Nine Lies About Work

As you read, you’ll realize that these Nine Lies have taken hold because each satisfies the organization’s need for control. Large organizations are complex places, and a strong and understandable instinct of their leaders is to seek simplicity and order—not least because this makes it easier to persuade themselves and their stakeholders that they are moving toward their objectives. But the desire for simplicity easily shades into a desire for conformity, and before long this conformity threatens to extinguish individuality. Before we know it, the particular talents and interests of each person are seen as inconveniences, and the organization comes to treat its people as essentially interchangeable.

You’ll see, as well, that the strongest force pushing back against the lies, and the force that we all seek to harness in our lives, is the power of our own individuality—that the true power of human nature is that each human’s nature is unique, and that expressing this through our work is an act, ultimately, of love.

We came to think of our audience not as the new leader but as the freethinking leader. A leader who embraces a world in which the weird uniqueness of each individual is seen not as a flaw to be ground down but as a mess worth engaging with, the raw material for all healthy, ethical, thriving organizations; a leader who rejects dogma and instead seeks out evidence; who values emergent patterns above received wisdom; who thrills to the power of teams; who puts faith in findings, not philosophy; and above all, a leader who knows that the only way to make the world better tomorrow is to have the courage and the wit to face up to how it really is today.

These eight aspects, and these eight precisely worded items, validly predict sustained team performance:

1. I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company.

1. At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me.

1. In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values.

1. I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work.

1. My teammates have my back.

1. I know I will be recognized for excellent work.

1. I have great confidence in my company’s future.

1. In my work, I am always challenged to grow.

You might notice a few things about these items right away. First, the team members are not directly rating their team leader or their company on anything—they are rating only their own feelings and experiences.

And what more than two decades of research into teams and their leaders has to tell us is this: what distinguishes the best team leaders from the rest is their ability to meet these two categories of needs for the people on their teams. What we, as team members, want from you, our team leader, is firstly that you make us feel part of something bigger, that you show us how what we are doing together is important and meaningful; and secondly, that you make us feel that you can see us, and connect to us, and care about us, and challenge us, in a way that recognizes who we are as individuals. We ask you to give us this sense of universality—all of us together—and at the same time to recognize our own uniqueness; to magnify what we all share, and to lift up what is special about each of us. When you come to excel as a leader of a team it will be because you’ve successfully integrated these two quite distinct human needs.

We see similar patterns on all eight of the questions—we see, in other words, that when we zero in on the critical aspects of our experience at work, they vary more team-to-team than they do company-to-company. Any ideas—like the idea of culture—that rest on the assumption that our experience of a company is uniform, no matter where we sit, don’t hold up. Any ideas—again, like the idea of culture—that rest on the assumption that our experience will vary company to company are incomplete, because our experience will vary more within a company than between companies.

When people choose not to work somewhere, the somewhere isn’t a company, it’s a team. If we put you in a good team at a bad company, you’ll tend to hang around, but if we put you in a bad team at a good company, you won’t be there for long. The team is the sun, the moon, and the stars of your experience at work. As Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish writer and philosopher put it as far back as 1790, “To love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ, as it were) of public affections.”

When we push on the data, and examine closely its patterns and variations, we arrive at this conclusion: while people might care which company they join, they don’t care which company they work for. The truth is that, once there, people care which team they’re on.

Second, we know that if you do happen to work on a team you are twice as likely to score high on the eight engagement items, and that this trend linking engagement to teams extends to multiple teams—in fact, the most engaged group of workers across the working world are those who work on five distinct teams.

Third, just like Lisa, those team members who said they trusted their team leader were twelve times more likely to be fully engaged at work.

You now know that when a CEO sets out to build a great company, all she can do—and it’s a lot—is strive to build more and more teams like her company’s best teams.

Culture locates us in the world. It consists of stories we share with one another to breathe life into the empty vessel of “company.” But—and here’s the kicker—so powerful is our need for story, our need for communal sense making of the world, that we imagine that our company and its culture can explain our experience of work. And yet it can’t. So strong is our identification with our tribe that it’s hard for us to imagine that other people inside our company are having a completely different experience of “tribe” from ours. Yet they are—and these local team experiences have far more bearing on whether we stay in the tribe or leave it than do our tribal stories.

Whereas culture’s focus leans toward conformity to a common core of behaviors, teams focus on the opposite. Teams aren’t about sameness—they aren’t, at their best, about marching in lockstep. Instead they’re about unlocking what is unique about each of us, in the service of something shared. A team, at its finest, insists on the unique contribution of each of its members, and is the best way we humans have ever come up with of harnessing those distinctive contributions together in the service of something that none of us could do alone.

There are three things for you to do as a leader of a team. First, you should know the answers to the eight questions for your team, all the time. There are technologies available to help you do this, but the easiest place to start is to ask your team members, one person at a time. Whatever their answers are, you’ll always be smarter because of them, and you’ll always know you’re paying attention to something that matters.

Second, read on to understand more clearly how to build a great team, and how the lies you’ll encounter get in the way of that. Your role as team leader is the most important role in any company. And who your company chooses to make team leader is the most important decision it ever makes. You have by far the greatest influence on the distinctive local experience of your team. This is a weighty responsibility, but at least it’s yours. We want to help you step into it.

And third, when you’re next looking to join a company, don’t bother asking if it has a great culture—no one can tell you that in any real way.

Instead, ask what it does to build great teams.

At the same time, there is a yearning quality to all this planning. We are attempting to shape our future, and our plans can feel like scaffolding stretching out into the months ahead, upon which we’ll build our better world—their function is perhaps as much to reassure us as it is to make that world real. Plans give us certainty, or at least a bulwark against uncertainty.

Your people want and need to engage with the world that they’re really in, and to interact with the world as it really is. By harnessing them to a prefabricated plan, you’re not only constraining your people but, quite possibly, also revealing how out of touch with reality you are.

It wasn’t, in any sense, a planning system, acting slowly on stale and summarized information. Instead, it acted fast on current, raw, and detailed information. The RAF’s force multiplier was an intelligence system.

When we understand the characteristics of an intelligence system, as distinct from a planning system—accurate, real-time data, distributed broadly and quickly, and presented in detail so that team members can see and react to patterns in deciding for themselves what to do—we begin to see them everywhere. The Battle of Britain Bunker was an early example of what, today, we’d call a war room, a name that has grown from its literal roots to encompass more metaphorical uses.

What all of these things have in common is that they move information across an organization as fast as possible, and do so to empower immediate and responsive action. Their underlying assumption is that people are wise, and that if you can present them with accurate, real-time, reliable data about the real world in front of them, they’ll invariably make smart decisions. It’s not true that the best plan wins. It is true that the best intelligence wins.

