First, Break All the Rules

by Marcus Buckingham

  Your filter is always working. Of all the possibilities of things you could do or feel or think, your filter is constantly telling you the few things you must do or feel or think.

  Your filter, more than your race, sex, age, or nationality, is You.

  The Decade of the Brain

  “How much of a person can the manager change?”

  How much of You can be changed?

  If you hate meeting new people, can you learn to love the icebreaking with strangers? If you shy away from confrontation, can you be made to revel in the cut and thrust of debate? If the bright lights make you sweat, can you be taught to thrill to the challenge of public speaking? Can you carve new talents?

  Many managers and many companies assume that the answer to all these questions is “Yes.” With the best of intentions they tell their employees that everyone has the same potential. They encourage their employees to be open and dedicated to learning new ways to behave. To help them climb up the company hierarchy, they send their employees to training classes designed to teach all manner of new behaviors — empathy, assertiveness, relationship building, innovation, strategic thinking. From their perspective, one of the most admirable qualities an employee can possess is the willingness to transform herself through learning and self-discipline.

  The world’s great managers don’t share this perspective. Remember their mantra:

  People don’t change that much.

  Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out.

  Try to draw out what was left in.

  That is hard enough.

  They believe that a person’s talents, his mental filter, are “what was left in.” Therefore no amount of “smile school” training is going to transform the person who is intimidated by strangers into a smooth wooer. Despite his best efforts, the person who becomes less articulate the angrier he gets will never acquire what it takes to excel at debate. And no matter how much he understands the value of “win-win” scenarios, the intense competitor will never learn to love them.

  A person’s mental filter is as enduring and as unique as her fingerprint. This is a radical belief, one that flies in the face of decades of self-help mythology. But over the last ten years, neuroscience has started to confirm what these great managers have long believed.

  In 1990 Congress and the president declared the nineties the decade of the brain. They authorized funding, sponsored conventions, and generally did everything within their power to help the scientific community unravel the mysteries of the human mind.

  Their encouragement accelerated ongoing efforts by industry, academia, and research organizations. According to Lewis L. Judd, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health: “The pace of progress in neuroscience is so great that 90 percent of all we know about the brain we learned in the last ten years.”

  In the past we had to infer the workings of the brain from the behavior of the patient. Today new technologies like positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) actually allow scientists to see the brain at work. Armed with these and other tools, we have taken giant leaps in learning.

  We have learned that the causes of mental illness are as biological as any physical disease. We have learned why the neurotransmitter dopamine calms us down and why serotonin fires us up. We have learned that, contrary to what we used to think, our memories are not stored in one particular place but are scattered like clues on every highway and back alley of our brain.

  And we have learned how the brain grows. Given the pace of scientific discovery in this arena, we shall surely advance our knowledge dramatically over the next few years. But this is what we know today.

  At birth the child’s brain contains one hundred billion neurons, more brain cells than there are stars in the Milky Way. These cells will grow and die regularly throughout the child’s life, but their number will remain roughly the same. These cells are the raw material of the mind. But they are not the mind. The mind of the child lives between these cells. In the connections between the cells. In the synapses.

  During the first fifteen years of life, the carving of these synaptic connections is where the drama unfolds.

  From the day she was born, the child’s mind begins to reach out, aggressively, exuberantly. Beginning at the center of the brain, every neuron sends out thousands and thousands of signals. They are trying to talk to one another, to communicate, to make a connection. Imagine everyone alive today simultaneously trying to get in touch with 150,000 other people and you will get some idea of the wonderful scale, complexity, and vitality of the young mind.

  By the time the child reaches her third birthday the number of successful connections made is colossal — up to fifteen thousand synaptic connections for each of its one hundred billion neurons.

  But this is too many. She is overloaded with the volume of information whirling around inside her head. She needs to make sense of it all. Her sense. So during the next ten years or so, her brain refines and focuses its network of connections. The stronger synaptic connections become stronger still. The weaker ones wither away. Dr. Harry Chugani, professor of neurology at Wayne State University Medical School, likens this pruning process to a highway system:

  “Roads with the most traffic get widened. The ones that are rarely used fall into disrepair.”

  Scientists are still arguing about what causes some mental highways to be used more regularly than others. Some contend that the child’s genetic inheritance predisposes her toward certain mental pathways. Others claim that the way she is raised has a significant effect on which pathways will survive the Darwinian pruning and which will die.

  These views are not mutually exclusive. But whatever their nature-nurture bias, few disagree on the outcome of this mental pruning. By the time the child reaches her early teens, she has half as many synaptic connections as she did when she was three. Her brain has carved out a unique network of connections. She has some beautiful, frictionless, traffic-free, four-lane highways, where the connections are smooth and strong. And she has some barren wastelands, where no signal at all makes it across.

