How to Win As a Manager
Teacher
: Your strength is how seriously you take my learning. And since you take it so seriously, since you pay it so much attention, I am inspired to do the same.
• You make yourself available. I never feel as if I’m intruding or taking too much of your time. You seem genuinely to perk up when I enter your office to ask for guidance or insight.
• I actually look forward to my performance reviews with you. I know you’ve actively monitored my progress, and I know that you’ll be creative in finding ways to help me elevate my performance to the next level.
• You reward with opportunity. If I’ve achieved something important, I can count on you to present me with a special project or mission to augment my skills. This focus on my growth shows me that you really care about my long-term development and ultimately, fulfillment.
• You individualize. I know that you support each of us differently, teach and reward us in distinct ways, and I don’t mind. I see the collective difference that it makes. Find obvious opportunities, such as a potluck lunch where we all have to bring in our favorite dish, for me to reveal more of who I am.
How to Win in Sales
Teacher
: Your strength is your understanding. Your rich perspective of how each client is unique enables you to adapt your offering to serve them better.
• Give me all your numbers. Tell me I can call you at any time, for any reason. You put the priorities of others above your own. You need to feel needed. This prompts you to drop everything to answer a question or explain an offering. Through your genuine attention, you make me feel important and valued.
• One of your gifts in sales is that you don’t need to have all the answers. You want to tell me what you know and then allow me to draw my own conclusions. I admire and appreciate this.
• As a Teacher you are also a natural learner. Learn from me. Ask me to share what I know. Let me speak about my world. I will sense that you are genuinely intrigued and so I will be drawn to you.
• You win through a highly individualized sales approach. As such, you will naturally thrive in sales positions where you don’t lead with your product, but instead where you have to evaluate thoroughly my need and then piece together a customized offering. The more that customization is the key to success, the more successful you will be.
• While your sales style fosters lasting business relationships, at times you may find that your approach requires a longer sales cycle to close. You may want to partner with an Influencer to initiate a new sales relationship or, failing this, focus on positions that support a longer sales cycle.
• You thrill in demonstrating all the cool features of the product. I can tell that you’re not simply going through the motions but that you’re genuinely committed to ensuring that I learn all the different ways the product can help me. Just notice when your enthusiasm has outlasted my interest.
How to Win in Client Service
Teacher
: Your strength is that you help me discover something new about my situation.
• Always seek to find opportunities to teach me. Say, “You’re using X, but Y will work better for you. Here’s why . . .”
• If there is a shortcut or a work-around for an issue I’m having, show it to me. When you have advice on how I might use my product or service more effectively or efficiently, share it. This learning breeds loyalty.
• Ask lots of questions to discover my level of expertise with the product, and then teach from there. Reassure me that whatever knowledge I have is a perfectly good place to start. This will keep me from feeling naïve.
• Give me an opportunity to show my knowledge. I’m more apt to listen and learn once you’ve acknowledged my expertise.
• Share your expertise regularly. Look for ways to stay in contact with me, to inform me of product changes, new offerings, and opportunities to learn more about what I’ve purchased from you. A monthly newsletter, or a weekly blog, for example.
• You leave me feeling as if I’m better off after interacting with you. I am more knowledgeable and more confident. Most importantly, I know I have a trusted resource to call if I run into future issues.
CHAPTER 4
The Three
Strengths Principles
Even with the help of tools such as StandOut it can be quite the challenge to build your strengths for a lifetime.
Sure, you have innate genius. Everybody does. This word “genius” might strike you as a bit overblown, but only because
genius
gets tossed around pretty cavalierly these days. Everyone from the latest disposable pop star to a chef who knows how to make
crème brulée
is dubbed with the term. In fact, if you do a search for “Marcus Buckingham is a genius,” you’ll get . . . well, you won’t get any hits at all. But let’s not dwell on that. What I’m getting at is simply that the word
genius
has become diluted and has evolved, as many words do, quite far from its original meaning.
Genius
derives from the Latin
gignere
, meaning “to beget,” and its original sense in English described a guardian spirit present with a person from birth—something like a guardian angel. Many of us in the twenty-first century may not think a lot about guardian spirits, but the word changed over time to take on the broader sense of a person’s natural, inherited abilities. And in this sense, we do all have a genius.
I’ve seen it in my own kids. Okay, I didn’t actually see any spirits hovering over my daughter Lilia when she was born, but I have seen her genius in action literally from her first words. Lilia started talking later than most children do, but when she did start, she spoke in complete sentences. One of her first utterances, as she lay there, a sweet-natured, wide-eyed, three-year-old, looking up at her mom, was this: “Mommy, that’s a lovely necklace.”
Of all the possible sentences she could have picked, why did she pick that one? No simple “More!” or “Stop!” for her, no sir. She chose to compliment her mother’s accessories. And I think I know why.
You might expect me to say that she went on to become a child prodigy fashion designer, or that she was reading at a fifth-grade level in the first grade. Well, I suppose Lilia is as interested in clothes as any young girl, but she doesn’t have any designs ready to show in Milan. And I think she’s plenty bright, but it’s not as if she’s already parsing Shakespearean iambic pentameters in kindergarten.