What can you do as a team leader to create such an intelligence system for your team? First, liberate as much information as you possibly can. Think about all the sources of information you have, and make as many of them as possible available to your team, on demand. Planning systems constrain information to those who “need to know.” Intelligence systems don’t— they liberate as much information as possible, as fast as possible. So don’t worry too much at first about whether your team will understand the data or be able to make use of it. If you think the information will help your people gain a better understanding of their real world in real time, share it. ...

Second, watch carefully to see which data your people find useful. Don’t worry too much about making all this data simple or easy to consume, or about packaging it for people, or weaving it together to form a coherent story. The biggest challenge with data today isn’t making sense of it—most of us deal with complexity all the time, and are pretty good at figuring out what we need to know and where to find it. No, the biggest challenge with data today is making it accurate—sorting the signal from the noise. This is much harder, and much more valuable for our teams. So be extremely vigilant about accuracy; watch which information your people naturally gravitate toward; and then, over time, increase the volume, depth, and speed of precisely that sort of data.

Third, trust your people to make sense of the data. Planning systems take the interpretation of the data away from those on the front lines, and hand it off to a select few, who analyze it and decipher its patterns, and then construct and communicate the plan. Intelligence systems do precisely the opposite—because the “intelligence” in an intelligence system lies not in the select few, but instead in the emergent interpretive powers of all front-line team members. You are not the best sense maker. They are.

... and, critically, that the best people to make sense of information are the users of that information. And finally, that the best way to make sense of it was together.

So, each and every week these leaders have a brief check-in with each team member, during which they ask two simple questions:

What are your priorities this week?

How can I help?

They are not looking for a to-do list from the team member. They simply want to discuss the team member’s priorities, obstacles, and solutions in real time, while the work itself is ongoing.

Actually, the data reveals that checking in with your team members once a month is literally worse than useless. While team leaders who check in once a week see, on average, a 13 percent increase in team engagement, those who check in only once a month see a 5 percent decrease in engagement.

Each check-in, then, is a chance to offer a tip, or an idea that can help the team member overcome a real-world obstacle, or a suggestion for how to refine a particular skill. Check-ins can be short—ten to fifteen minutes —but that’s plenty of time to do a little real-time learning and coaching. And, like all good coaching, this has to be rooted in the specifics of the particular situation the team member is facing, the psychology she is bringing to it, the strengths she possesses, and the strategies she might already have tried. Again, the only way to surface these sorts of microdetails is to make sure that the conversations are frequent.

The more frequently and predictably you check in with your people or meet with your team—the more you offer your real-time attention to the reality of their work—the more performance and engagement you will get.

Span of control, in other words, isn’t a theoretical, one-size-fits-all thing. It’s a practical, function-of-team-leader’s-capacity-to-give-attention thing. Your span of control is your span of attention.

More often than not, however, low scores are a function not of bad intent but of poor information: team members don’t know how to support one another, because they don’t know what’s going on in enough detail to offer assistance. If they don’t know what one another is doing, how can each learn what the others truly value?

The more frequent sense-making rituals you establish on your team, the more information you will liberate, the more intelligence you will generate, and the more trust you will engender. Trust can never emerge from secrecy. Frequency creates safety.

So, companies invest in goals because goals are seen as a stimulator, a tracker, and an evaluator— and these three core functions of goals are why we spend so much time, energy, and money on them.

But these sales goals don’t beget more sales; they just anticipate what the sales will be. Sales goals are for performance prediction, not performance creation.

All goals, at least in the real world, function in this same way. You are either done, or you are not done: goal attainment is binary. You might want to set some intermediate goals along the way, and tick these goals off as they are done (or not done). But you won’t ever be able to assign a “percent complete” to your bigger goal as you tick off these mini-goals. And if you attempt to, or if your company asks you to, you will only be generating falsely precise data about the state of your progress.

Self-evaluation of goals isn’t really about evaluating your work, in other words: it’s a careful exercise in self-promotion and political positioning, in figuring out how much to reveal honestly and how much to couch carefully.

In the real world, there is work—stuff that you have to get done. In theory world, there are goals.

Work is ahead of you; goals are behind you—they’re your rear-view mirror.

Work is specific and detailed; goals are abstract.

Work changes fast; goals change slowly, or not at all.

Work makes you feel like you have agency; goals make you feel like a cog in a machine. Work makes you feel trusted; goals make you feel distrusted.

Work is work; goals aren’t.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Goals can be a force for good.

This, ultimately, is what goals are for: to help you manifest your values. They are your best mechanism for taking what’s inside of you and bringing it out where you and others can see it, and where you and they can benefit from it. Your goals define the dent you want to make in the world.

And this in turn means that the only criterion for what makes a good goal is that the person working toward it must set it for him- or herself, voluntarily. The only way a goal has any use at all is if it comes out of you as an expression of what you deem valuable.

The best companies don’t cascade goals; the best companies cascade meaning.

First, two of the eight questions behaved differently from the other six in one slice of the analysis. We weren’t sure what this meant, as it didn’t show up anywhere else. But later on, we ran our factor analysis, and then, all at once, there it was: a second factor appeared. It was made up of these two questions:

1. I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company.

1. I have great confidence in my company’s future.

So we began thinking of these as the “company” factor, and the remaining six questions as the “team” factor—and these two factors together as “engagement.

The best leaders realize that their people are wise, that they do not need to be coerced into alignment through yearly goal setting. These leaders strive instead to bring to life for their people the meaning and purpose of their work, the missions and contributions and methods that truly matter. These leaders know that in a team infused with such meaning, each person will be smart enough and driven enough to set goals voluntarily that manifest that meaning. It is shared meaning that creates alignment, and this alignment is emergent, not coerced. Whereas cascaded goals are a control mechanism, cascaded meaning is a release mechanism.

The Chick-fil-A franchise agreement does not work this way. As a Chick-fil-A franchisee you cannot own two thousand locations, no matter how much capital you have. Instead, you are allowed to own one. You can throw as much money at Chick-fil-A as you like, and it won’t be swayed into giving you any more locations: the franchise agreement, unchanged since Cathy devised it in the mid-1950s, forbids it. At its founding, Cathy decided that the mission of his company was less to sell chicken than it was to build leaders in local communities. Some of us might scoff at this, but Cathy stayed true to it, and devised his franchise agreement accordingly. He reasoned that if he was to grow local leaders, he would have to ensure that each person he brought on as a franchisee had a good reason to stay close to their local community. The best way to do that, he thought, was to keep these leaders in their stores, and the best way to ensure that, in turn, was to allow them only one. If you have only one, he figured, then you will be in this store all the time, staying close to your guests and close to your team members, knowing intimately the concerns of each—what the community is interested in and what it’s worried about. And over time you will respond to these needs and take action, and therefore, over time you will grow as a community leader.

To be specific, here are the three levers they used to such great effect.

