Marcus Wilfrid Buckingham is an English author, motivational speaker, and business consultant based in California. These Marcus Buckingham quotes will motivate you.
Best Marcus Buckingham Quotes
1. “Leaders are fascinated by future. You are a leader if and only if, you are restless for change, impatient for progress and deeply dissatisfied with status quo. Because in your head, you can see a better future. The friction between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’ burns you, stirs you up, propels you. This is leadership.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
2. “You grow most in your areas of greatest strength. You will improve the most, be the most creative, be the most inquisitive, and bounce back the fastest in those areas where you have already shown some natural advantage over everyone else your strengths. This doesn’t mean you should ignore your weaknesses. It just means you’ll grow most where you’re already strong.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
6. “Focusing on strengths is the surest way to greater job satisfaction, team performance and organizational excellence.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
7. “You will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
8. “Strengths are not activities you’re good at, they’re activities that strengthen you. A strength is an activity that before you’re doing it you look forward to doing it; while you’re doing it, time goes by quickly and you can concentrate; after you’ve done it, it seems to fulfill a need of yours.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
9. “The Four Keys of Great Managers: 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. and When developing someone, they help him find the right fit … not simply the next rung on the ladder.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
10. “Talent is the multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield. The time you spend with your best is, quite simply, your most productive time.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
11. “A note of caution: We can never achieve goals that envy sets for us. Looking at your friends and wishing you had what they had is a waste of precious energy. Because we are all unique, what makes another happy may do the opposite for you. That’s why advice is nice but often disappointing when heeded.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
12. “The difference between a pebble and a mountain lies in whom you ask to move it.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
13. “People leave managers, not companies” ~ Marcus Buckingham
14. “Innovation and best practices can be sown throughout an organization – but only when they fall on fertile ground.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
15. “As a general rule, people tend to do best what they enjoy doing most.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
16. “Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
17. “Companies don’t have one culture. They have as many as they have supervisors or managers. You want to build a strong culture? Hold every manager accountable for the culture that he or she builds.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
18. “Clarity is the answer to anxiety. Effective leaders are clear.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
19. “Managers are, and should be, totally responsible for recognizing individual strengths (both natural talents and skills), getting those strengths in proper alignment (i.e. in the right “seats”), and then leveraging them.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
20. “The secret to living a strong life is right in front of you, calling to you every day. It can be found in your emotional reaction to specific moments in your life.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
21. “The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
22. “Discover what you don’t like doing and stop doing it.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
23. “Define excellence vividly, quantitatively. Paint a picture for your most talented employees of what excellence looks like. Keep everyone pushing and pushing toward the right-hand edge of the bell curve.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
24. “Your strongest life is built through a continuous practice of designing moment by moment.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
25. “The opposite of a leader isn’t a follower. The opposite of a leader is a pessimist.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
26. “The true genius of a great manager is his or her ability to individualize. A great manager is one who understands how to trip each person’s trigger.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
27. “If we have to know without a doubt that the choices we are making are the perfect ones, we risk never making any choices at all.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
28. “It remains true that great managers recognize individualities and focus on developing strengths rather than weaknesses. Great leaders, in sharp contrast, recognize what is (or could be) shared in common – a vision, a dream, a mission, whatever – and inspire others to join them in the given enterprise.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
29. “Forcing your employees to follow required steps only prevents customer dissatisfaction. If your goal is truly to satisfy, to create advocates, then the step-by-step approach alone cannot get you there. Instead, you must select employees who have the talent to listen and to teach, and then you must focus them toward simple emotional outcomes like partnership and advice….Identify a person’s strenths. Define outcomes that play to those strengths. Find a way to count, rate or rank those outcomes. And then let the person run.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
30. “You can find energizing moments in each aspect of your life, but to do so you must learn how to catch them, hold on to them, to feel the pull of their weight and allow yourself to follow where they lead.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
31. “Clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
32. “Always work hard. Intensity clarifies. It creates not only momentum, but also the pressure you need to feel either friction, or fulfillment.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