  If she ends up with a four-lane highway for empathy, she will feel every emotion of those around her as though it were her own. By contrast, if she has a wasteland for empathy, she will be emotionally blind, forever saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person — not out of malice, but simply out of an inability to pick up the frequency of the emotional signals being sent. Likewise if she has a four-lane highway for confrontation, she will be that lucky person whose brain just hands her one perfect word after another during the heat of a debate. If she has a wasteland for confrontation, she will find that her brain always shuts her mouth down at the most critical moments.

  These mental pathways are her filter. They produce the recurring pattern of behaviors that makes her unique. They tell her which stimuli to respond to and which to ignore. They define where she will excel and where she will struggle. They create all of her enthusiasms and all of her indifferences.

  The carving of these pathways is the carving of her character. Neuroscience is telling us that beyond her mid-teens there is a limit to how much of her character she can recarve.

  This does not mean that she cannot change. As we will describe later, she can learn new skills and new knowledge. She can alter her values. She can develop a greater sense of self-awareness and a greater capacity for self-regulation. And if she does indeed have a wasteland for confrontation, then with enough training, coaching, and encouragement, she can probably be helped to build a thin path so that she is at least able to cope with confrontation. But it does mean that in terms of these mental pathways, no amount of training, coaching, or encouragement will enable her to turn her barren wastelands into frictionless four-lane highways.

  Neuroscience confirms what great managers know. Her filter, and the recurring patterns of behavior that it crea
tes, is enduring. In the most important ways she is permanently, wonderfully, unique.

  So are you. And, of course, so are the people you hire.

  Skills, Knowledge, and Talents

  “What is the difference among the three?”

  Great managers are not troubled by the fact that there is a limit to how much they can rewire someone’s brain. Instead they view it as a happy confirmation that people are different. There is no point wishing away this individuality. It’s better to nurture it. It’s better to help someone understand his filter and then channel it toward productive behavior.

  So if you can’t carve out new talents for your people, what, if anything, can you change about them?

  First, you can help them discover their hidden talents. As we shall discuss in more detail in chapter 5, the best managers are adept at spotting a glimpse of a talent in someone and then repositioning him so that he can play to that talent more effectively.

  Second, a manager can teach her employees new skills and new knowledge. Here we come to one of the most profound insights shared by great managers: Skills, knowledge, and talents are distinct elements of a person’s performance. The distinction among the three is that skills and knowledge can easily be taught, whereas talents cannot. Combined in the same person, they create an enormously potent compound. But you must never confuse talents with skills and knowledge. If you do, you may waste a great deal of time and money trying to teach something that is fundamentally unteachable.

  Skills are the how-to’s of a role. They are capabilities that can be transferred from one person to another. For accountants, arithmetic is a skill. If, for some strange reason, the neophyte accountant doesn’t know how to do arithmetic, he can still be taught. For pilots, the mechanics of yaw, roll, and pitch are a skill. For administrative assistants, Microsoft Word or Excel are skills. For nurses, the details of how to give a safe injection are a skill. The best way to teach a skill is to break down the total performance into steps, which the student then reassembles. And, naturally, the best way to learn a skill is to practice.

  Your knowledge is simply “what you are aware of.” There are two kinds of knowledge: factual knowledge — things you know; and experiential knowledge — understandings you have picked up along the way.

  Factual knowledge for an accountant would be knowing the rules of double-entry bookkeeping. For flight attendants, the Federal Aviation Administration’s safety regulations are factual knowledge. For salespeople, their products’ features and benefits are factual knowledge. For engineers, the National Bureau of Standards’ electrical frequencies are factual knowledge. Factual knowledge can and should be taught.

  Experiential knowledge is a little different. It is less tangible and therefore much harder to teach. Acquiring it is your responsibility. You must discipline yourself to stop, look back on past experiences, and try to make sense of them. Through this kind of musing or reflection, you can start to see patterns and connections. You can start to understand.

  Some of these understandings are practical. For example, over a number of years an accountant comes to know a variety of ways to shield a client’s assets from excessive taxation. A retail store manager, reflecting back on customer buying patterns, now knows which products to highlight during the holiday seasons. A teacher, remembering the glazed eyes of past students, is now prepared with videos and field trips to spice up the particularly stodgy sections of the course.

  Some understandings are more conceptual. Your awareness of who you are and how you come across to others is experiential knowledge. It comes with time, if you are listening. In the same way, your values — those aspects of life that you hold dear — are experiential knowledge. As you make your choices, sometimes compromising, sometimes holding firm, you come to realize that certain aspects of your life are more important than others. These critical aspects become your values, guiding the choices you make in the future. Some of these values will remain constant throughout your life. Others will change with time and reflection.