The first is expressed values: what you write on the walls. We don’t mean that you should literally write out your “values.” Many leaders and many companies set about doing this and wind up with a list of generic values such as integrity, innovation, or, God forbid, teamwork—which are about as meaningful as Muzak—and then wonder why the whole exercise doesn’t seem to have made much difference. Instead, apply some creativity to how you want to bring your meaning to life for your people. Don’t tell them what you value, show them. What do you actually want them to see and to bump into at work?...

A second way to cascade meaning is through rituals… You already have rituals, whether they are conscious or unconscious, and these rituals—the things you do repeatedly—communicate to your people what is meaningful to you. If we followed you around for a week, we’d see them. Let’s say you have a meeting: What time do you show up? Are you five minutes early, or five minutes late? What are you wearing? Do you catch up with your team members about their personal lives or do you launch right into business? Who talks first? Do you allow your team members to speak, or do you cut them off? Does the meeting go long? Do you hold people back to finish things up?

These are all aspects of your rituals, and we, your team, see them, make sense of them, and draw our conclusions—whether you want us to or not. The question, then, isn’t whether you have rituals or not. The question is whether or not you are deliberate about what your rituals communicate…

The third lever is stories. Chick-fil-A makes an art of its storytelling through the operator profiles during Seminar. The company dedicates time to going out to each operator’s store, taking photos, and learning about his or her family and community, precisely so it can share these stories with the rest of the company.

Many of the best leaders are storytellers, not in the sense of writing a novel or a screenplay, but because they cascade meaning through vignettes, anecdotes, or stories told at meetings, on email chains, or on phone calls. They are always telling these little stories, because the stories that they choose to tell convey what they value. Stories make sense of the world: they are meaning, made human. That’s why religions tell stories about their messiah and the creation of the earth, and include parables within those stories that help us learn what is meaningful. And that’s why you can tell a lot about what matters to a team by the stories that the team members tell themselves.

You tell stories, whether you know it or not, and you’re telling them all the time, in every conversation and at every meeting. What stories are you telling, and what do they say about what you find meaningful?

As a leader, you are trying to unlock the judgment, the choices, the insight, and the creativity of your people. But, as we’ve seen in the last two chapters, the way we go about this doesn’t make much sense. We cloister information in our planning systems, and we cascade directives in our goal-setting systems. Instead, we should unlock information through intelligence systems, and cascade meaning through our expressed values, rituals, and stories. We should let our people know what’s going on in the world, and which hill we’re trying to take, and then we should trust them to figure out how to make a contribution. They will invariably make better and more authentic decisions than those derived from any planning system that cascades goals from on high.

A strength, on the other hand, is an “activity that makes you feel strong.” This sort of activity possesses for you certain definable qualities. Before you do it, you find yourself actively looking forward to doing it. While you are doing it, time seems to speed up, one moment blurring into the next. And after you’ve done it, while you may be tired and not quite ready to suit up and tackle it again, you nonetheless feel filled up, proud. It is this combination of three distinct feelings—positive anticipation beforehand, flow during, and fulfillment afterward—that makes a certain activity a strength. And it is this combination of feelings that produces in you the yearning to do the activity again and again, to practice it over and over, to thrill to the chance to do it just one more time. A strength is far more appetite than ability, and indeed it is the appetite ingredient that feeds the desire to keep working on it and that, in the end, produces the skill improvement necessary for excellent performance.

Instead, we are drawn to activities in which we find joy. We can’t always explain why, but some activities seem to contain ingredients that breathe life into us, that lift us up out of ourselves to reveal something finer, more resilient, and more creative. Each of us is different, of course, so each of us finds this joy in different activities, yet each of us knows this feeling. And when our work does indeed bring us this joyful ingredient, when we do indeed feel love, even, for what we do, then we are truly magnificent.

Of the eight conditions that are the signature of the highest-performing teams, there is one in particular that stands out —in study after study, irrespective of industry and irrespective of nationality—as the single most powerful predictor of a team’s productivity. It is each team member’s sense that “I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work.” No matter what kind of work your team is doing and no matter which part of the world you’re working in, your team will always be most productive when more team members feel delight and joy in what they do every day.

Somehow, on the best teams, the team leader is able not only to identify the strengths of each person but also to tweak roles and responsibilities so that team members, individually, feel that their work calls upon them to exercise their strengths on a daily basis. When a team leader does this, everything else—recognition, sense of mission, clarity of expectations—works better. But when a team leader doesn’t, nothing else that he or she tries, whether in the form of money or title or cheerleading or cajoling, can make up for it. Ongoing work-strengths fit is the master lever for high-performance teams: pull it, and everything else is elevated; fail to pull it, and everything else is diminished.

And because competencies are unmeasurable, it is impossible to prove or disprove the assertion that everyone who excels in a particular job possesses a particular set of competencies. It is equally impossible to show that people who acquired the competencies they lacked outperformed those who did not—that, in other words, well-rounded people are better. These two statements together are the foundation for most of what companies do to develop the talents of their people, yet each of them is unfalsifiable—you will find no academic papers in any peer-reviewed journal proving the necessity of possessing certain competencies, and no proof that acquiring the ones you lack nets you any increase in performance. Both of these assertions, despite the good intentions that created them, are conjured from thin air—and we can never know if they are correct.

... the research into high performance in any profession or endeavor reveals that excellence is idiosyncratic. The well-rounded high performer is a creature of theory world. In the real world each high performer is unique and distinct, and excels precisely because that person has understood his or her uniqueness and cultivated it intelligently.

Growth, it turns out, is actually a question not of figuring out how to gain ability where we lack it but of figuring out how to increase impact where we already have ability. And because our abilities are diverse, when you look at a great performance you see not diversity minimized but rather diversity magnified; not sameness but uniqueness.

After all, if we include “fluency in musical notation” in our list of musical skills, we’d knock out some big names. Frank Sinatra, for instance, couldn’t read a note. Neither can Elton John. And if we include “having two hands” in our list of required traits for a pianist, we’d be forced to exclude Paul Wittgenstein, a classical pianist who lost his right arm in the First World War, who subsequently commissioned piano concertos for the left hand from the leading composers of his day, and without whom we would not have masterpieces by Benjamin Britten, Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev, Richard Strauss, and Maurice Ravel.

But as they looked at the scores of the best managers, they found something subtly and wonderfully different. The high scores of the best managers moved around—one manager would do well on questions about creating a particular ambience in the pub, say, while another would excel on questions about inventory and budgeting. There was no pattern at all. Or, rather, there was just one big pattern—the only way to predict a manager’s performance was to look at his or her total score. They had found a list of ways in which managers could excel, and they could define excellence on each of these dimensions. Yet it seemed to make no difference which of these a candidate excelled at, as long as he or she excelled somewhere.

