Top 80 Marcus Buckingham Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “People leave managers, not companies.”

— Marcus Buckingham

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

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

— Marcus Buckingham

7. “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

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. “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

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

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

— Marcus Buckingham

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

— Marcus Buckingham

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

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

— Marcus Buckingham

26. “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

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

— Marcus Buckingham

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

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

— Marcus Buckingham

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

— Marcus Buckingham

33. “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

34. “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

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

— Marcus Buckingham

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

— Marcus Buckingham

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

— Marcus Buckingham

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

— Marcus Buckingham

39. “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

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

— Marcus Buckingham

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

— Marcus Buckingham

42. “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

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

— Marcus Buckingham

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “Every time you make a rule you take away a choice, and choice, with all of its illuminating repercussions, is the fuel for learning.”

— Marcus Buckingham

48. “Define the outcomes you want from your team and its members, and then look for each person’s strength signs to figure out how each person can reach those outcomes most efficiently, most amazingly, most creatively, and most joyfully. The moment you realize you’re in the outcomes business is the moment you turn each person’s uniqueness from a bug into a feature.”

— Marcus Buckingham

49. “In a war, no matter the outcome of a certain skirmish or battle, the winner is the party whose attitudes, behaviors and preoccupations come to dominate the postwar landscape. By this measure, the outcome of the gender wars, if wars they were, is clear: women won.”

— Marcus Buckingham

50. “It’s a special person – and personality – who can lead a start-up to soaring success and sustain that success for the long term. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are star examples.”

— Marcus Buckingham