Marcus Buckingham's Speaking Topics:

 
1) 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. Mr. 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.

2) Strengths-Driven Performance

   During Marcus Buckingham’s 17 years with the Gallup Organization, he helped to guide ground-breaking 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.

    Mr. 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. Mr. 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.

3) 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 stockboys. 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.

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STRENGTHS ENGAGEMENT TRACK SURVEY

   Each keynote engagement includes at no extra charge an online Strengths Engagement Track (SET) survey for those who will be attending the keynote. This survey measures the current level of strengths engagement in your organization and compares the results to national averages. Marcus will discuss your organization’s aggregate score during his keynote, but individual responses to the survey remain confidential.

   Four to six weeks prior to your event, you will receive an e-mail with a web link for the SET Survey, which consists of 16 questions and should take approximately five minutes to complete. Because the SET results will be more representative with a higher participation rate, we encourage everyone in your organization to take the survey. A response deadline should be set one week before the keynote address to allow time for the results to be tabulated.

About Marcus Buckingham

In a world where efficiency and competency rule the workplace, where do personal strengths fit in?

   Marcus Buckingham has dedicated his career to answering this complex question. Using his nearly two decades of experience as a Senior Researcher at Gallup Organization, he has challenged entrenched preconceptions about achievement to get to the core of what drives success.

   The definitive treatment of strengths in the workplace can be found in Buckingham’s four 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; and Go Put Your Strengths To Work (2007). Buckingham’s work offers important insights into maximizing strengths, understanding the crucial differences between leadership and management, and fulfilling the quest for long-lasting personal satisfaction in work and in life.

   Buckingham’s newest book, The Truth About You: Your Secret to Success (2008), empowers readers to focus on themselves in order to craft a work life that plays to their strengths.

   The ultimate goal is to move companies toward greater success and productivity by creating a workplace in which employees spend more than 75% of each day on the job using their strongest skills and engaged in their favorite tasks, basically doing exactly what they want to do. Companies that focus on cultivating employees’ strengths rather than simply improving their weaknesses stand to dramatically increase efficiency while allowing for maximum personal growth.

   As he addresses more than 250,000 people around the globe each year, Buckingham touts this strengths revolution as the key to finding the most effective route to personal achievement and the missing link to the efficiency, competence, and high performance for which companies constantly strive. He challenges conventional wisdom and shows the correlation between engaged employees and business fundamentals such as turnover rates, customer satisfaction, profits and productivity.

   In his role as an author, independent consultant and speaker, Marcus Buckingham 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. He has appeared on numerous television programs, including “The Today Show” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” and is routinely lauded by such corporations as Toyota, Coca-Cola, 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.

   Marcus Buckingham graduated from Cambridge University in 1987 with a master’s degree in social and political science.