This was not an anomaly for the role of pub manager. Every single occupation the Gallup Organization studied—salesperson, teacher, doctor, housekeeper—displayed this same pattern: those who excelled did not share all the same abilities, but instead displayed unique combinations of different abilities, strongly. Excellence in the real world, in every profession, is idiosyncratic.

The strong instinct of most corporate leaders, faced with the teeming diversity not just of gender, race, and age but of thought, drive, and relationship inside their organizations, is to look for some way to exert control—to rein it all in, to impose conformity on the chaos, and thence to be able to understand what’s going on, and to shape what will happen next. And so companies have spent, and continue to spend, large quantities of time and money trying to work around each person’s uniqueness—and this is where these models bubble up from.

As we’ve seen, what’s most striking when we look at excellent performance is not the absence of deficit but, rather, the presence of a few signature strengths, honed over time and put to ever greater use. But still the idea of fixing deficits appeals to us—it gives us the hope that we might corral, and thus tame, our imperfections, and it allows us to make amends for our shortcomings by toiling to fix them. And the fact that this toil is usually far from joyful is part of the allure.

... the truth is that large success is the aggregation of small successes, and that therefore improvement consists of finding out, in each trial, what works, seizing hold of it, and figuring out how to make more of it. Failure by itself doesn’t teach us anything about success, just as our deficits by themselves don’t teach us anything about our strengths. And the moment we begin to get better is the moment when something actually works, not when it doesn’t.

Of course, if we were able to watch a great athlete training, or a great writer writing, or a great coder coding, we would see that honing a strength is hard work—it is by no means easy to find that incremental margin of performance when you are already operating at a high level—and that a strength is not where we are most “finished” but in fact where we are most productively challenged. Yet we are told to resist the temptation to “just” play to our strengths, and instead to work constantly on our weaknesses. In common parlance, we are told to avoid “running around our backhand.” This betrays, perhaps, a misunderstanding of what a strength actually is. It is not, for each of us, where performance is easiest—it is where performance is most impactful and increasing.

What, then, should we do in the face of all of this? How do the best team leaders in the real world go about building great teams? Here are three strategies we’ve seen used by the best team leaders.

The first strategy is this: Get into the outcomes business. A team leader at one of the early Silicon Valley startups faced an unusual situation. He had assigned a new hire to work with one of his experienced engineers, and now the experienced engineer was complaining. The new hire was arrogant and prickly, he said, but worse than this, he had awful body odor —the team leader should fire him. But the team leader saw something in his unusual employee, and worked out a different solution. He figured that the two could work together as long as they weren’t in the office at the same time, and instead passed work back and forth. And so, in the early days of Atari, Steve Jobs worked nights…

And what you will be doing, when you step back and look, is fitting the role to the person—which leads us to the second strategy: Define the adjustable seat…

Hence the third strategy: Use team technology. To help you address everything that needs to be addressed, the real world has devised a supremely effective technology for integrating people’s wonderfully imperfect capabilities in the service of a given objective. It’s called a team, and the essential magic of a team is that it makes weirdness useful.

The researchers had measured ten dimensions for each pilot, so now Daniels set himself the task of going through the data, pilot by pilot by pilot, and counting how many of the 4,063 pilots were in the middle 30 percent on all of the ten dimensions.

The answer, when it came, was this: none. There were no average-sized pilots—none whatsoever. Even if you looked at just three of the ten dimensions, fewer than 5 percent of the pilots were average-sized on all three. Even in a population of humans deliberately selected against a set of criteria (if you were too tall or too short, for instance, you weren’t qualified to become a USAF pilot in the first place), there was no one-size-fits-all, not even close.

Just as Don Clifton discovered that the only predictor of performance was total score across a number of relevant variables—that there was no right pattern of abilities, only a right sum of abilities—Gilbert Daniels discovered that there were no average humans in a population of 4,063, and that the average is a mathematical concept, not something that exists in the physical world. While the outcomes of high performance are visible and clear, the ingredients of high performance vary from person to person. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to human beings; and 8 9 there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to great performance.

Diversity isn’t an impediment to building a great team—rather, it’s the fundamental ingredient without which a great team cannot exist. If we were all the same, there would doubtless be things that all of us could not do, and that therefore the team could not do. We need to partner with people whose strengths—whose weirdness, whose spikiness—is different from ours if we are to achieve results that demand more abilities than any of us has alone. And this means, in turn, that the more different we are from one another, the more we need one another. The more different we are, the more we rely on understanding and appreciating the strengths of others, and on building a shared understanding of purpose, and an atmosphere of safety and trust, so that those strengths can be most usefully put to work. Well-roundedness is a misguided and futile objective when it comes to individual people; but when it comes to teams, it’s an absolute necessity. The more diverse the team members, the more weird, spiky, and idiosyncratic they are, the more well-rounded the team.

When we carry our competencies across the measurement bridge, we enter a fake and dangerous world—as a tool of assessment, order and control, they are worse than useless. But as public signifiers for what we deem most important, they are another way we can cascade meaning in our organizations, and thereby help our leaders and teams understand what’s most important.

While our stories of others center on who they are, we are much more generous to ourselves in our interpretation of our own actions. When it comes to our self-attributions, we skew the other way, and overascribe our behavior to the external situation around us, to what’s happening to us. If we’re doing something that annoys someone else, then that person is annoyed only because he or she doesn’t understand the situation that’s forcing us to act that way. This tendency is called the Actor-Observer Bias, and it’s one of a number of human-reasoning biases that fall into a category called self-serving biases, because they serve to explain away our own actions in a way that props up our self-esteem.

These biases lead us to believe that your performance (whether good or bad) is due to who you are—your drive, or style, or effort, say—which in turn leads us to the conclusion that if we want to get you to improve your performance we must give you feedback on who you are, so that you can increase your drive, refine your style, or redouble your efforts. To fix a performance problem we instinctively turn to giving you personal feedback, rather than looking at the external situation you were facing and addressing that.

And by the way, if you think about it, much of the world of work is designed this way—it’s designed for Those Other People, who need to be told what to do (hence planning instead of intelligence), whose work needs aligning (hence goals over meaning and purpose), and whose weaknesses put us all at risk (hence the deficit thinking we saw in the last chapter, instead of the focus on distinctive abilities). One of the inconvenient truths about humans is that we have poor theories of others, and these theories lead us, among other things, to design our working world to remedy or to insulate against failings that we see in others but don’t see in ourselves.

To create pervasive disengagement, ignore your people. If you pay them no attention whatsoever—no positive feedback; no negative feedback; nothing—your team’s engagement will plummet, so much so that for every one engaged team member you will have twenty disengaged team members.

...for those employees given mainly positive attention—that is, attention to what they did best, and what was working most powerfully for them—the ratio of engaged to disengaged rose to sixty to one.

