First, Break All the Rules Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

Brief Summary

First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman is a management classic based on Gallup’s research with over 80,000 managers. It challenges conventional leadership wisdom, emphasizing that great managers focus on employees’ strengths, match talents to roles, and foster engagement using the Gallup Q12 framework. The book offers actionable insights for building high-performing teams by breaking traditional rules and embracing individualized management approaches.

About the Author

Marcus Buckingham, born January 11th of 1966, was raised in the village of Radlett, north of London. As a child he suffered from a stammer which caused him to not speak much until the age of 13. In 1987, he graduated from Pembroke College, Cambridge, with a degree in Social and Political Sciences. While studying at Cambridge, he was recruited by the founder of Selection Research, Incorporated (SRI), which would later become Gallup Organization, to develop interviews that would allow businesses to match people’s talent with the right job roles. Based on the surveys and interviews Buckingham conducted with thousands of managers for this project, he was able to coauthor with Curt Coffman First, Break All the Rules (Simon and Schuster, 1999). The book became a New York Times best-seller. It was also selected by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten as one of "The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.” Since then, Buckingham has created management training program. He has made numerous television appearances on shows such as The View, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America on ABC, The Today Show on NBC, Larry King Live on CNN and so many more. Buckingham married Jane Rinzler in 1996, and they divorced 2017. They share a son, Jack, and a daughter, Lilia, who is an actress on the Brat network.

Curt Coffman’s main work regards changing the way organizations think about their culture, their managers, and their business results. His mission is to help organizations, their leaders, managers and associates to create more engaging, productive workplaces to secure the loyalty and growth of their customers and business. He is the Senior Partner and Chief Science Officer of The Coffman Organization. He formerly served as the Global Practice Leader for employee and customer engagement at the Gallup Organization for 22 years. His work launched a new era in employee and management development with First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers do Differently . He followed that success with another bestselling book, Follow This Path: How the World's Greatest Organizations Drive Growth by Unleashing Human Potential. His work has been translated in over 40 different languages. His research and writings have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, The Economist, and a host of other management journals. He is currently an op-ed contributor to the New York Times. He has been married for over 30 years to Tammy. They reside in Denver, Colorado and are the parents of daughters, Katie and Claire, and son, Clayton.

Topics

Entrepreneurship Management & Leadership

First, Break All the Rules Book Summary Preview

Key Insights

All managers have a different leadership style, but there is one common trait that all great managers share: they are not afraid to break the rules. Great managers don’t make room for each employee to overcome his or her weaknesses. They don’t provide abundant training for employees to gain the skills they lack. In this book, several managers or front-line supervisors of thriving companies were interviewed. The people interviewed excelled at one main goal: transforming employees’ talents into strong performance.

The big picture summary: Choose employees based on their talents instead of their skills or experience.

The main points of this book are:

Great managers break all the rules. They operate on the assumption that people probably can’t change many of their traits, so they focus on employee strength instead. The first key to being a strong manager is to select employees based on talent rather than experience or intelligence. The second key is to evaluate performance based on desired outcomes rather than direct control over the way a worker performs his or her job. The third key is to stop trying to develop your workers. Focus on their strengths, instead. The fourth and final key is to find the right fit for your employees’ talents. Strong managers look inside of their employees and drive out the best in them.

Now let’s take a closer look at what these points really mean:

Chapter Summaries

Chapter 1. The measuring stick. A disaster off the Scilly Isles: what do we know to be important but are unable to measure?

Many employers who are invested in finding and maintaining top talent make the mistake of offering perks to keep employees around; however, these rewards don’t distinguish between great and lower performers.
The Gallup Organization developed the following survey and offered it to over 2500 business units to determine if employees believed they had a strong work environment. If the workers responded “yes” to the following questions, then strong employee retention was more likely: 1. Do I know what is expected of me at work? 2. Do I have the equipment and material I need to do my work right? 3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? 4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work? 5. Does my supervisor or someone at work seem to care about me as a person? 6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development? 7. At work, do my opinions seem to count? 8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my work is important? 9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work? 10. Do I have a best friend at work? 11. In the last six months, have I talked to someone about my progress? 12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?
Gallup’s measuring stick has no questions about pay, benefits, senior management, or organizational structure on the list because those issues pertain to good, bad, or mediocre...
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