Marcus Buckingham reveals the science behind resilience and offers some surprising advice to leaders on how to cultivate it

Bestselling author and leadership and management expert MARCUS BUCKINGHAM demystifies the science behind creating resilient organizations and teams in a piece for Harvard Business Review, “What Really Makes Us Resilient?” Buckingham discusses the findings of his real-world, data driven, global experiments to identify the sources of resilience, how to measure it, and how to cultivate it in yourself and your teams. Here’s what Buckingham advises leaders: 1) Resilience is a reactive state of mind created by exposure to suffering, and 2) The more tangible leaders make the threat, the more resilient people become. Buckingham’s surprising advice to leaders: Don’t sugar-coat harsh reality. Tell people the truth about threats and they will respond with resilience.

Buckingham has been a trusted leadership and management thought-leader and bestselling author for decades. He conducts a tremendous amount of meaningful research as the Head of the ADP Research Institute, and synthesizes his findings into useable takeaways regularly in Harvard Business Review. Buckingham is a masterful presenter, in full command of his cutting-edge leadership research, and humanizes the practical process of leading teams to greatness.

Marcus Buckingham is an expert on agile leadership, transforming teams with his ideas about leadership and new ways of working

If you do one thing to improve your organization this year, consider listening to a presentation from MARCUS BUCKINGHAM. Buckingham has been a thought leader on leadership and pioneering how people work for decades, as the New York Times Bestselling author, researcher, and founder of the Strengths Revolution. He brings that knowledge to the stage as he tailors his talks to organizations about agile leadership to improve teams’ effectiveness and focus on what is most important. He stands by the idea that when leaders let people spend time each day doing what they love and are best at, their organizations get their best work. His data-driven research reflects these ideas, and he uses statistics to back everything he shares as the head of the ADP Research Institute, following two decades of experience as a Senior Researcher at Gallup Organization. When Buckingham speaks to teams, he completely revolutionizes the way they think about leading a team, being flexible, and new ways of working, with the goal of providing team leaders with the insights and tools they need to turn talent into performance and drive the organization toward greater success and productivity. Buckingham brings his researched talks to organizations to help them improve their speed and quality of work through agile leadership, help employees live out their strengths at work, and make teams as effective as possible. As Coca-Cola North America shared after a presentation by Buckingham, “Marcus Buckingham spoke two weeks ago and there's still so much positive buzz around the office about his presentation. He takes complex things and breaks them down. People said, 'How can I take this and make it happen for me?' People left wanting to do something, wanting to take action.”

Watch him speak on 5 Things All Leaders Should be Doing Today >>

Watch his Lead from Strength Virtual Series, which dives into how individuals and teams can use their strengths to build resilience, connection and confidence >>

Marcus Buckingham is an electrifying leadership and strategic management speaker, anchored by his research and real world experience running teams

When best-selling author and researcher MARCUS BUCKINGHAM stopped by our office recently, he held us spellbound.  He simultaneously gave a master class on leadership and management while inspiring each of us to tap into our very human, personal needs to love what we do (which is different from doing what we love), find belonging on our teams, and capitalize on our strengths. All in the name of creating more resilient, higher performing teams.  His work is not anecdotal or impressionistic, it is squarely and credibly based in the data he generates as part of the ADP Research Institute, which looks at accumulated payroll data that moves the economy, and is backed by Harvard Business Review, for which Buckingham serves on the Editorial Advisory Board.  He also has field experience running productive teams as he built and ran a software company (developing what else but software to build great teams!) which was eventually integrated into the internal systems at WebEx, Cisco, and Microsoft Teams, to name a few. Buckingham often consults and speaks to organizations looking to strengthen their leaders and individual contributors and is praised for his practical, tactical recommendations for increasing productivity, rather than motivation based on rah-rah platitudes.

The leadership and management lessons we all learned from Buckingham during his short time with us, will surely have a lasting impact. We are all inspired to manage our teams better, pay attention to the individual strengths of our team members, and find ways to cultivate those strengths rather than focusing on “areas of development.”  And, we have to admit, each of us felt like he was talking to us one on one. He has that special ability to humanize the real world work we all do. He spoke of our need to identify the “red threads” of satisfaction in the quilt of our daily tasks, and our need to find belonging on our teams, which moves the diversity and inclusion message to a deeper, more essential conversation.  In fact, Buckingham, grounded in his research, is working on a book and a movement called ‘Love + Work’, which takes a more individualistic look at the meaning of our work and ambition in the larger context of our lives. We are here for it!

We can’t recommend Marcus Buckingham highly enough as a speaker.  The messages he left us with are still reverberating around our office. We’re all thinking in bigger ways about what we do and how we collaborate. 

Virtual Programming: If you lead people in these new realities, Marcus Buckingham says every team should do these 5 things

In this dynamic virtual presentation MARCUS BUCKINGHAM helps leaders focus on what’s most important for their team right now. In his talk, If You Lead People Today, Do These 5 Things, Marcus walks teams through what they can do to make their virtual teams the most effective and productive teams possible, even--and especially--during these new realities. Using his two decades of experience as a Senior Researcher at the Gallup Organization and currently, the Head of ADP Research Institute of People and Performance, Marcus’ revolutionary framework for understanding teams combines visionary thinking backed by rigorous research. His work on leveraging the strength of teams and productivity has been memorialized in numerous bestselling books, such as: First, Break All the Rules; Now, Discover Your Strengths; The One Thing You Need to Know; Go Put Your Strengths To Work; The Truth About You; Find Your Strongest Life; StandOut 2.0; and Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World. 

Sponsors rave: "Marcus Buckingham was GREAT! I got a lot of positive feedback from all our company's participants!" (Masterfoods) "Marcus is the most engaging and useful business speaker working today. His advice is grounded in research and at the same time appeals to common sense." (The Wharton School) "Our managers ranked Buckingham the #1 speaker of the meeting, topping the perennial favorites - our CEO and president. What impressed us all was how well Marcus had done his homework. This was no generic speech - it related to our business and our people, in a motivating, challenging and useful way" (Walgreens) 

Marcus has been profiled in nearly every important publication such as The New York Times, Fortune, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. He is frequently in demand for TV appearances, having appeared on The Today Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show amongst many others. Corporations as diverse as Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Disney employ his ideas and often invite Marcus to speak