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In his role as 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 is routinely lauded by such corporations as Toyota, Coca-Cola, Master Foods, Wells Fargo, and Disney as an invaluable resource in informing, challenging, mentoring and inspiring people to find their strengths and obtain and sustain long-lasting personal success. He has used his nearly two decades of research experience as a Sr. Researcher at The Gallup Organization to break through the preconceptions about achievement and get to the core of what drives success.
Marcus Buckingham holds a master's degree in social and political science from Cambridge University and is a member of the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Leadership and Management. He lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles.
What attracted you to working in this field?
I worked for the Gallup organization for about 17 years after going to university in Cambridge. My dad was the personnel director for both Allied Breweries and Gallaher. He wanted to find out how to select better pub managers because at the time he had 7,000 pubs, and pubs were rated by the quality of their manager and their spouse. He found a company over in Lincoln, Nebraska which was building psychometric pre-employment interviews and he brought them over. Their basic methodology was to study 100 great managers and 100 average ones and see whether or not the 100 great ones were different; see whether they had anything in common at all in terms of their talent; and see whether you could identify that talent before they were hired. So while I was at university I was sent over to Nebraska to study how to build interviews: how to find the right questions to get at the things people might not want to tell you about themselves. I then went back over after I graduated, one thing led to another and I never came back.
What role do you think a manager plays in helping an employee identify their own strengths?
From all the research that I've been a part of it's really clear that managers make a huge...