The one thing you need to know - Marcus Buckingham

I read this book about 2 months ago, finally having time to update some summary about this nice book.

Chapter 1

A few things you should know about the “One Thing”

The one thing you need to know:

• Great managing
• Great leading
• Sustained individual success

Chapter 2

Managing and Leading: What’s the Difference?

In this chapter, the author mainly discussed about the how one defines leadership and what need to be posses to become a leader:

1) Leaders, apparently, are not born, but rather are made by their training and their diligence.

2) Varies traits leader need to posses:

In the book ‘Prima Leadership’: emotional self control, transparency, initiative, building bonds.

Leadership by Rudy Giuliani :know your values, be hopeful, be prepared, show courage, build great teams, LOVE people.

Be, Know , Do, Leadership the Army Way: A combination of loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honour, integrity, and personal courage ,coincidently spell out LDRSHIP

3) Great Leaders rally people to a better future. An effective leader might also be competitive, achievement oriented, and a good coach. But these are not characteristics that make him a leader. He is a leader if, and only if, he is able to rally others to the better future he sees.

4) Leaders are fascinated by the future. They are restless for change, impatient for progress, and deeply dissatisfied with status quo.

5) As a leader you must believe, deeply, instinctively, that thing can get better.

6) The Leader sees things differently. He starts with his image of the future. Only with this image clear in his mind does he turn his attention to persuading other people that they can be successful in the future he envisions.

Chapter 3

Great Managing

This chapter mainly covered: What skills will prevent you from failing as a manager?

The Author believes strongly in these 4 practices:

1) Selecting good people

Know what talent you looking for is important: Do you want someone who is competitive, or altruistic, or focused, or entrepreneurial, or creative, or analytical?

2) Define clear expectations.

How good managers bring clarity to the team? The Suggestion was:’Constantly’. Goal setting should be done constantly to check progress, offer advice, and agree on course of corrections.

3) Praise and recognition.

Excellence is rarely a function of one achievement, but rather is a result of repeated practice and incremental improvement. Managers should notice this incremental improvement and celebrate them. The person will be more likely to repeat them and climb towards excellence.

4) Show care for the people.

With care, people start to feel more secure, more willing to share our confidences, more willing to take risks, and more willing to support one another.

Mediocre managers assume that their employees will be motivated by the same things, driven by the same goals, desire the same kind of relationships, and learn in roughly the same way.

Great managers do the opposite. They discover what is unique about each person and capitalize on it.

Why is that so?

Firstly, capitalizing on each person’s uniqueness saves time.

Instead of coaching someone to be a well-rounded, managers could have better spent on cultivating employees natural ability.

Second, finding and capitalizing each person’s uniqueness make each person more accountable.

Third, capitalizing what is unique about each person builds strong sense of team.

By identifying, emphasizing, and celebrating each person’s uniqueness, there will be ‘I’ in a team.

What are the three things to know about a person in order to manage him effectively?

1) Learn his strengths and weakness

2) What triggers him to perform

3) His unique style of learning

Chapter 4

Great Leading

The Truly effective leader, while not denying the truth that each person is uniquely different, would choose instead to focus on a separate but equally powerful truth: despite our differences, we all share a great deal.

Leader should able to identify the five fears and create attention:

1) Fear of Death (Need for serity)

2) Fear of Outsider (Need for Community)

3) Fear of Future (Need for clarity)

4) Fear of Chaos (Need for Authority)

5) Fear of insignificance (The Need for respect)

To be a successful leader, one simply must find a way to engage our fear of the unknown and turn it spiritedness.

Chapter 5

The twenty Percenters

The twenty percenters are those few individuals who, by dint of their ability, hard work, persistence, contacts, some measure of good fortune, manage to experience extraordinary, repeated, and sustained success. They choose wisely in their careers and then, as the years goby, they build on their early successes, navigating around life’s obstacles, or bulldozing through them, or clambering over them, making one right move after another, in a seemingly unending series of smart bets and excellent performances.

One Thing we need to know to sustain our success:

Discover What You Don’t Like Doing and Stop Doing it

Sustained success means making the greatest possible impact over the longest period of time.

Success requires two things:

1.Targeting the learning toward those area where we possess some kind of comparative advantage over everybody else.

‘Something special must leave the room when you leave the room’ Peter Drucker

2. Success requires that one not only get good at something, but stay good and get better.

Long term success demand one be resilient, flexible, open to learning, innovative, confident, optimistic, and, sufficiently devoid of stress to maintain your energy for the long haul.

Chapter 6

The three Main Contenders

Contender 1

‘Find the right tactics and employ them’

Here is where I think is interesting: Permission paradox

Translation: You can’t get the job without experience, but you can’t get the experience without the job.

Solution: One should proactively seek out special project s and one off assignments because these will allow one to claim to have skills and experiences not supplied by current job.

Contender 2

‘Find your flaws and fix them’

“Start with the flaws that prevent you from achieving minimal performance standards for key tasks. When you’ve taken care of those, move on to the weakness that are preventing you from advancing your career.

Contender 3

‘Discover your strengths and cultivate them’

Some ways to discover your strength: StrengthsFinder, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Kolbe profile.

Chapter 7

So, How Do You Sustain Success IF…..?

You are bored

When the content of your job proves deeply uninteresting to you, you must change the job.

You’re unfulfilled

You may enjoy the activities of the job and even perform them well, but your values are not engaged.

To stay in the job for the money or the security is, in the long run, a bad bargain.

You’re frustrated

This happens when the interest and the values are both engaged, but somehow the strengths are not in play.

Tweak your role so that a part of it plays to your strengths, experience some success, and then parlay this success into a new, changed role that plays to your strengths entirely.

You’re drained

Find someone else to do what you hate to do. One can be best in all fields. Do what you best in and let the other jobs done by other people who also good in that.