WILLOW Magazine, Issue 3, 2005 The One Thing Management vs. Leadership. What’s the One Thing you need to know about them? An interview with Marcus Buckingham Marcus Buckingham is on a roll. His new book, The One Thing You Need to Know, is a best-seller, he was recently featured on the cover of USA Today, and he’s in high demand as a speaker. Buckingham was one of the featured speakers at The Leadership Summit 2004 and has participated in other WCA training events since then. His new book states that most situations can be distilled down to one core concept, and once that concept is discovered it can dramatically improve action and results. He applies this theory to management and leadership alike, drawing marked distinctions between the two and bringing focus to the “one thing” that makes each of them effective. We sat down with him recently in his home and discussed how these concepts could help church leaders become more effective. Willow: Most people have probably never thought much about the differences between a manager and a leader, but you say there are some very distinct differences that we should be aware of. So lets tackle them one at a time. What is a manager, and what’s the “one thing” that makes someone a great manager? Buckingham: A manager is a catalyst. You hire a bunch of talented people, you leave them alone, and they will be productive. That is what they do. They are talented. They do not need a manager to make that happen. But a manager speeds up the reaction between the talented person and the goals of the company through the way they set expectations, the way they build relationships, the way they coach, or the way they recognize performance. They speed up turning a person’s natural ability into real performance. The manager’s role is an intermediary role between the company and the person. The one thing that great managers know in order to do that well is they find what is unique about a person, and then capitalize on it. The real challenge of managing is to pay close enough attention to another human being — to be able to see how one person differs from another in terms of their talents, their styles of learning, their motivations, and then figure out how to arrange the world so they can capitalize on that uniqueness. If you can identify what is unique about a person and then figure out how to arrange the world to use that, you will excel as a manager. If you cannot, you never will. A great manager knows if you are going to be efficient at turning a person’s talent into a performance, then you have got to come at it with a few key assumptions, and two of them would be: a) that each person’s talents are enduring and unique, and, b) that a person is going to learn the most, grow the most, develop the most out of their areas of strongest talent, not out of their areas of weakness. As I said at The Leadership Summit last year, you look around, and you can see that a) most people do not think about management the way I just described it and b) even if they do think about management as a coach, as a developer of people, they get it backwards as to what managers should focus on, and they tell people that managers should focus on remediating a person’s flaws. We just did a poll recently where I asked: “When you sit down and talk with your manager about your performance, what do you spend the most time talking about?” Twenty-five percent of them said strengths. Seventy-five percent of people are focused on weakness. So, if you want to say what separates a good manager from a great one, it would be that ability to perceive individual differences and then capitalize on those differences. But it’s weird ... no one writes about management that way. No one has isolated individualization as the critical skill to development as a manager, and I do not know why because when you talk to the great ones that is all they talk about. Willow: What if you manage a lot of people? How do you customize the game plan for maximum output? Buckingham: Many managers I know keep a cheat sheet on each of their people, and whatever they are thinking about now reflects a complicated game of chess. That is why great managers are chess players, and not checker players. Checker pieces all move in the same way. But in chess every piece moves differently. The best managers will write down your strengths. They are always using all the available information to keep adding to their descriptions of a person’s strength. Each person has a page, if you will, and the manager just keeps adding to that page. It is not a personnel file where demerits get noted. It’s more of a “best plays for this player” kind of a file. Again, the job of the manager is not to try and arrange the world so each person can be successful. The job of a manager is to create the greatest performance from that group of people. Willow: Then what is a leader, and what makes someone a great leader? Buckingham: There are so many definitions of this. A lot of leadership books often point to a combination of four things: Initiative, creativity, the courage of one’s convictions, and integrity. These are all great, but they are not necessarily the traits of a great leader. In other words, you can have all of those things and lead no one. The chief responsibility of a leader is to rally lots of people toward a better future. It’s somehow being able to touch people in such a way that they want to help you make your better future come true, and of course that implies a) you as a leader can see a better future, and b) you have the ego to believe that you are going to make that future come true. It also implies that you have some ability, through your images, your stories, your words, your communication ability, to somehow persuade lots of people to want to help you make that future come true. People have a natural and legitimate fear of the unknown, a fear of the future. How does a leader turn the legitimate fear of the unknown into competence? Through clarity. It is not consistency, it is not passion, it is not insight, it is not creativity. It is clarity. Clarity is the antidote to anxiety. When you look at what separates a