The unedited transcript of Phalana Tiller's interviews with Frances Hesselbein and Marcus Buckingham for the September 2011 episode of Drucker on the Dial entitled "Strength to Strength." First, Frances Hesselbein, president of the Leader to Leader Institute and former chief executive officer of the Girl Scouts of the United States of America, says that one manages for the mission, one manages for innovation, and one manages for diversity, and if one doesn't, one is part of the past. She talks about her path to becoming the chief executive of the Girl Scouts and her vision for the organization. She discusses the Girl Scouts research on diversity, and how the Girl Scouts worked to create a diverse and representative organization. Hesselbein shares her experience as the first woman to chair a United Way campaign in her community and how she engaged the steel and labor communities. She talks about her development of circular management, and says that it was one of the things that Peter Drucker appreciated most when he discovered the Girl Scouts. Hesselbein goes on to say that respect for all people is an important quality in a great leader, and that leadership is a matter of how to be, and not how to do. Next, author Marcus Buckingham, talks about his interest in studying great managers, and how you can get the greatest performance and creativity from a person if you find, focus, and capitalize on his or her strengths, and manage around his or her weaknesses. He says that this was the genesis of his work called Now Discover Your Strengths, written with Donald Clifton, which was an effort to build a language that could describe human strengths and capabilities. Buckingham talks about the emergence of positive psychology, and shares that Clifton believed that if you wanted to learn about excellence, you have to study it, because it has its own configuration. He then says that he wanted to focus on the practical application of how to help managers get better at doing what great managers do. Buckingham says that his book, StandOut: The Groundbreaking New Strengths Assessment from the Leader of the Strengths Revolution, was created as a prescription on how to help managers know how to find a person's edge and advantage. He explains that the assessment is a situational judgment test and that it's not a summary of who you think you are, but of how other people see you. Buckingham discusses the research behind StandOut, and says that it is proving to be a different and practical approach to finding out what your edge is, and helping your manager maximize it. He goes on to say that he is planning to launch a StandOut mobile application that will deliver video drips containing pieces of advice that will provide strength coaching specific to your strengths every week.
Interviews Hesselbein, Frances Buckingham, Marcus Girl Scouts of the United States of America Mission statements Consumers Communities Leadership Respect Authorship Executives Clifton, Donald O Positive psychology
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