NINE LIES ABOUT WORK: A FREETHINKING LEADER’S GUIDE TO THE REAL WORLD BY ASHLEY GOODALL AND MARCUS BUCKINGHAM
BOOK REVIEWS BY BINOD
BINOD’S RATING: 8/10
Easily one of the best books I’ve read. Ever. Because I could relate so much to it.
In the early part of my career I spent a total of five years in the Big 5 audit firms.
One firm in particular stood out for many reasons. I hated the dreaded evaluations after each audit. Called Job Evaluation Forms (JEFs), these were essentially tools to deny promotion or increments, or worse, to fire people based on very subjective ratings. To “inspire” us, detailed Leadership Competency Frameworks were revealed to us and we in our naivety duly knelt and worshipped. The firm’s stated culture never percolated down to us flunkeys who saw a culture of tight deadlines, tighter budgets, crap clients and incompetent jerks as managers and partners. We youngsters all felt this was the “norm” and that we needed to adjust.
There was a pervasive stink in the air, a mix of ignorance, fear, hopelessness and cynicism. No one has written with credibility and conviction about what sucked in the world of HR till this book came along.
Let’s take some concepts which are taken as truths at work globally.
You crave feedback.
Your organization's culture is the key to its success.
Strategic planning is essential.
Your competencies should be measured and your weaknesses remedied.
Leadership is a thing.
Etc.
These may sound like basic truths. But actually, they're lies.
As Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall show in this provocative, inspiring book, there are some big lies--distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking--that we encounter every time we show up for work. Nine lies, to be exact.
Why lies? Look at the evidence of the real world, and you find that these practices are neither reflective of what we know about human performance, nor producing the results we are after.
They cause dysfunction and frustration, ultimately resulting in workplaces that are a pale shadow of what they could be.
But why and how did we get here? Well, the lies are the result of attempts to tidy up the messiness of life, to assert control over the teeming diversity in any organization by focusing on a uniform culture, on adherence to the plan, on telling people to conform to a standard list of competencies so that they’re well-rounded, and on giving people feedback on what they lack. The lies emerge from a desire for conformity, and conformity is attractive; hence the lies persist. But in conformity, we lose the very thing we all want—the sparks of human distinctiveness that lead to great and productive work.
It reminds me of another big area which has caused many global disasters and which is in a similar quandary as a result of trying to oversimplify and standardize human behavior; the pseudo science of Economics.
So, what are the nine lies?
#1: People care which company they work for
#2: The best plan wins
#3: The best companies cascade goals
#4: The best people are well-rounded
#5: People need feedback
#6: People can reliably rate other people
#7: People have potential
#8: Work-life balance matters most
#9: Leadership is a thing
They’re the fake news of work, and we’re suffering, today, because of them.
Going to back to my experience with feedback, the book brilliantly explains why it did not and will never work. First, it puts the brain into flight-or-fight mode, which impairs learning rather than helping it. Second, it imagines that learning is a question of telling you what you can’t do, rather than helping you understand in more detail what you can. And third, it presumes that excellence is the same for everyone, so we can give you feedback on how you fall short of it, whereas the excellence is profoundly different for each of us.
Nine Lies is utterly readable, often entertaining, and carefully reasoned and argued using some unusual real-world examples. Equally importantly, I hope you feel vindicated and liberated.
A must read.