good leader from a great one or an average leader from a great one it would be ability to provide vivid and specific clarity to four or five key areas. It is amazing to me when you look at some leaders and they are unnecessarily vague, unnecessarily generic, and provide no descriptions of the future. Look at most mission statements, for example. They are either generic or they are too complex. But the best ones are simply clear! Willow: Any examples? Buckingham: Sure. Take Bill Hybels, for instance. Look at what he has done at Willow Creek. There is no generalization there. When he talks about the better future he wants to build, he is incredibly vivid. It is the vividness of great leaders, and that does not just come to him on stage. There is a lot of forethought. A lot of rumination. He sees things through. “What is this going to be like? What are we going to offer?” He makes us see it. Martin Luther King — “I have a dream that one day the sons of slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” OK, I can see that! Even the day before he died, in that speech in Memphis, he talked about seeing the day where a black boy and a white girl are walking hand in hand down the same street, being taught in the same class, and drinking out of the same water fountain. I can see that! So, if you have some natural optimism, some natural self-assurance, then the skill and the discipline you need to develop is to become increasingly vivid —increasingly specific — in the way you describe where you are going. Willow: You have spent a lot of time with Fortune 500 companies, and have studied their leadership and management at length. But as of late, through your interactions with the WCA, Injoy, and a few others, you started to delve a bit into the church world. What parallels if any, do you see? Buckingham: Well, I am of the belief that leadership is leadership is leadership, and management is management is management. I do not care what the environment is. If you are going to have a flourishing church, you better understand that when you bring people into the church to work with you, whether they are volunteers or whether they are on staff, you better cast them in the right role. You better understand how they are unique. There is no point getting someone to come in and work with you because they so believe in the mission of the church, and you assign them to be a money raiser, for example, when they hate making those calls. That is a stupid management decision, and if you want to grow any organization, church or company, it has got to have some great managers. That is why I just rail against the idea that managers are just leaders-in-waiting, but just unsophisticated leaders waiting to grow up. They are two very different frames of reference! One of the things that the best leaders have figured out is people’s confidence in this better future grows when you can be vivid and clear and specific about who you serve. Take Apple Computers, for example. Steve Jobs says, “We serve people who really like cool stuff that is easy to use.” It is no more pretentious than that, but that really constrains him toward trying to serve people who want cool stuff that is easy to use. Therefore, “anything that is not cool stuff that is easy to use, we do not want to serve that group.” Well, that is constraining. But who cares? It is so vivid! You can start orientating all of your thinking around how to deliver to that group. Many leaders say, “We serve everybody all the time.” That’s not possible. Focus is needed. Look at Southwest Airlines. They say, “We are going to serve the person who wants a cheap fare. They are going to line up to get their seat assignments, we are not going to serve anything but peanuts, and they are going to have to line up outside to check their baggage in. That is what it is, and we are going to serve the person who wants that kind of an experience. Because that is such a pure focus, Southwest Airlines has become almost an expert in the psychographics of that group and they are so good at the discipline of learning who that customer is, and what that customer wants. Willow: Are there any advantages that church leaders have that perhaps marketplace leaders do not? Buckingham: I think the great thing for a church leader, frankly, is that mankind has a natural yearning for meaning, for purpose, for someplace in the grander scheme of things, and the corporate world is barren of that. A church has a much greater opportunity to appeal to that need for being part of something bigger than ourselves — that craving for meaning. That craving for significance. Selling more Tide, for most of us ain’t going to do it. This is the wonderful opportunity for church leaders to ask, “Who do we serve? We serve people like this, and here is why it is important.” Willow: Are there any examples in the church world that you have seen of highly effective managers or leaders at work? Buckingham: Managers are hard to know, because you have to find them to study them because no one knows who they are. You have to dig to find them. I do not know Rick Warren, I do not know John Maxwell, but having seen Bill Hybels at work ... what impressed me most about Bill, frankly, was his clarity about who he serves, and I’ve got to believe that a lot of the success of Willow Creek is due to the fact that he specifically determined, “We are going to serve this group, and here is why. This is what they are like. This is why it is important.” Not long after the Summit last year, I went to work with one of the largest financial institutions in this country and I asked the president of the organization if he knew who they were serving. He said, “We serve people with $500,000 to invest.” What a terrible answer that is! Because if you have $501,000, that $500,000 feels really different than if you have five million to invest. So, it was a purely demographic answer. It was not a psychographic answer as in, “What do the people want from you that you are trying to serve? Describe for me what they want. Do they want security? Do they want growth? Why are they coming to you? What do they want from you? I am not saying