First, Break All the Rules

by Marcus Buckingham

  When selecting someone, they select for talent … not simply experience, intelligence, or determination.

  When setting expectations, they define the right outcomes … not the right steps.

  When motivating someone, they focus on strengths … not on weaknesses.

  When developing someone, they help him find the right fit … not simply the next rung on the ladder.

  We’ve labeled this revolutionary approach “the Four Keys” of great managers. Taken together, the Four Keys reveal how these managers unlock the potential of each and every employee.

  Let’s examine how each of these Four Keys works and how you can apply them to your own people.

  CHAPTER 3: The First Key: Select for Talent

  * * *

  Talent: How Great Managers Define It

  The Right Stuff

  The Decade of the Brain

  Skills, Knowledge, and Talents

  The World According to Talent

  Talent: How Great Managers Find It

  A Word From the Coach

  Talent: How Great Managers Define It

  “Why does every role, performed at excellence, require talent?”

  Normally we associate talent only with celebrated excellence — with a strong emphasis on the word “celebrated.” We look at Michael Jordan, swaying and knifing his way to the basket, and we know that neither his training nor his dogged determination is the prime source of his brilliance. He may have both of these, but then so do most other NBA players. Alone, these cannot explain why Michael shines. Deep down we know that his secret weapon is his talent. We look at Robert De Niro and we think the same: He has talent. Tiger Woods, Jay Leno, Maya Angelou, they are all part of the talent club. They are blessed with a secret gift. For most of us talent seems a rare and precious thing, bestowed on special, faraway people. They are different, these people with talent. They are “not us.”

  Great managers disagree with this definition of talent. It is too narrow, too specialized. Instead they define a talent as “a recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied.” The emphasis here is on the word “recurring.” Your talents, they say, are the behaviors you find yourself doing often. You have a mental filter that sifts through your world, forcing you to pay attention to some stimuli, while others slip past you, unnoticed. Your instinctive ability to remember names, rather than just faces, is a talent. Your need to alphabetize your spice rack and color-code your wardrobe is a talent. So is your love of crossword puzzles, or your fascination with risk, or your impatience. Any recurring patterns of behavior that can be productively applied are talents. The key to excellent performance, of course, is finding the match between your talents and your role.

  This definition of talent is deceptively neutral, almost bland. Nevertheless it guides great managers toward a momentous discovery: Every role, performed at excellence, requires talent, because every role, performed at excellence, requires certain recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior. This means that great nurses have talent. So do great truck drivers and great teachers, great housekeepers and great flight attendants. (We will describe some of these talents later in this chapter.)

  Whether the excellence is “celebrated” or anonymous, great managers know that excellence is impossible without talent.

  The Right Stuff

  “Why is talent more important than experience, brainpower, and willpower?”

  For most roles, conventional wisdom advises managers to select for experience, for intelligence, or for determination. Talent, if mentioned at all, is an afterthought.

  Conventional wisdom says:

  “Experience makes the difference.” Managers who place a special emphasis on experience pay closest attention to a candidate’s work history. They pore over each person’s résumé, rating the companies who employed him and the kind of work he performed. They see his past as a window to his future.

  “Brainpower makes the difference.” These managers put their faith in raw intelligence. They say that as long as you are smart, most roles can be “figured out.” Smart people simply “figure it out” better than the rest. When selecting people, they tend to favor articulate applicants blessed with high-powered academic records.

  “Willpower makes the difference.” This is the “Success is 10 percent inspiration, 90 percent perspiration” school of thought. Managers from this school believe that the technical part of most roles can be taught, whereas the desire to achieve, to persist in the face of obstacles, cannot. When selecting people, they look for past evidence of grit.

  As far as it goes, great managers would agree with all of this advice — experience can teach valuable lessons; intelligence is a boon; and willpower — which great managers actually label a talent — is almost impossible to teach. But conventional wisdom stops there. It fails to take into account that there are so many other kinds of talents and that the right talents, more than experience, more than brainpower, and more than willpower alone, are the prerequisites for excellence in all roles — talents such as a waiter’s ability to form opinions, empathy in nurses, assertiveness in salespeople, or, in managers, the ability to individualize. Conventional wisdom assumes either that these behaviors can be trained after the person has been hired or that these characteristics are relatively unimportant to performance on the job.

  Both assumptions are false. First, you cannot teach talent. You cannot teach someone to form strong opinions, to feel the emotions of others, to revel in confrontation, or to pick up on the subtle differences in how best to manage each person. You have to select for talents like these. (We shall explain why this is true later in the chapter.)

  Second, talents like these prove to be the driving force behind an individual’s job performance. It’s not that experience, brainpower, and willpower are unimportant. It’s just that an employee’s full complement of talents — what drives her, how she thinks, how she builds relationships — is more important.

  No matter how carefully you select for experience, brainpower, or willpower, you still end up with a range in performance. In the retail company described in chapter 1, all store managers faced the same conditions and were provided the same training, yet some were 15 percent over their P/L budget and some were 30 percent below.