Positive attention, in other words, is thirty times more powerful than negative attention in creating high performance on a team. (It’s also, if you’re keeping score, twelve hundred times more powerful than ignoring people, but we haven’t yet come across a management theory that advocates ignoring people.)

People don’t need feedback. They need attention, and moreover, attention to what they do the best. And they become more engaged and therefore more productive when we give it to them.

But development means nothing more than doing our work a little better each day, so increasing performance and creating growth are the same thing. A focus on strengths increases performance. Therefore, a focus on strengths is what creates growth.

Because of your genetic inheritance and the oddities of your early childhood environment, your brain’s wiring is utterly unique—no one has ever had a brain wired just like yours, and given the brain’s complexity, no one ever will. Some parts of your brain have tight thickets of synaptic connections, while other parts are far less dense. And when we examine your brain’s growth—when we count the new neurons and their connections—it turns out that you grow far more neurons and synaptic connections where you already have the most pre-existing neurons and synaptic connections. Perhaps this is caused by nature’s harshly efficient use-it-or-lose-it design, or perhaps, with so much pre-existing biological infrastructure supporting your densest synaptic regions, it is simply easier to forge new connections where you already have lots. Either way, we now know that, though every brain grows, each grows most where it’s already strongest. The arrow of brain development points toward specialization. As the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux memorably described it, “Brain growth is like new buds on an existing branch, rather than new branches.

Here’s what they found. In the brains of the students who received negative feedback the sympathetic nervous system lit up. This is the “fight or flight” system, the system that mutes the other parts of the brain and thus allows us to focus only on the information most necessary to survive. When this part of the nervous system is triggered, your heart rate goes up, endorphins flood your body, your cortisol levels rise, and you tense for action. This is your brain on negative feedback: it responds as if to a threat, and it narrows its activity. The strong negative emotions produced by criticism “inhibits access to existing neural circuits and invokes cognitive, emotional, and perceptual impairment,” psychology and business professor Richard Boyatzis said in summarizing the researchers findings.

Negative feedback doesn’t enable learning. It systematically inhibits it and is, neurologically speaking, how to create impairment.

In the students who received attention focused on their dreams and how they might go about achieving them, however, the sympathetic nervous system was not activated. Instead it was the parasympathetic nervous system that lit up. This is sometimes referred to as the “rest and digest” system. To quote the researchers again: “[T]he Parasympathetic Nervous System . . . stimulates adult neurogenesis (i.e., growth of new neurons) . . . , a sense of well being, better immune system functioning, and cognitive, emotional, and perceptual openness.”

In other words, positive, future-focused attention gives your brain access to more regions of itself and thus sets you up for greater learning. We’re often told that the key to learning is to get out of our comfort zones, but this finding gives the lie to that particular chestnut—take us out of our comfort zones and our brains stop paying attention to anything other than surviving the experience. It’s clear that we learn most in our comfort zone, because that’s our strengths zone, where our neural pathways are most concentrated. It’s where we’re most open to possibility, and it’s where we are most creative and insightful.

The pull to look at the negative is a very strong one—the Berkeley psychologist Rick Hanson sums up the research memorably when he says, “the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones”—which is why making this a conscious habit is so important.

Paradoxically, then, the more your high-priority interrupts involve catching your people doing things wrong (so you can fix them), the less productive each person will become in the short term, and the less growth you’ll see from your team members in the long run. Finding itself in negative-criticism territory, the human brain stiffens, tenses, and—in meaningful ways—resists improvement. Machines and processes don’t do that. You can fix a machine, you can fix a process, but you can’t fix a person in the same way—people aren’t toasters. So, when it comes to your people, what should be your high-priority interrupt? If what you want is improvement, then it should be whenever someone on your team does something that really works. The goal is to consciously spend your days alert for those times when someone on your team does something so easily and effectively that it rocks you, just a little, and then to find a way of telling that person what you just saw.

While the other teams were reviewing missed tackles and dropped balls, Landry instead focused his players’ attention on their wins, however minor. He combed through footage of previous games and created, for each player, a highlight reel of where that player had done something easily, naturally, and effectively. He reasoned that while the number of wrong ways to do something was infinite, the number of right ways, for any particular player, was not. It was finite, and knowable, and the best way to define and know the right way was to look at those plays where the player had done it right.

His instincts told him that each person would learn best how to improve his performance if he could see, in slow motion, what his own personal versions of excellence looked like. Really great performance often happens in a state of flow, such that we’re barely conscious of what we’re doing—Michael Jordan used to watch himself in post-game highlights and shake his head, saying, “Wow, I did that?

The trick to doing this is not just to tell the person how well she’s performed, or how good she is. While simple praise is by no means a bad thing, it captures a moment in the past rather than creating the possibility of more such moments in the future. Instead, what you’ll want to do is tell the person what you experienced when that moment of excellence caught your attention—your instantaneous reaction to what worked. For a team member, nothing is more believable, and thus more powerful, than your sharing what you saw from her and how it made you feel. Or what it made you think. Or what it caused you to realize. Or how and where you will now rely on her. These are your reactions, and when you share them with specificity and with detail, you aren’t judging her or rating her or fixing her. You are simply reflecting to her the unique “dent” she just made in the world, as seen through one person’s eyes—yours. And precisely because it isn’t a judgment or a rating, but is instead a simple reaction, it is authoritative and beyond question.

Excellence is not the opposite of failure: we can never create excellent performances by only fixing poor ones. Mistake fixing is just a tool to prevent failure.

... the positive-to-negative ratio you’ll arrive at is somewhere between three to one and five to one—three to five moments of appreciative attention for every one piece of negative feedback. While there is no need to obsess over the mathematical precision of the ratios, the science suggests that if you aim for this level of deliberate imbalance you and your team will be well served.

They [team leaders] understand that the path you will take to your best performance will be unpredictably different from theirs.

The second thing that great team leaders know, and that brain scientists have shown, is that an “insight” is brain food. These scientists aren’t yet sure whether this is because insights come with a nice shot of dopamine or some other neurochemical transmitter, but what they do know is that the brain is built such that a new insight—“a feeling of knowing generated from within,” to use their phrasing—feels good.

When a team member comes to you asking for advice, then, don’t rush to your easel and start furiously painting away. Instead try this approach— the box-of-paints approach, if you will, containing some hues of present, some shades of past, and a few bright dabs of future. Start with the present. If your team member approaches you with a problem, he is in it now. He is feeling weak, broken, or challenged, and you have to address that. But rather than dealing with it head-on, ask your colleague to tell you three things that are working for him right now. These “things that are working” might be related to the situation, or they might be completely separate from it. They might be significant or trivial. It doesn’t matter. Just ask for three “things that are working.”...

