Marcus Buckingham

Leading Authority and Best Selling Author on Employee Productivity and the Best Practices of Leadership and Management

In-Person Fee Range
$50,000 or greater
(Inquire for virtual fee)

Travels From
California, United States

Leading Authority and Best Selling Author on Employee Productivity and the Best Practices of Leadership and Management

Marcus Buckingham is a global researcher and thought leader focused on unlocking strengths, increasing performance and pioneering the future of how people work.

Research

Building on nearly two decades of experience as a Senior Researcher at Gallup Organization, he currently guides the vision of ADP Research Institute as Head of People + Performance research. He founded The Marcus Buckingham Company in 2006 with a clear mission: to instigate a “strengths revolution.” It started, as all revolutions do, with the simplest of ideas: that when people spend the majority of each day on the job using their greatest talents and engaged in their favorite tasks, basically doing exactly what they want to do, both they and their organizations will win.

Strengths Revolution

In other words, companies that focus on cultivating employees’ strengths rather than simply improving on people’s weaknesses stand to dramatically increase efficiency and productivity while allowing for maximum personal growth.

Keynote Speaker

In all of his speeches, Marcus demonstrates the correlation between strengths-driven, engaged employees and business fundamentals such as turnover rates, customer satisfaction, profits, and productivity. Challenging entrenched preconceptions about achievement to get to the core of what drives success, Marcus’s strengths-based approach is a win/win scenario that, without exaggeration, will define the future of work.

Leadership and Management

Once you’ve broken all the rules and launched your career by writing an instant classic management book, what do you do for an encore? If you’re Marcus Buckingham, you dedicate yourself to understanding what makes world-class managers excel, bottling it, and sharing it with the world. Marcus first conquered the bestseller lists in 1999 with First, Break All the Rules. While the title may imply an iconoclastic streak, his continuing plea for managers to break with tradition has nothing to do with rebellion; instead, he argues, rules must be broken and discarded because they stifle the originality and uniqueness — the strengths — that can enable all of us to achieve our highest performance. The goal is to provide team leaders with the insights and tools they need to turn talent into performance and drive the organization toward greater success and productivity.

Books

The definitive treatment of strengths in the workplace can be found in his best-selling books: First, Break All the Rules (coauthored with Curt Coffman), Now, Discover Your Strengths (coauthored with Donald O. Clifton), The One Thing You Need to Know, Go Put Your Strengths To Work, The Truth About You, Find Your Strongest Life, and StandOut 2.0.

Nine Lies About Work

His latest book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World takes an in-depth look at the lies that pervade our workplaces and the core truths that will help us change it for the better. The goal is to provide team leaders with the insights and tools they need to turn talent into performance.

Media

As an internationally renowned thought leader and business expert, Marcus has been the subject of in-depth profiles in The New York Times, Fortune, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal and has appeared on numerous television programs, including “Larry King Live,” “The Today Show” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

Clients

He is routinely lauded by such corporations as Toyota, Facebook, lululemon, Coca-Cola, Box, Master Foods, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, and Disney as an invaluable resource in informing, challenging, mentoring and inspiring people to find their strengths and sustain long-lasting personal success. He now leads People + Performance research at the ADP Research Institute and remains CEO of The Marcus Buckingham Company (TMBC).

Find Your Edge: Win At Work

Excellence happens all the time in an organization, but it can be tricky to harness this excellence and make it work for you. So often, when companies try to reproduce what their best performers do differently, the result is just another lifeless policy that ends up constraining people instead of freeing them to do their best work. The trick is to help people put innovative ideas into practice without stifling the personal strengths that give them their edge. In this speech, Marcus presents a customized best practice delivery system for both managers and individual contributors. Using a simple, easy-to-remember scheme to identify each person’s unique combination of strengths, Marcus gives individuals tips and techniques on how to put their particular edge to use. And managers will get lots of raw material to be better coaches based on the specific strengths of their team members. At the end of the speech, you will know how to move beyond the one-size-fits-all approach and find those practices that are best for you.