  In a large telecommunications company, the lower-performing customer service representatives take three times as many calls as the best reps to resolve the same customer complaint — and since millions of customers call in each year, and each call costs the company $10, this range in performance rightly gets management’s attention.

  Similarly, a nationwide trucking company reports that their average drivers cover 125,000 miles per year and suffer four accidents per year — yet one of their best drivers has just celebrated his four millionth mile of accident-free driving.

  There is range in every role, no matter how simple it seems. While experience, brainpower, and willpower all affect performance significantly, only the presence of the right talents — recurring patterns of behavior that fit the role — can account for this range in performance. Only the presence of talents can explain why, all other factors being equal, some people excel in the role and some struggle.

  Let’s take an extreme example where candidates were carefully selected for experience, brainpower, and willpower. They were expertly trained, and yet they still performed very differently from one another.

  Brigadier General Don Flickinger faced one of the more daunting management challenges in history. He had to find and train seven men to perform an extremely difficult role. No one had ever performed this role before, and each man would have the opportunity to do it only once. The stakes were very high. Succeed in their role, and these men would restore America’s faith in America. Fail, and they would add fuel to the Eastern bloc’s swelling self-confidence.

  As any manager would, the gen
eral spent a great deal of time and energy trying to find the right men for the job. First he laid out his minimum criteria: They had to be no older than thirty-nine, no taller than five feet eleven, in excellent physical condition, and graduates of a military test-pilot school, with at least 1,500 hours of flying experience in jets.

  After passing muster, all successful applicants were subjected to the most exacting physical and psychological tests. Tests of physical endurance — how long can you support a column of mercury with one lungful of breath? Tests of mental stability — how long can you endure being locked up in a pitch-black, soundproof “sensory deprivation chamber” with no idea when you will be released? Tests of pain suppression — if we drive a long needle into the big muscle at the base of your thumb and pass an electric current through it, what will you do?

  Eventually the general found his seven men.

  He found Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper, and Deke Slayton. He found the seven astronauts of the Mercury Space Program.

  And like any good manager, after having found them, he trained them. They were taught everything from the esoterics of gravitation and rocket propulsion to the very practical matter of how to control yaw, roll, and pitch in the vacuum of space. They were given the best teachers, the most up-to-date equipment, and the time to focus. Over two years they acquired a wealth of new skills and knowledge.

  By May 5, 1961, they were ready. Alan Shepard’s fifteen-minute sub-orbital flight was the first of six successful missions (Deke Slayton fell foul of a preexisting heart condition), which culminated in Gordon Cooper’s thirty-four-hour, twenty-two-orbit marathon.

  By the time Cooper splashed down on May 17, 1963, the Russians had been caught up with, America’s pride had been restored, and the platform had been laid for the leap to the moon.

  From almost every angle, the MISS program (Man in Space Soonest) was a model of project execution excellence: superior technology combined with carefully selected and well-trained employees, all focused on a specific mission and buoyed by the hopes of a nation. No wonder it succeeded.

  But look closer. When you examine the Mercury Program through a strictly managerial lens, you do not see a picture-perfect project. You see six very different missions. And putting aside for a moment the spectacular dimension of the endeavor and the inspirational bravery of each astronaut, the quality of the performance in each of the six missions can be comparatively ranked — two textbook, two heroic, and two mediocre. Look closer still and you realize that, in most instances, the individual astronauts themselves caused this variation.

  Alan Shepard and Wally Schirra, both career military men, executed their duties perfectly: no drama, no surprises, textbook missions.

  John Glenn and Gordon Cooper were a little special. Glenn was the heroes’ hero. Cooper was so laid-back, he actually fell asleep on the launchpad. But both of them faced severe mechanical difficulties and then responded with cool heroism and technical brilliance — Cooper even managed to achieve the most accurate splashdown of all, despite the complete failure of his automatic reentry guidance systems.

  The performances of Gus Grissom and Scott Carpenter were rather less impressive. Grissom piloted a clean flight, but he appeared to panic after his capsule splashed down. It seems he blew the escape hatch too early, the capsule filled with water, and it sank to the sea floor sixteen thousand feet below. NASA never recovered the three-thousand-pound capsule.

  Carpenter, meanwhile, was so excited to be up in space that while in orbit he maneuvered his capsule this way and that until he had used up almost all his fuel. When it came time to reenter the earth’s atmosphere, he was unable to make the appropriate corrections to his angle of reentry and ended up splashing down 250 miles from his designated landing site. He was lucky. If he had been a couple of degrees shallower in his approach, the capsule would have bounced off the atmosphere and spun off into space for eternity.

  NASA must have looked at the performance of their astronauts and wondered, “Why this range in performance? We selected for experience, for intelligence, and for determination. They all had the same training and the same tools. So why didn’t they perform the same? Why did Cooper excel while Carpenter struggled? Why did Glenn behave so calmly and Grissom less so?”

