The best way to find out whether you're on the right path? Stop looking at the path.
Marcus BuckinghamRead
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.
Interpretation
Excellence should be clearly defined and visually represented to inspire employees to strive for it.
Marcus Buckingham emphasizes the importance of defining excellence in a detailed and quantitative manner to motivate talented employees. By clearly illustrating what excellence looks like, leaders can inspire their team to continuously improve and aim for the highest standards, pushing the boundaries of their abilities and potential.
In practice
In a team meeting to set goals and expectations for the upcoming project.
The best way to find out whether you're on the right path? Stop looking at the path.
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.
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.
Most of my work has been in corporations, studying how you build an organization that helps people to identify and work to their strengths.
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.
Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in.
I have not the particular shining bauble or feather in my cap for crowds to gaze at or kneel to, but I have power and resolution for foes to tremble at.
And I will do everything that I can as long as I am President of the United States to remind the American people that we are one nation under God, and we may call that God different names but we remain one nation.
You need to understand, if you take out a government, take out a regime, guess who becomes the government and regime and is responsible for the country? You are. So if you break it, you own it.
An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn't have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.
My grandmother was kind, but she knew what she wanted and she wasn't afraid to give a command. When, eventually, I ran my own kitchen, I realized I had a leadership model reaching back into my earliest memories.
Leadership contains certain elements of good management, but it requires that you inspire, that you build durable trust. For an organization to be not just good but to win, leadership means evoking participation larger than the job description, commitment deeper than any job contract's wording.
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