What the World’s Best Managers Do Differently

What sets great companies apart? Survey data gathered over decades’ worth of interviews with thousands of managers and workers around the world reveals one simple truth: there are no great companies. Every company is made up of separate teams, and the performance of those teams, no matter how successful the company may be, varies widely. What makes the difference? The manager. Managers play a significant role in creating an environment within which individuals can thrive, discover their talents and use their best selves daily. Great managers help people to identify and leverage their unique strengths. Buckingham will discuss the four key demands a manager must fulfill in order to provide the kind of environment that enables people to achieve peak performance on a regular basis: Select the right people for the right roles; Clarify expectations of the manager and of the employee; Engage team members by paying constant attention; and Accelerate performance by maximizing strengths and neutralizing weaknesses. In short, his presentation will address how great managers turn talents into performance.

Strengths-Driven Performance

During Marcus Buckingham’s 17 years with the Gallup Organization, he helped to guide groundbreaking research on the world’s best leaders, managers and workplaces. This research was used as a basis for his best-selling books First, Break all the Rules and Now Discover Your Strengths. His subsequent best-selling book Go Put Your Strengths to Work forms the foundation for the “Strengths in the Workplace” keynote address. Marcus Buckingham will present key data from a number of different industries demonstrating the correlation between performance and engagement. He discusses the factors at play with engaged teams vs. disengaged teams and drills down to the specific lever that recent research indicates most impacts engagement: the extent to which employees have the opportunity to play to their strengths. When employees have the opportunity to apply their greatest strengths at work, they turbocharge their careers and everybody wins. Companies find their employees are more productive and their teams are more effective. Despite this, research shows a majority of people do not fully use their strengths at work. Buckingham will examine current corporate levels of engaging the strengths of employees and look at the psychological and practical obstacles that can get in the way of creating a strengths-based organization. Throughout his presentation, he will offer a number of different strategies to support people in leveraging the best of themselves and others in the workplace.

Finding Your Strongest Life

In the four decades since the beginning of the modern women’s movement, women have secured greater opportunity, greater influence, greater independence, more free time, and more money. Despite all those important gains, however, recent longitudinal research indicates that women have become more unhappy, anxious and stressed during that same time period, and that they get sadder as they get older (while men, in contrast, get happier as they age). Marcus Buckingham will explore the data behind the startling findings on women’s happiness and discuss the lessons to be learned from happy, successful women who buck the statistical trends.

The Difference between Great Managing and Great Leading

The many facets of great managing and great leading could be detailed endlessly, but Marcus Buckingham draws on a wealth of examples to uncover the single controlling insight that lies at the heart of each. Lose sight of this “one thing” and even your best efforts will be diminished or compromised. Success comes to those who remain mindful of the core insight, understand all of its ramifications, and orient their decisions around it. Buckingham backs his arguments with authoritative research from a wide variety of sources, including his own data and in-depth interviews with individuals at every level of an organization, from CEOs to hotel maids and stock boys. He cuts through the thicket of often-conflicting possibilities and zeroes in on what matters most, revealing the surprisingly different keys to great managing and great leading.

NINE LIES ABOUT WORK: What the research reveals about the real world of work

Examine the 9 lies that are pervasive in our organizations. Learn the truths behind them, backed by data and research. Discover how you can become a Freethinking Leader.

All Marcus Buckingham Books

Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World
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StandOut: The Groundbreaking New Strengths Assessment from the Leader of the Strengths Revolution
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Find Your Strongest Life: What the World’s Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently
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The Truth About You
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Go Put Your Strengths to Work: Six Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance
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The One Thing You Need to Know: About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success
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Now, Discover Your Strengths: How to Develop Your Talents and Those of the People You Manage
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First, Break All The Rules: What The World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
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Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader�s Guide to the Real World
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Find Your Strongest Life: What the World�s Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently
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Recent Books

Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World
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StandOut: The Groundbreaking New Strengths Assessment from the Leader of the Strengths Revolution
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