Next, go to the past. Ask him, “When you had a problem like this in the past, what did you do that worked?” Much of our lives are lived through patterns, so it’s highly likely that he has encountered this problem before and found himself similarly stuck. But on one of these occasions he will almost certainly have found some way forward, some action or insight or connection that worked for him and enabled him to move out of the mess. Get him thinking about that, and seeing it in his mind’s eye: what he actually felt and did, and what happened next.

Finally, turn to the future. Ask your team member, “What do you already know you need to do? What do you already know works in this situation?” In a sense you’re operating under the assumption that he’s already made his decision—you’re just helping him find it. At this point, by all means offer up one or two of your own paintings, to see if they might clarify his own. But above all keep asking him to describe what he already sees, and what he already knows works for him.

So far, we’ve seen that 1) human beings can never be trained to reliably rate other human beings, that 2) ratings data derived in this way is contaminated because it reveals far more of the rater than it does of the person being rated, and that 3) the contamination cannot be removed by adding more contaminated data. And this means, in turn, that ratings-based tools, be they annual engagement surveys, performance-rating tools, 360-degree surveys, or any of the many other varieties at large, do not measure what they purport to measure. And this means, in turn, that discussions based on the data generated by these tools do not accurately reflect the truth of you.

Reliable, variable, and valid—these are the signs of good data, and these three concepts will help you intelligently examine the quality of any data put in front of you.

For example, if someone claims his data is valid you might ask him, politely, whether he can prove that this data has been shown to predict something else, measured by something else, in the real world. If he can show this—à la Amazon and the clicks from one page driving the clicks on another—then you’re probably looking at valid data.

And, as we’ve seen in this chapter, the problem with almost all data relating to people—including you—is that it isn’t reliable. Goals data that reports your “percent complete”; competency data comparing you to abstractions; ratings data measuring your performance and your potential through the eyes of unreliable witnesses: it wobbles by itself, and fails to measure what it says it’s measuring.

But in contrast, your response to the question, “Do you turn to this team member when you want extraordinary results?” is entirely reliable. With this question we are not asking you to stand above her, and outside of yourself, and opine dispassionately on her performance. Instead we are asking you to look inside yourself and tell us simply whether you feel confident to go to her when you want something done excellently. You cannot be wrong about this, because there is no right or wrong, only your feeling about what you would or wouldn’t do with this team member.

The key to understanding performance is to stop thinking of it as a broad abstraction, and instead start finding elements of it that we can measure reliably and act on usefully.

...you want to be represented by data that simply, reliably, and humbly captures the reaction of your team leader to you. That’s not you, and it shouldn’t pretend to be you. It’s your leader, and what she feels, and what she would do in the future. And that’s enough. Truly.

Your company is a maximization machine—it wants to make the best use of its finite resources—so it is greatly interested in identifying precisely who to invest in, and how.

The problem with this stems from the way your company executes on these good intentions. Why, for example, does it assume that it will net a good return only from certain people? Surely, the cliché that “Our people are our greatest asset” applies to all of the people in the company. As we’ve seen, every human brain retains its ability to learn and grow throughout adulthood. For sure, each brain grows at a different speed and in a different way, but this implies only that each person learns differently, not that—categorically—some people do and some don’t. Therefore, the best course of action for any maximization machine worth its salt would be to figure out where and how each brain can grow the most, rather than zeroing in on only a select few brains and casting aside the others.

As with all the lies we’ve addressed in the book so far, the lie that people have potential is a product of organizations’ desire for control, and their impatience with individual differences.

Therefore we know a) that the ability to learn exists in us all, b) that it shows up differently in each of us, and c) that while we can all get better at anything, none of us will ever be able to rewire our brains to excel at everything. More simply, we can all get better, and we will all get better at different things, in different ways, and at different speeds.

The first set of questions will focus on who Maureen is as a person. You’ll find yourself asking her, “What do you love most about your job right now, Maureen? What do you love most about ballooning? Do you love the piloting part, the thrill of the lift, the sensation of getting airborne; or do you love the navigating part, the movement of the light-as-air balloon through the cold northern winds, the calibration of the flame to achieve just the right altitude; or do you love the part where you show the guests the sights and get to tell them interesting facts they may not have known about this part of the world?”... Each of these questions addresses who Maureen is as a person, what she loves, what she’s really into, and what she yearns for in terms of her career. You’re basically being curious about the specifics of what it’s like to be Maureen-at-work.

The second set of things you’ll ask her about will focus on how she’s moved through the world thus far, and what she’s picked up along the way. You’ll ask her about her current performance: how many balloon trips she completes and how many guests she takes up in a month. You’ll ask her about her past performance: you’ll want to find out how long she’s been a balloon pilot, how many hours she’s logged, what her safety record has been, how often she is able to put her balloon down within the designated landing range. … And with each of these questions, you’ll learn more about how Maureen has moved through the world—what she has measurably achieved, and measurably learned.

From the answers to these two sets of questions, you’ll have discovered, first, who Maureen is at work. These are her traits. These are things that are inherent and enduring in her—not entirely unchanging, but nonetheless resistant to change. These are the loves and aspirations that are uniquely hers, and that she carries around with her everywhere she goes, just as surely as she carries her own body. Wherever she goes, they are there. You can call these her mass.

And second, you’ll have unearthed some things she’s acquired as she’s applied herself in the world to move in a particular direction: her current and past record of performance, and her tested certifications. Obviously, since she can change any and all of these things, these are states. But since they describe how she has moved through the world—how she’s done it, how well she’s done it, how quickly, and in what direction—you can usefully label these her velocity.

In the world of physics, there’s a name for the discrete, measurable, definable, and directional thing that is produced when mass and velocity combine. It’s called momentum. In the world of teams and team members, the same applies. Maureen has momentum.

By keeping these two ideas about Maureen—mass and velocity— separate, and by using momentum to describe their combination, we suddenly enable you, the team leader, to do all manner of useful things to help her.

Addressing their potential makes people feel like they’ve been dealt with. Addressing their momentum makes them feel understood. More important, it helps them understand themselves, by encouraging them to consider where they are, right now—not as a point of stasis, but as a unique human being moving purposefully through the world.

And rather than investing in systems and processes to provide a fallback in case our managers are found wanting, it’s far better to invest in helping our team leaders do what we need them to, by 1) getting rid of ratings of “potential,” 2) teaching team leaders what we know about human growth, and 3) prompting them to discuss careers with their people in terms of momentum—in terms of who each team member is, and in terms of how fast each is moving through the world. This is harder, of course, than buying the latest piece of enterprise software and then imploring our people to use it, but it’s the right hard thing to do.