  Talents are different phenomena altogether. Talents are the four-lane highways in your mind, those that carve your recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior. Through Gallup’s studies of great accountants, we have discovered that one of their most important talents is an innate love of precision. Ask a great accountant — not any accountant, but a great accountant — when he smiles and he will tell you, “When the books balance.” When the books balance, his world is perfect. He may not show it, but inside he is aglow. All he can think about is, Oh, when can I do that again! This might seem rather odd to you. But if you think about it, for the person blessed with an innate love of precision, accountancy must be a wonderful job. Every time his books balance he experiences absolute perfection in his work. How many of us can claim that?

  A love of precision is not a skill. Nor is it knowledge. It is a talent. If you don’t possess it, you will never excel as an accountant. If someone does not have this talent as part of his filter, there is very little a manager can do to inject it.

  THREE KINDS OF TALENT

  At Gallup we have studied the talents of over 150 distinct roles and, in the process, have identified a multitude of different talents (some of which are described in the appendix). As you would imagine, the talents needed to excel at these roles vary greatly — an all-star goalie in the NHL possesses rather different talents than an excellent Catholic deacon; the best nurses are not cut from the same cloth as the best stockbrokers.

  Fortunately we have found a way to simplify these diverse talents into three basic categories: striving talents, thinking talents, and relating talents.

  Striving talents explain the why of a person. They explain why he gets out of bed every day, why he is motivated to push and push just that little bit harder. Is he driven by his desire to stand out, or is good enough good enough for him? Is he intensely competitive or intensely altruistic or both? Does he define himself by his technical competence, or does he just want to be liked?

  Thinking talents explain the how of a person. They explain how he thinks, how he weighs up alternatives, how he comes to his decisions. Is he focused, or does he like to leave all of his options open? Is he disciplined and structured, or does he love surprises? Is he a linear, practical thinker, or is he strategic, always playing mental “what if?” games with himself?

  Relating talents explain the who of a person. They explain whom he trusts, whom he builds relationships with, whom he confronts, and whom he ignores. Is he drawn to win over strangers, or is he at ease only with his close friends? Does he think that trust must be earned, or does he extend trust to everyone in the belief that most will prove worthy of it? Does he confront people dispassionately, or does he avoid confrontation until finally exploding in an emotional tirade?

  Striving, thinking, and relating: these are the three basic categories of talent. Within each you will have your own combination of four-lane highways and barren wastelands. No matter how much you might yearn to be different, your combination of talents, and the recurring behaviors that it creates, will remain stable, familiar to you and to others throughout your life.

  A COUPLE OF MIND GAMES

  If you want to experience firsthand the distinct properties of skills, knowledge, and talents, try this little game.

  Can you see the well-known phrase or saying in this word:

  The solution: “One in a million.”

  If the answer leapt out at you, then you probably have an innate talent for finding word patterns. We have seen this kind of thinking talent in great computer programmers. Like them, you might also love crossword puzzles and brainteasers.

  But perhaps you didn’t see the answer immediately. If so, don’t worry. We will try to teach you a skill that will help you to improve your pattern-finding performance. The skill has three steps:

  Identify what seems out of place within the word.

  Evaluat
e where it is in relation to the whole word.

  Combine steps 1 and 2 and discover the phrase.

  Thus, with this first puzzle, the number 1 is out of place. Where is it in relation to the whole word? It is in the middle. So by combining these two facts, you discover the phrase: “One in a million.” Simple, really.

  Now try gaining some experience at applying this new skill. Can you see the well-known phrase in this word:

  What is out of place? The letter A. Where is it in relation to the rest of the word? It is raised and in the middle.

  The solution: “A raise in pay.”

  How about this one:

  What is out of place? The letter A again. Where is it in relation to the rest of the word? It is dropped and in the middle.

  The solution: “A drop in temperature.”

  One more:

  Hopefully the solution is starting to come a little quicker: “A fall from grace.”

  Okay, you have been given the opportunity to learn a new skill and to gain some experiential knowledge at applying this skill, just as you provide your people in the real world. But now we are going to change the rules on you, just as in the real world.

  Can you see the well-known phrase in these words:

  This one is a little harder, but if you have the innate thinking talent for perceiving patterns, then once again the solution should gradually emerge:

  “But on second thought.”

  But if you don’t have this talent, then the skills and knowledge you just acquired didn’t help you at all, did they? Lacking the talent, your performance suffered when you were confronted with a novel situation not covered in your training.