that is the only thing that a leader should do, but that is the first question a leader should ask. Willow: Lots of leadership books say that we all must learn to be leaders, but in your book you disagree. Buckingham: Yes, I would disagree 100 percent. I do not think we should all be leaders because I do not think we should all be delusional. We are not all leaders. There are very few people who can do what Bill Hybels has done or what Rick Warren has done. When you are leading, you are describing a better future. You are seeing that future vividly. You are trying to describe that future to other people, and get other people to be as excited about it as, say, Jim Mellado was when he wrote the Harvard case study on Willow Creek and said, “This is so good I want to join in!” The last thing Willow Creek needs is a bunch of other people charging around, yanking everyone around in other directions. It needs people who are incredible stewards of themselves, and in some cases incredible stewards of other people, incredible managers. It does not need tons of leaders. It needs people asking how they can use their greatest strength in order to further the vision that Bill had, and bring that hope to the world. Does the church need leaders? Yes, it does. It needs leaders to define the hope vividly, and to quell people’s anxiety about change in the future, and to replace it with passion, enthusiasm, and confidence. Probably every church needs one or two leaders to bring back that kind of clarity, but other than that we do not need everyone to be a leader. We need everyone to be a gifted steward of themselves. Willow: You say in your book that “optimism and ego are the talents underpinning all great leadership.” But how do church leaders reconcile that tension when they have a higher imperative to essentially renounce ego and lead from humility. Buckingham: When you interview the best leaders and you ask them questions like, “How important is it that you excel — that you be the very best?” they say it’s very important. You ask them to describe the prizes and awards they have won, and off the top of their head they can give you more than most people. You ask them what kind of a person they would like to work for, they say they would not. You can keep going down a list of questions like that, and there is a very, very clear configuration of answers that characterizes the best leaders, which in most standard psychological language would be “ego.” You could find a nice way to say it, but it is a craving for significance. Willow: Personal. Buckingham: Personal significance. Now you can attach that to something else — my beliefs, my team, my country... Willow: … my church ... Buckingham: My church, yes. But it begins with a total dissatisfaction with mediocrity, a total dissatisfaction with obscurity, an almost physical rejection of insignificance. If you use this definition and you look at a guy like Bill Hybels, for instance. I’m sorry, but you do not make the claims that he is making if you do not on some level believe that you have the responsibility to make a huge difference in the world. So that is the ego part. Willow: What about the humility part? Buckingham: Humility is a tough word. I know I keep using Bill Hybels, but let’s just continue with this example. Bill is not humble in his goals. His hope for the world — “the church is the hope for the world.” That is not a humble claim! I do not know what the opposite of humble is, but that is not a humble claim at all. It is a huge claim! So, to say the best leaders are humble implies you should become more humble if you want to be a better leader, and it is just not true. What should you tell them? Believe in yourself less? Have less arrogant goals? Make your dreams less all-encompassing? I do not want 5,000 people on Sunday? What are you going to do with that? Ego, as I describe it, comes out of that part of the message that you are special, and that your talents should not be buried, they should be used. If one of the things you should be is a leader, then claim it. Claim it! If I were to write another book about this, I would think I would engage those two ideas rather more directly, and ask how does humility tie into ego? Where does that fit? The point I was trying to make here is from a purely pragmatic developmental prospective telling someone to become more humble if they want to grow as a leader does not help them. Willow: Are leaders born or made? Buckingham: I think they are born then made. Just like you can practice any discipline and get better, you can grow as a leader. But, as I said in the book, the two primary talents you better have as a leader are optimism and ego, and everything that I know says those things cannot be developed. Willow: Anything else you’d like to say to church leaders? Buckingham: Just be clear. Always strive toward clarity. I always loved Corinthians 13:13, you know, “faith, hope, and love — and the greatest of these is love.” I cannot quote Scripture at length, but for whatever reason that has always stuck in my mind from a very, very early age because it was so clarifying. I thought, why would he bother to say that, and why those three? But it is beautifully clear. “If this young church in Corinth is going to survive, guys, it’s love you’ve got to focus it on. That would be your strength — love.” That is leadership as much as anything else. Church leaders can do a lot worse than look at probably the greatest church leader of them all — the Apostle Paul — and look for the kind of clarity he provided. Clarity is what we seek. I think church leaders have a wonderful opportunity to step into the middle of this mix and say with clarity and confidence: “This is who we serve; this is what our strength is; this is what we believe.” The One Thing You Need to Know Great managing, leading, and career success —Buckingham draws on a wealth of applicable examples to reveal that a controlling insight lies at the heart of the three. Lose sight of this “one thing” and even the best efforts will be diminished or compromised. To order your copy of The One Thing You Need to Know, call (800) 570-9812 Top