According to a recent report from the Mayo Clinic, 52 percent of physicians report being burned out, and their incidence of PTSD is 15 percent, four times the levels in the regular workforce and three percentage points higher than the levels found in veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These sky-high stress levels inevitably have quantifiable and negative effects on both patient care and physician well-being. The Mayo Clinic found not only that a 1 percent increase in measured burnout led to a 20 to 30 percent decrease in patient satisfaction but, more worryingly still, that 15 percent of all doctors have issues with substance abuse during their careers, and that their rates of depression and suicide are twice the national levels.

The only job harder than being a doctor—so the data tells us—is being an emergency-room nurse, which comes with higher levels of burnout and depression and (at 19 percent) almost twice the level of PTSD seen in combat veterans.

And in the end, balance is an unachievable goal anyway, because it asks us to aim for momentary stasis in a world that is ever changing. Supposing we ever get things just exactly in balance, we know for sure that something will come along and unbalance them and that we’ll be back to pushing our balance rock up the hill again. Balance as an ideal erases our humanity—the essence of who each of us is and aspires to be—and replaces it with a Sisyphean coping strategy.

The Greeks called it eudaimonia, which sounds like a cleaning product but which actually means “the fullest and purest expression of you in your most elevated state.” Their idea was that each of us had a spirit, or daimon, that embodied our greatest and most unique possibilities—our natural strengths or talents—and that the state we should all seek was one where, because of the happy intersection of our role, our skills, our team, and our context, we turned these possibilities into contribution, and thus liberated our good spirit.

We’re going to take a longer look at love; not to drag you away from the hard realities of the world of work, or to dismiss the demands and discoveries of reliable data, but instead to dive deeper into both. In doing so, we’d like to share the truth that—more than striving for balance between work and life—love-in-work matters most.

Love-in-work is less of a mouthful than eudaimonia, for sure, but it might also sound soft, idealistic, and far removed from the real-world pragmatism of the freethinking leader. If it does, then bear with us. Because love—specifically, the skill of finding love in what you do, rather than simply “doing what you love”—leads us directly to a place that is the epitome of pragmatism.

The same is true for you. There’s a little bit of you that your organization can never touch, never know, never see, and certainly never feel. And yet it’s this part of you—the loving, feeling part of you—that makes you feel alive at work, able to do things that surprise and delight you, things that are ridiculously good, unexpectedly made, astonishing to your team, and that light you up from the inside.

Those who reported that they spent at least 20 percent of their time doing things they loved had dramatically lower risk of burnout. Each percentage point reduction below this 20 percent level resulted in a commensurate and almost linear increase in burnout risk. Remove the love from a physician’s work, and the work grates, and grates some more, until it hurts.

And in case you’re wondering, the data reveals that, for most of us, the problem of loveless work lies less in the fact that our job is too constricted and more in the fact that we can’t figure out how to weave. The ADP Research Institute’s global engagement study revealed that only 16–17 percent of workers say they have a chance to play to their strengths every day, whereas their surveys of a representative sample of the US working population reveal that 72 percent of workers say, “I have the freedom to modify my role to fit my strengths better.” In psychology we refer to this as an attitude-behavior consistency problem—we know we can modify our roles to fit ourselves better, but most of us simply don’t.

Twice a year, spend a week in love with your work. Select a regular week at work and take a pad around with you for the entire week. Down the middle of this pad draw a vertical line to make two columns, and write “Loved It” at the top of one column and “Loathed It” at the top of the other. During the week, any time you find yourself feeling one of the signs of love—before you do something, you actively look forward to it; while you’re doing it, time speeds up and you find yourself in flow; after you’ve done it, there’s part of you looking forward to when you can do it again—scribble down exactly what that something was in the “Loved It” column.

And any time you find yourself feeling the inverse—before you do something, you procrastinate, perhaps handing it off to the new person because it will be “developmental”; while you do it, time drags on and ten minutes feels like a hard-fought hour; and when you’re done with it, you hope you never have to do it again—scribble down exactly what that something was in the “Loathed It” column.

The 20 percent number was a threshold, which is to say that a little love goes an awfully long way: when you can deliberately weave your red threads throughout the fabric of your work you’ll feel stronger, perform better, and bounce back faster.

These red threads are your strengths. Typically we think of our strengths as what we’re good at and our weaknesses as what we’re bad at, and that our team leaders, or our colleagues, are therefore the best judges of both. But as we saw in chapter 4, this is not the best definition of either strengths or weaknesses. A strength is any activity that strengthens you (for Miles the anesthetist, keeping a patient hovering between life and death), and a weakness is any activity that weakens you, even if you’re good at it (for Miles, helping patients recover). “Performance” is what you have done well or poorly, and your team leader can be the judge of that. Team leaders and colleagues, however, can’t judge what strengthens or weakens you.

The same is true for you, of course. You have a unique relationship with the world, a relationship that reveals to you things that only you can see. It offers thread-weaving opportunities all the time, but the only person who knows if those threads are red is you. The world won’t do your weaving for you—it doesn’t care about your red threads. The only person who can stop and be attentive enough to identify these threads, and weave them intelligently into the fabric of your work, is you.

What we all wrestle with every day in the real world is not so much work and life as it is love and loathe.

But what if we made the attempt the entire point of work: To teach our kids and our college graduates, our workers young and old, our people in the second decade of their first career and our people in the first year of their third career, how to use the raw material of work to find their very own red threads and then to take responsibility for weaving them into something fine and strong?

Ballet, as you know, is an unremittingly technical and demanding craft, but if you build technical craft on a loveless foundation, you net only burnout, because technical mastery absent love always equals burnout. Burnout isn’t the absence of balance but the absence of love.

On the day after Valentine’s Day in 2015 he published, to very little fanfare, his version of Hozier’s “Take Me to Church.”

If you’ve never seen it, take a moment now to log onto YouTube and watch—it’s four minutes and eight seconds that you’ll never forget. Whether you’re a fan of ballet or not, you’ll recognize it not only as the work of a man at the end of his tether, but also as a pure expression of technical craft and unabashed joy. You see here a man who is taking his loves seriously, interlacing them with craft and discipline, and contributing to us something passionate, rare, and pure. You will see, from the inside out, that this is the fullest, most authentic, and richest expression of this unique person. If the people coming to work on your team could feel more like this, if you could help them take their red threads this seriously—not to make your people feel good about themselves, although that helps, but so they could share more with the world—what a beautiful and lasting contribution you and your team would make.

The power of human nature is that each human’s nature is unique. This is a feature, not a bug. So your responsibility is to take seriously the uniqueness of your uniqueness, and design the most intelligent, the most honest, and the most effective ways to volunteer it to the rest of us. We— your teammates, your family, your community, your company—are waiting for you to share with us your unique loves. We’re here for but a few short years. Please don’t make us wait too long.

More specifically, we follow leaders who connect us to a mission we believe in, who clarify what’s expected of us, who surround us with people who define excellence the same way we do, who value us for our strengths, who show us that our teammates will always be there for us, who diligently replay our winning plays, who challenge us to keep getting better, and who give us confidence in the future.