33. “In the minds of great managers, consistent poor performance is not primarily a matter of weakness, stupidity, disobedience, or disrespect. It is a matter of miscasting.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
34. “The best strategy for building a competitive organization is to help individuals become more of who they are.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
35. “CEOs hate variance. It’s the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
36. “Many of us feel stress and get overwhelmed not because we’re taking on too much, but because we’re taking on too little of what really strengthens us.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
37. “Great managers know they don’t have 10 salespeople working for them. They know they have 10 individuals working for them . A great manager is brilliant at spotting the unique differences that separate each person and then capitalizing on them.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
38. “A strength is what you do that makes you feel strengthened.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
39. “All the great organizations have great managers at all levels who recognize where their culture is getting stronger and where it is getting weaker. There are always reasons why.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
40. “Everyone can probably do at least one thing better than ten thousand other people.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
41. “Passion isn’t something that lives way up in the sky, in abstract dreams and hopes. It lives at ground level, in the specific details of what you’re actually doing every day.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
42. “Authenticity is your most precious commodity as a leader.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
43. “We live with them every day, and they come so easily to us that they cease to be precious.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
44. “No idea will work if people don’t trust your intentions toward them.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
45. “People should be hired “as is” and their managers then help them to develop their individual strengths while completing tasks for which they have the greatest aptitude and in which they have the greatest interest.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
46. “There has to be a way to redirect employee’s driving ambition and to channel it more productively. There is. Create heroes in every role. Make every role, performed at excellence, a respected profession.” ~ Marcus Buckingham quotes
47. “Great leaders rally people to a better future.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
48. “People quit managers, not jobs.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
49. “Too many companies waste time trying to eliminate their employees’ weaknesses when, in fact, they should concentrate on developing their strengths.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
50. “There is no shortage of mechanisms by which to measure almost anything.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
51. “We dream of having a clean house – but who dreams of actually doing the cleaning? We don’t have to dream about doing the work, because doing the work is always within our grasp; the dream, in this sense, is to attain the goal without the work.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
52. “If you want to be clear, act.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
53. “If the manager really is the problem, try to get reassigned elsewhere in the organization or start looking for one in which you can play to your strengths.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
54. “You will learn and grow the least in your areas of weakness.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
55. “When you feel as though you can’t do something, the simple antidote is action: Begin doing it. Start the process, even if it’s just a simple step, and don’t stop at the beginning.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
56. “As with all catalysts, the manager’s function is to speed up the reaction between two substances, thus creating the desired end product. Specifically, the manager creates performance in each employee by speeding up the reaction between the employee’s talent and the company’s goals, and between the employee’s talent and the customer’s needs.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
57. “We all want the chance to express the very best of ourselves and to be challenged to keep reaching for more. Our time at work affords us this chance – not the only chance, to be sure, but, given that we’re there forty or fifty hours a week, it’s one of the best.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
58. “To get the best coaching outcomes, always have your 1-on-1’s on your employee’s turf not yours. In your office the truth hides.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
59. “Every time you make a rule you take away a choice, and choice, with all of its illuminating repercussions, is the fuel for learning.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
60. “The best way to find out whether you’re on the right path? Stop looking at the path.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
61. “It’s a special person – and personality – who can lead a start-up to soaring success and sustain that success for the long term. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are star examples.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
62. “There are “four keys” to becoming an excellent manager: finding the right fit for employees, focusing on strengths of employees, defining the right results, and hiring for talent – not just knowledge and skills.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
63. “You shouldn’t take pride in your natural talents any more than you should take pride in your sex, your race or color of your hair” ~ Marcus Buckingham
64. “The time you spend with your best (employees) is, quite simply, your most productive time.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
65. “I do still get extremely nervous before speeches. My biggest fear is that I’ll be standing there in front of hundreds of people and be incapable of talking. I’m afraid that I’ll make a complete fool of myself and be unable to go on.” ~ Marcus Buckingham
