to implement them.

(Shortform note: Planning from the top-down can be such a long, drawn-out process involving out-of-touch senior leaders that companies sometimes end up acting too late or launching ill-considered projects. Case in point: In 1955, [Ford planned to introduce a medium-priced...

Nine Lies About Work Summary Lie #3: Dictating Company Goals Stimulates Performance

The third lie has the same fundamental issue as Lie #2: that orders dictated from above are rarely effective. This time, Buckingham and Goodall argue that company-imposed goals—strategic, operational, people-related, and so on—are meaningless, because they don’t reflect people’s day-to-day work.

(Shortform note: Jerry Porras and Jim Collins offer evidence to the contrary, saying that goals are one of the keys to a company’s enduring success. In Built to Last, they write that mammoth companies like Boeing and Procter & Gamble commit to “big hairy audacious goals” (BHAGs)—precise goals that are easy to understand, push the company out of its comfort zone, reinforce the company’s core philosophy, and take at least a decade to achieve. For such goals to work, the authors say that companies have to make them institutional, building them into the organization and making them exciting enough to maintain...

Nine Lies About Work Summary Lie #4: Performance Appraisal Systems Are Objective

The fourth lie (Lie #6 in the book) that’s pervasive in organizations is that performance ratings are objective. According to the authors, companies use these systems to grade people on specific competencies (such as “execution” and “initiative”), determine the top performers, and reward them accordingly. Companies also use these systems to pinpoint the low performers who will then be put on a performance improvement plan and eventually let go.

However, the authors state that these systems are flawed because of the human element: Raters can’t objectively rate other people’s competencies. Even with a numerical rating system, raters base their decisions on subjective rating scales (for example, two managers can have different ideas of what “collaborative” means) and unconscious biases, resulting in inconsistencies...

Nine Lies About Work Summary Lies About People

The previous set of lies uncovered the flawed systems and processes at organizations: an emphasis on corporate culture, a top-down approach to planning and goal-setting, and a reliance on seemingly objective performance...

Nine Lies About Work Summary Lie #5: People Should Work on Their Weaknesses

In the fifth lie (Lie #4 in the book), the authors describe how employees are typically evaluated on their core competencies, or specific skills required for the job. Those who are proficient at most or all of the competencies are given opportunities for advancement. Meanwhile, those who demonstrate weakness in some areas are held back from promotion, even if they have specific (though limited) strengths. These employees are then required to work on their weaknesses so that they become more well-rounded and, thus, have a chance to move up the ranks. However, the authors argue that focusing on improving weaknesses in this way erroneously equates excellence with well-roundedness.

(Shortform note: The authors write that well-roundedness isn’t something to strive for, but David Epstein champions its merits. In Range, he argues that generalists fare better than specialists in the modern world. This is because generalists can more easily pivot to keep up with rapidly changing times, while [specialists have fewer transferable...

Nine Lies About Work Summary Lie #6: “High-Potential” People Will Perform Better in the Long Run

Lie #6 (Lie #7 in the book) shows how one lie can build on another lie to create an unfair, inefficient system.

In Lie #4, we discussed how companies use performance appraisal systems to gauge employees’ competencies. From there, well-rounded team members—those who are proficient at more skills—are classified as “high potential,” while team members who exhibit weaknesses are classified as “low potential.” The authors explain that companies use this segregation as a shortcut to gauge which employees to invest in. They reason that high-potential employees, who make up about 15% of employees, will give the highest returns, so they should be rewarded with more opportunities such as training, promotions, and pay increases compared to their low-potential peers.

However, the authors argue that since performance appraisals are flawed, then the practice of classifying employees as high potential and low potential based on those appraisals is also flawed. To Buckingham and Goodall, “potential” is an abstract concept that means nothing more than the ability to learn and grow, which means that everyone has potential. Furthermore, each individual learns and grows in different areas,...

Nine Lies About Work Summary Lie #7: Corrective Feedback Leads to Better Performance

As Lie #5 reveals, leaders traditionally believe that working on weaknesses leads to excellence. This means that they focus on giving team members corrective feedback to help them improve their performance. However, in this lie (Lie #5 in the book), the authors contend that negative, corrective feedback puts people on the defensive by activating their fight-or-flight response, which inhibits learning. While research suggests that negative feedback is 40 times more effective than giving no feedback at all, the authors say that delivering positive attention is much more powerful.

(Shortform note: Buckingham and Goodall address the feedback fallacy in an article for the Harvard Business Review. However, in response to this article, other experts argued that: 1) The fight-or-flight response is temporary, and recipients become more receptive to the feedback...

Nine Lies About Work Summary Lie #8: Work-Life Balance Leads to Fulfillment

Another pervasive lie at work is that people should strive to attain work-life balance—to toil enough so that we can have the money to support the people and the activities we love, but not too much that we burn out. Buckingham and Goodall argue that this mindset is flawed because it implies that work drains our energy and is therefore bad, while life outside of work replenishes our energy and is therefore good.

(Shortform note: Experts contend that work itself may not drain our energy, but rather three problems at the organizational level: 1) excessive collaboration, 2) limited time-management abilities, and 3) the tendency to overload the most capable workers. Streamlining organizational structures and routines can keep employees from multitasking, help conserve their energy for the most productive tasks, and prevent burnout.)

The Truth: Doing What You Love Leads to Fulfillment

The authors say that you should change your mindset from seeking work-life balance to deliberately doing work that you love over work that you hate. This means that you...

Nine Lies About Work Summary Lie #9: Strong Leaders Follow a Leadership Formula

The last lie that the authors address is that strong leaders possess a common set of attributes, including being inspirational, strategic, and decisive. Employees who’ve shown that they have these attributes and have demonstrated well-roundedness and high potential are typically put on the fast track to leadership roles. However, the authors say that some of the greatest leaders actually lack some of the textbook leadership traits—for example, Apple’s Steve Jobs was driven, innovative, and focused, but he was also known to be impatient, petulant, and controlling. On top of that, they write that no two leaders lead the same way.

(Shortform note: Leaders may lack some abilities and qualities, but Jerry Porras and Jim Collins write in *[Built to...

Shortform Exercise: Find More Fulfillment at Work

Buckingham and Goodall write that you should forget about work-life balance and find more fulfillment in your work by doing more of the tasks that you love.

List your work tasks in the past week and divide them into two categories: what you loved (something you looked forward to and that energized you) and what you hated (something you put off doing or passed on to someone else).