Your challenge as a leader is not to try to acquire the complete set of abstract leader competencies—you will fail, not least because the first hurdle you will fall at is authenticity. Instead, your challenge is to find and refine your own idiosyncratic way of creating in your team these eight emotional outcomes. Do this well and you will lead well.

Interestingly—and happily—a close study of the real world reveals that these two are linked. Your ability to create the outcomes you want in your followers is tied directly to how seriously and intelligently you cultivate your own idiosyncrasy, and to what end. The deeper and more extreme your idiosyncrasy becomes, the more passionately your followers follow—and while this is frustrating to us when we happen to disagree with the ends of a particular leader, it is so nonetheless.

We have seen, already, that the best people aren’t well-rounded, but are instead spiky—they have honed one or two distinctive abilities that they use to make their mark on the world. What we see in the best leaders is a similar extremism—a few signal abilities refined over time. But now, these abilities are so pronounced, and the leaders so adept at transmitting them to the world, that they stand out to all of us. And so this truth: we follow spikes.

Your greatest challenge as a leader, then, is to honor each person’s legitimate fear of the unknown and, at the same time, to turn that fear into spiritedness. We, your followers, like the comfort of where we stand, yet know that the flow of events is pulling us inexorably into the unknown. So when we find something, anything, however slight, that lessens our uncertainty, we cling on for dear life.

The act of following is a barter—we entrust some part of our future to a leader only when we get something in return.

That “something in return” is confidence.

And what gives us confidence in the future is seeing, in a leader, some great and pronounced level of ability in something we care about.

We follow people who are really good at something that matters to us. We follow the spikes.

Each truly effective leader cultivates his or her mastery in a way that communicates to us something certain and vivid. It’s as if we trust leaders only when they’ve proven to us that they’ve opened more doors than we have, seen round more corners than we have, dived deeper than we have, taken themselves more seriously than we have. We trust the seriousness of this. We trust its predictability. We are drawn to its specialness. We sense its authenticity. We are attracted to the beautiful clarity of great ability, the brief moments of awe. We ignore everything else.

Leading and following are not abstractions. They are human interactions; human relationships. And their currency is the currency of all human relationships—the currency of emotional bonds, of trust, and of love. If you, as a leader, forget these things, and yet master everything that theory world tells you matters, you will find yourself alone. But if you understand who you are, at your core, and hone that understanding into a few special abilities, each of which refracts and magnifies your intent, your essence, and your humanity, then, in the real world, we will see you.

And we will follow.

Truths:

Truth #1: People care what team they’re on (because that’s where the work actually happens).

Truth #2: The best intelligence wins (because the world moves too fast for plans).

Truth #3: The best companies cascade meaning (because people want to know what they all share).

Truth #4: The best people are spiky (because uniqueness is a feature, not a bug).

Truth #5: People need attention (because we all want to be seen for who we are at our best).

Truth #6: People can reliably rate their own experience (because that’s all we have).

Truth #7: People have momentum (because we all move through the world differently).

Truth #8: Love-in-work matters most (because that’s what work is really for).

Truth #9: We follow spikes (because spikes bring us certainty).

• “Of those who say they work in teams, 65 percent of them report that they work on more than one team, and that this team is not represented in the org chart.

Clearly, there are many reasons why engagement levels remain relatively low across the world, some of those reasons relating to the nature of work itself, some to macroeconomic conditions in the region or country, and some to the specifics of the industry or company. However, it appears that one of the reasons that engagement remains relatively low across the world is that organizations do not understand, or act on, the vital power of teams.

• Organizations do not know how many teams they have, who is on them, or which are their best and most engaged teams.

• When organizations make great teams their primary focus—what creates them, what can fracture them—we may well see significant rises in global engagement.

Of those who strongly agreed that they trusted their team leader 45 percent were Fully Engaged. Of those who didn’t strongly agree only 6 percent were Fully Engaged. A worker is twelve times more likely to be Fully Engaged if she trusts her team leader.

Two questions in the survey showed the strongest relationship to a worker’s feeling of trust in his team leader:

• Do I know clearly what is expected of me at work?

• Do I have the chance to use my strengths every day?

This data suggests that these two conditions—knowing what is expected, and being able to play to one’s strengths—are the foundations of trust. When a team leader, despite the ambiguities and the fluid and fast pace of the world of work, can help team members feel clarity about expectations and a sense that their best is recognized and utilized frequently, then trust is built, and a Fully Engaged team becomes more likely.

One implication for companies is that, if they choose to use contractors or gig workers—and today many do—the faster and more genuinely they can introduce these workers into teams, the more engagement, more productivity, and higher retention they will see from these workers. The inverse is also true: that the more companies can make traditional full-time work similar to gig work—as in, greater flexibility and ownership for team members, and a greater chance to do what they love—the more engagement, productivity, and higher retention they will see from their full-time workers.

The item “I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work” exhibited the strongest connection to overall engagement and the strongest connection to other items in the survey. The item “My teammates have my back” showed the second-strongest connection, and the item “In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values” had the third-strongest connection.

Our study did show a statistically significant and meaningful difference between the best and the rest, suggesting that, at Cisco, the best teams harness the individual excellence of each team member, unlock the collective excellence of the team, and do so in an environment of safety and trust.

This suggests that team members who check in with their leader frequently have an enhanced sense of being able to use their strengths every day, of being recognized for excellent work, and of having opportunities to grow. Although this study did not distinguish between correlation and causation (we could not tell whether the increased frequency of conversation led to increased engagement or vice versa), subsequent research, a portion of which is described in the final section of this appendix, indicated that it was in fact the increased attention, via frequent conversation, that led to the increased levels of engagement.

...we discovered that (at least at Cisco) there are two factors of engagement within the Engagement Pulse. The first factor comprises all four “me” items together with the two “we” items that ask about team environment, and so consisted of:

• At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me. (Me)

• I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work. (Me)

• I know I will be recognized for excellent work. (Me)

• In my work, I am always challenged to grow. (Me)

• In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values. (We)

• My teammates have my back. (We)

We chose to call this factor team engagement. The other factor comprised the remaining two “we” items:

• I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company. (We)

• I have great confidence in my company’s future. (We)

We chose to call this factor company engagement.

One way to think of these results is to imagine a team leader having three distinct jobs. Her first is to ensure her team members feel connected to the purpose and future of the company, even though she may not directly define those. Her second is to ensure that her team members, as a group, understand and support one another. And her third is to ensure that her team members, individually, understand what’s expected of them and how they can do their best work now and in the future, all while feeling recognized for who they are.

The subtlety here is that, as we saw above, the feeling of enthusiasm about a company’s mission, and confidence in its future, still vary team to team. In other words, our experience of our company is significantly mediated by our experience of our team.