Nine lies about work: debunking some “well-known truths”

Author Moonshot.news

Published on: 17/09/2021

In their book “Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World,” Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall argue that many of the “accepted truths” of work are deeply flawed.

Throughout our professional careers many of us have experienced – or probably will at some point – some thriving and healthy workplaces, and some toxic, dysfunctional ones. We have seen teams coming together to produce thrilling outcomes, but also teams that just couldn’t get it together and finally failed.

Through these working experiences we have developed our own beliefs about what makes an organization or a team successful. And sometimes these beliefs come in contrast with what we’re told to do by leadership and management “experts”.

In their book “Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World,” strengths guru and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham and Cisco Leadership and Team Intelligence head Ashley Goodall explore the disconnect between how we work best and how we’re told to work. And they argue that many of the accepted truths of work are deeply flawed.

Forget what you know about the world of work. You crave feedback. Your organization’s culture is the key to its success. Strategic planning is essential. Your competencies should be measured and your weaknesses shored up. Leadership is a thing. These may sound like basic truths of our work lives today. But actually, they’re lies, the authors say. 

As Buckingham and Goodall argue in their book, there are some big lies – distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking – that we encounter every time we show up for work. Nine lies, to be exact, that “cause dysfunction and frustration, ultimately resulting in workplaces that are a pale shadow of what they could be”. 

“But there are those who can get past the lies and discover what’s real. These freethinking leaders recognize the power and beauty of our individual uniqueness. They know that emergent patterns are more valuable than received wisdom and that evidence is more powerful than dogma.” 

With engaging stories and incisive analysis, the authors reveal the essential truths that such freethinking leaders will recognize immediately: that it is the strength and cohesiveness of your team, not your company’s culture, that matter most; that we should focus less on top-down planning and more on giving our people reliable, real-time intelligence; that rather than trying to align people’s goals we should strive to align people’s sense of purpose and meaning; that people don’t want constant feedback, they want helpful attention. “This is the real world of work, as it is and as it should be.”