  The answer is that despite being similar in many ways — and all exceptionally accomplished, in comparison with the rest of us — these six men possessed different talents.

  What does that mean? It means that although each of these men faced the same stimuli, the way they reacted to these stimuli and then behaved was very different. During orbit, Carpenter was so excited that he couldn’t stop playing with the altitude jets; yet Cooper felt so calm, he actually slept through some of his orbits. At takeoff, Grissom’s pulse rate spurted to 150. Glenn’s never climbed above 80.

  Same stimuli, vastly different reactions. Why? Because each man filtered the world differently. Each man’s mental filter sorted and sifted, making one man acutely aware of stimuli to which another was blind. Bobbing in the water after splashdown, the dependable Wally Schirra was so focused on “doing it right” that he stayed in the capsule for four hours in order to complete every step of his postflight routine. His mental filter blocked out any twinges of claustrophobia. Gus Grissom’s didn’t. All indications are that barely five minutes after splashing down, he felt the tiny little capsule closing in around him. His mental filter, no longer able to dampen his growing panic, told him to get out, to escape, now, now. The hatch blew.

  You have a filter, a characteristic way of responding to the world around you. We all do. Your filter tells you which stimuli to notice and which to ignore; which to love and which to hate. It creates your innate motivations — are you competitive, altruistic, or ego driven? It defines how you think — are you disciplined or laissez-faire, practical or strategic? It forges your prevailing attitudes — are you optimistic or cynical, calm or anxious, empathetic or cold? It creates in you all of your distinct patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior. In effect, your filter is the source of your talents.

  Your filter is unique. It sorts through every stimulus and creates a world that only you can see. This filter can account for the fact that the same stimulus produces vastly different reactions in you from those in the person next to you.

  For example, imagine you are asleep on a long flight when the plane encounters some high-level turbulence. Do you wake up, convinced that the main reason you haven’t heard any explanation from the cockpit is that the pilots are too busy strapping on their parachutes? Or do you stay sleeping, a slightly more vigorous head nodding the only sign that your body notices the bumps?

  Imagine you are at a party with some people you know and some you don’t. Do you find yourself compelled to dive into the crowd of strangers and swim easily through the throng, remembering names, telling stories, turning strangers into friends? Or do you hug the corner with your significant other, scanning the room for anyone else you might know and nervously rehearsing the one joke you might have to tell tonight?

  Imagine you are arguing with your boss. As the argument intensifies, do you find yourself becoming colder, clearer, more articulate, as your brain hands you one perfect word after another? Or, despite all your preparations, does your emotion rise and your brain shut down, separating you from all of those carefully rehearsed words?

  Because every human being is guided by his unique filter, the same situation produces very different reactions. What is ridiculously easy for him is excruciatingly difficult for you. What is stimulating to you is tedious for someone else.

  All truck drivers face the same situation — miles of road, an unwieldy load, and swarms of little cars buzzing around them. They all have the same training, the same experience. But some of these drivers drive twice as many miles as their colleagues yet suffer half as many accidents. Why? Their filter. When you ask the best drivers, “W
hat do you think about when you are driving?” they all say the same thing. They all say, “I think about what would I do if … if that car pulled out right now. If that pedestrian decided to try to cross before the light changed. If my brakes failed.” While the other drivers are thinking about the next rest stop, how much longer they have to go today, or other, more diverting subjects, the best drivers are playing “what if?” games, anticipating scenarios, planning evasive maneuvers. Same stimuli, different reactions, very different performance.

  Likewise all customer service representatives face the same situation — thousands of telephone calls coming in from disgruntled customers. They all have the same technology, the same experience and training. Yet the best take a third fewer calls than the average to solve the same complaint. Why? Because for the best, many of whom are shy in person, the phone is an instrument of intimacy. It offers them shelter from the customer while at the same time giving them the chance to reach through the phone and connect more quickly and more closely than if they were standing face-to-face with her. They picture what room the customer is in. They imagine what the customer looks like. They smile and wave their hands even though they know that the customer cannot see what they are doing. Instinctively their filter takes every disembodied voice and fashions a full human being. On the other end of the line, the customer feels the difference.

  This filtering of their world is not a conscious, rational process. It does not happen once a week, allowing them the luxury of sitting back and weighing up all alternatives before deciding on the most “sensible” course of action. Rather, their filter is constantly at work, sorting, sifting, creating their world in real time.

  Yours does the same. It’s happening now, as you read this book. Maybe, just at this moment, you have looked up from the page to pause and think through something. Maybe you haven’t. Maybe you are speed-reading this so that you can get to the end of the chapter before your plane flight ends. Maybe the flight has nothing to do with it; you are simply a compulsive speed reader. Maybe you have just picked up your pen to underline this paragraph or to make a scrawled note in the margin. Maybe you hate it when people mark up books.