No, what Lilia was showing us with that first sentence was a precocious tendency toward something psychologists call “reciprocal altruism.” That is to say, she was aware that goodwill is harvestable: if you sow it now, you may be able to reap it in the future. So when she complimented Mommy on her necklace, she realized that by saying something nice right now, later on Mommy might be nice to her in return. We didn’t teach her this—and if she didn’t possess it, I have no idea how we would. Lilia just instinctively understands reciprocal altruism, and she uses it to get people to do what she wants them to do.
That may sound cynical on her part, but the thing is, Lilia doesn’t
know
she’s doing it. She just does it, naturally. It’s part of her genius. And in ways far beyond her conscious understanding it guides her actions and pushes her to do things that most other kids don’t. At school, for example, Lilia has deployed this genius to finagle her way into her schoolmates’ hearts. What should be a twenty-second walk from the assembly hall to her classroom routinely takes ten minutes as fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, who shouldn’t even know she exists, scoop her up into a smoochy “Lilia!” hug, as she squeals with delight. After being at the school only a couple of months, she’d already been sowing goodwill. She can’t stop herself.
At her most recent parent-teacher conference, Lilia’s teacher showed us the results of a class project in which the children had set goals for the upcoming semester (excellent training for the future denizens of corporate America). The first goal seemed worthy enough: “Learn to write better” (misspelled). All right, that’s to do with knowledge. We can work on that. No real worries here. Move along to the next one.
The second goal was more alarming: “Stop fooling the teachers.” Excuse me? Stop fooling the teachers? Since when do children this young have to be reminded not to manipulate their teachers? Have I missed something? Maybe it’s a generational thing? Perhaps many of the other children had that on their list of goals as well? How many—ah, none. Okay, then. Apparently our child is unique.
If I needed confirmation that not every child approaches life the same way Lilia does, I got it that night from my son, Jack. I shared the story of Lilia’s goals with him—
mea culpa
. Not the wisest parenting move, I now realize, expecting him to chuckle with me when I got to the “stop fooling the teachers” part. There were no chuckles. Not even a grin.
“You can fool the teachers?” he asked, baffled.
“Er, no,” I fumbled. “I just meant that . . .” I stopped. I could see I’d lost him. He was trying to recalibrate his understanding of a universe in which teachers could actually be fooled. His confusion was less “
How
do you do that?” than “
Why
would you even want to do that?”
Such behavior in my five-year-old is amusing, even kind of adorable. But you can see how this same genius for reciprocal altruism that makes her schoolmates love her might get her into trouble down the line. She’s not too young to
have
this genius, but she’s still too young to channel it intentionally and put it to good use. She could turn out to be very effective at influencing people in sales, say, or as a leader. But if she’s not conscious and careful about what she’s doing, she could easily squander this gift and turn into a manipulative person.
Of course, one would hope that we adults are all conscious and intentional enough that we recognize our genius for what it is, and channel it appropriately.
But what if we’re not?
What if we’re all, when it comes to our genius, our unique combination of strengths, the equivalent of five-year-olds— using our genius, if at all, haphazardly and without any real sense of purpose and direction?
Obviously I don’t mean to compare you to a five-year-old. My point is simply that despite the fact that your genius—your particular combination of strengths—is deeply a part of who you are, it is exceedingly challenging to understand it, take control of it, and make it work for you.
The most basic challenge, of course, is that it’s hard to see your own uniqueness. As I saw with Lilia, your strengths are a part of you whether you’re conscious of them or not. And because they’re so woven into the fabric of who you are, they can actually be quite difficult to pinpoint. Certain things come so naturally to you that you don’t see your ability to do them as unique; you just think it’s you. Or rather, you don’t even think anything. You just do what you do because it comes to you too easily to require any analysis. It’s not that you don’t value your uniqueness; it’s that you don’t
see
it. You may even assume that your abilities are no big deal because everybody must have them.
Which points to a second challenge: other people don’t care what makes you unique. As oblivious as we can be to our own strengths, it’s even easier to ignore the particular and unique strengths of others. We assume that if we have a talent or inherent ability, everybody else does too. Or if we’re not naturally drawn to doing something, we find it hard to understand why anybody else would be.
No one else is worrying about what makes you unique. Nobody is dedicated to identifying that special cluster of talents you have. School doesn’t do it—they want to make sure that everybody learns what everybody is supposed to learn. Work doesn’t do it—they’re most concerned about what needs to get done. Everybody in your life has expectations and demands that don’t necessarily have any direct connection to your strengths. It makes for a lot of background noise.
If you were an engineer, you might say that your life has a terrible signal-to-noise ratio. Even if you felt impelled to ask yourself, “What is my genius? What am I drawn to do naturally? What makes me who I am?” you are surrounded by crowds of people advising you to “try this” and “you have to do it this way” and “be like that,” drowning out that impulse.