Marcus Buckingham, bestselling author and renowned speaker, is credited with pioneering the research-based “Strengths Revolution,” which promotes playing to people’s strongest skills rather than attempting to improve their weaknesses to increase effectiveness and productivity.

Buckingham’s books include First, Break All the Rules (co-authored with Curt Coffman, 1999); Now, Discover Your Strengths (co-authored with Donald O. Clifton, 2001); and Go Put Your Strengths to Work (2007). Buckingham holds a master’s degree in social and political science from Cambridge University and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Fortune.

Q| You are originally from England. What brought you to the United States?

I came to the United States to work for a company called Selection Research Inc., \[it later became Gallup\], which was in the business of building selection interviews to select the best in a role. My father was in charge of selecting and developing managers for about 7,000 pubs, and he had brought Selection Research over to build an interview for selecting pub managers. I was fascinated by this idea that you could build interviews to measure this thing called "talent." So after I finished university, I went to work for Selection Research in the fall of 1987.

Q| In your opinion, what are some of the misconceptions about employee engagement?

There are a couple of misconceptions. One, that employee engagement is something a company can fix. In the end, it isn't. It varies so massively by manager - a company can create the conditions in which a manager can engage. But it's really the manager - you get engaged with a manager, you don't get engaged with a company.

Then I think there's a misconception of what drives engagement. We know from extensive research that there are three questions that explain about 94 to 95 percent of the variance of every other engagement question you can ask: "Do I know what's expected from me at work? Do I have a chance to do what I do best every day? And are my co-workers committed to quality work?" Those are the three consistent drivers of employee engagement, which really means that an employee is saying to herself in any company, "Focus me, know me, and surround me with like-valued people, and I'll be engaged."

Now you can add on to that - other things about mission and purpose, growth and development, reward and recognition, and relationships and stuff - but if you blow it on any of those three, everything else you do after that is diminished. Of course, the first point is that the manager is a huge influence on whether a person feels as though those three needs are being met.

Q| What is the one change you'd like to see in today's approach to workplace learning and development?

The one change I'd like to see is an understanding that the first question to ask is, "Who's the learner?" You have to start with where the person is, and from that comes an understanding, not only of what they need to learn, but how they need to learn and when they need to learn it.

We're beginning to get there. We're moving toward more customization, but we need to make that an essential premise of any sort of training, learning, or development. And of course an extension of that is that you will learn most, you will grow most, develop most in the areas where you have already shown some sort of natural advantage. This whole idea that you grow most in the areas where you are already strong seems obvious when you first say it, and yet the more you look at it the more you realize that it's quite countercultural - after all, most companies label weaknesses "areas of opportunity" or "areas for development" as though a person's greatest opportunities for development lie in their weaknesses, not their strengths.

We need to change our language - a person's strengths are their "areas of greatest opportunities for development." And we need to change our concepts. Organizations must always be thinking about ROI - where do we get the best return on our learning investment? The answer to this question must involve the word "strengths," since strengths are a multiplier of learning.