Marcus Buckingham

Why organisations work with Marcus Buckingham

• He is the source, not a secondary interpreter, of the strengths-based management research that now sits inside most large engagement and performance programmes.
• His HBR cover story with Ashley Goodall, “The Feedback Fallacy,” was named by HBR as one of the most influential articles of its first century, and gives executives a defensible reason to dismantle conventional review cycles.
• He brings a working evidence base from the ADP Research Institute, which gives boards a global, current dataset on engagement and team performance rather than another set of opinions.
• First, Break All the Rules is one of the most widely read management books in circulation; senior audiences arrive already familiar with the argument, which lets a session move quickly from premise to application.
• Few speakers can stand on a body of work that has reshaped how Cisco, Deloitte and other large employers redesigned performance management; Buckingham is one of them.

Biography highlights

• Co-author of First, Break All the Rules (1999) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001), foundational texts of strengths-based management and the basis for the StrengthsFinder assessment.
• Head of People and Performance Research at the ADP Research Institute.
• Co-author with Ashley Goodall of Nine Lies About Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019), named best management book of 2019 by Strategy+Business.
• HBR cover authorship includes “Reinventing Performance Management” (April 2015) and “The Feedback Fallacy” (March/April 2019), the latter selected by HBR as one of the most influential articles of its first hundred years.
• Author of Love + Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022), a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
• Thinkers50 ranked thinker, peaking at #8 in 2011 and shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Leadership Award the same year. Cambridge University, MA in Social and Political Sciences.

Biography

The orthodoxy of corporate performance management is built on premises that the evidence does not support. Marcus Buckingham’s research at Gallup, and later at the ADP Research Institute, has spent more than three decades testing those premises against what the highest-performing teams actually do. His finding, in short form, is that performance is local, individual and rooted in what people do best, not in what an annual review tells them to fix.

That argument first reached scale through First, Break All the Rules, co-written with Curt Coffman in 1999 and built on Gallup’s global manager interviews. Now, Discover Your Strengths followed in 2001 with Donald O. Clifton and introduced the StrengthsFinder assessment. Together they reframed the conversation in HR from competency gaps to talent deployment.

The work has continued to land where senior leaders are paying attention. “Reinventing Performance Management,” his 2015 HBR cover with Ashley Goodall, documented Deloitte’s redesign of its review system. “The Feedback Fallacy,” their 2019 cover, was later named by HBR as one of the most influential articles of its first century. Their book Nine Lies About Work was named best management book of the year by Strategy+Business.

Buckingham now heads people and performance research at ADP, with access to one of the larger live datasets on engagement and team behaviour anywhere in business. His most recent book, Love + Work, published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2022, extends the strengths argument into the question of how individuals build careers around the activities that genuinely energise them. The work in front of leaders today is the same work that produced StrengthsFinder: identify what each person does best, then organise around it.

Key speaking topics

• Strengths-based leadership
• Performance management redesign
• Employee engagement and team effectiveness
• Future of work and workforce research
• Talent strategy and career design
• Manager development

Ideal for

• CHROs and senior people leaders rebuilding performance management or engagement frameworks
• Executive teams whose growth strategy depends on retaining and deploying skilled talent
• Boards reviewing the evidence base behind their human capital reporting
• Leadership development audiences inside large, multi-location workforces

Audience outcomes

• A clear account of which assumptions inside conventional performance management the data actually supports, and which it does not.
• Specific design principles, drawn from Gallup and ADP research, for how teams should be measured and led.
• A working definition of strengths that is operational at the level of an individual conversation, not just a slogan.
• An evidence-based case for replacing annual feedback rituals with a different cadence of attention from managers.