Top 80 Marcus Buckingham Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People leave managers, not companies.”

— Marcus Buckingham

Featured in: Boss Quotes

2. “You will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses.”

— Marcus Buckingham

3. “Focusing on strengths is the surest way to greater job satisfaction, team performance and organizational excellence.”

— Marcus Buckingham

Featured in: Quotes About Strength, Friday Quotes for Work, Career Development Quotes

4. “Remember, what you focus on expands; results follow focus.”

— Marcus Buckingham

5. “Clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.”

— Marcus Buckingham

6. “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.”

— Marcus Buckingham

7. “Authenticity is your most precious commodity as a leader.”

— Marcus Buckingham

8. “Many of us feel stress and get overwhelmed not because we’re taking on too much, but because we’re taking on too little of what really strengthens us.”

— Marcus Buckingham

9. “Always work hard. Intensity clarifies. It creates not only momentum, but also the pressure you need to feel either friction, or fulfillment.”

— Marcus Buckingham

10. “The difference between a pebble and a mountain lies in whom you ask to move it.”

— Marcus Buckingham

11. “Talent is the multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield. The time you spend with your best is, quite simply, your most productive time.”

— Marcus Buckingham

12. “Great leaders rally people to a better future.”

— Marcus Buckingham

13. “Innovation and best practices can be sown throughout an organization – but only when they fall on fertile ground.”

— Marcus Buckingham

14. “Discover what you don’t like doing and stop doing it.”

— Marcus Buckingham

15. “Clarity is the answer to anxiety. Effective leaders are clear.”

— Marcus Buckingham

16. “A strength is what you do that makes you feel strengthened.”

— Marcus Buckingham

17. “The best way to find out whether you’re on the right path? Stop looking at the path.”

— Marcus Buckingham

18. “The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor.”

— Marcus Buckingham

19. “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.”

— Marcus Buckingham

20. “Companies don’t have one culture. They have as many as they have supervisors or managers. You want to build a strong culture? Hold every manager accountable for the culture that he or she builds.”

— Marcus Buckingham

21. “In most cases, no matter what it is, if you measure it and reward it, people will try to excel at it.”

— Marcus Buckingham

22. “We’re all filled with naturally recurring patterns that make us unique – they’re called talents. And our charge is to bloody well use them.”

— Marcus Buckingham

23. “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.”

— Marcus Buckingham

24. “You cannot learn very much about excellence from studying failure.”

— Marcus Buckingham

25. “We dream of having a clean house – but who dreams of actually doing the cleaning? We don’t have to dream about doing the work, because doing the work is always within our grasp; the dream, in this sense, is to attain the goal without the work.”

— Marcus Buckingham

26. “Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in.”

— Marcus Buckingham

27. “The best strategy for building a competitive organization is to help individuals become more of who they are.”

— Marcus Buckingham

28. “Teach your children how to identify their own strengths and challenge them to contribute these strengths to others.”

— Marcus Buckingham

29. “You can find energizing moments in each aspect of your life, but to do so you must learn how to catch them, hold on to them, to feel the pull of their weight and allow yourself to follow where they lead.”

— Marcus Buckingham

30. “Passion isn’t something that lives way up in the sky, in abstract dreams and hopes. It lives at ground level, in the specific details of what you’re actually doing every day.”

— Marcus Buckingham

31. “Sustained success means making the greatest possible impact over the longest period of time.”

— Marcus Buckingham

32. “Everyone can probably do at least one thing better than ten thousand other people.”

— Marcus Buckingham

33. “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.”

— Marcus Buckingham

34. “You will learn and grow the least in your areas of weakness.”

— Marcus Buckingham

35. “Convey your passion and link your strengths to measurable results. Employers and interviewers love concrete data.”

— Marcus Buckingham

36. “No idea will work if people don’t trust your intentions toward them.”

— Marcus Buckingham

37. “CEOs hate variance. It’s the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.”

— Marcus Buckingham

38. “I do still get extremely nervous before speeches. My biggest fear is that I’ll be standing there in front of hundreds of people and be incapable of talking. I’m afraid that I’ll make a complete fool of myself and be unable to go on.”

— Marcus Buckingham

39. “These four characteristics – simplicity, frequent interaction, focus on the future, and self-tracking – are the foundation for a successful “performance management” routine.”

— Marcus Buckingham

40. “Google and Facebook, each in their own way, have revolutionized the delivery of advertising based on search and social networking, creating a sort of anti-Spam: targeted, relevant ads that a consumer might actually welcome rather than spurn.”

— Marcus Buckingham

41. “What do we know to be important but are unable to measure?”

— Marcus Buckingham

42. “Your strongest life is built through a continuous practice of designing moment by moment.”

— Marcus Buckingham

43. “Every company wants to know how to find and keep highly talented women in the workplace.”

— Marcus Buckingham

44. “People don’t change that much. Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough.”

— Marcus Buckingham

45. “The opposite of a leader isn’t a follower. The opposite of a leader is a pessimist.”

— Marcus Buckingham

46. “In the minds of great managers, consistent poor performance is not primarily a matter of weakness, stupidity, disobedience, or disrespect. It is a matter of miscasting.”

— Marcus Buckingham

47. “Focus on each person’s strengths and manage around his weaknesses. Don’t try to fix the weaknesses. Don’t try to perfect each person. Instead do everything you can to help each person cultivate his talents. Help each person become more of who he already is.”

— Marcus Buckingham

48. “And what of the notion that “trust must be earned”? Sensible though it may sound, great managers reject it. They know that if, fundamentally, you don’t trust people, then there is no line, no point in time, beyond which people suddenly become trustworthy.”

— Marcus Buckingham

49. “Actually, the data reveals that checking in with your team members once a month is literally worse than useless. While team leaders who check in once a week see, on average, a 13 percent increase in team engagement, those who check in only once a month see a 5 percent decrease in engagement.”

— Marcus Buckingham

50. “The secret to living a strong life is right in front of you, calling to you every day. It can be found in your emotional reaction to specific moments in your life.”

— Marcus Buckingham