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Strong personal relationships are crucial for success.

12 questions "capture everything you need to know about the workplace." Your employees should respond positively to each of the following:

"Do I know what is expected of me at work?"
"Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?"
"At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?"
"In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?"
"Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?"
"Is there someone at work who encourages my development?"
"At work, do my opinions seem to count?"
"Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?"
"Are my coworkers committed to doing quality work?"
"Do I have a best friend at work?"
"In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?"
"This last year, have I had opportunities to learn and grow?"

Treat each person as he would like to be treated, bearing in mind who he is.

Don't treat them as YOU would like to be treated.

Managers and leaders are profoundly different, but both are necessary.

"Great managers look inward," they wrote. "Great leaders, by contrast, look outward." That is, leaders do not have the time to determine the individual needs and styles of their employees because they are focused on bigger-picture thinking. It's up to managers to establish these relationships and foster excellent output.

Employees should primarily be hired for talent.

The best way to find great job candidates? Let them do 90% of the talking in your interview.

Buckingham has found that managers often get the wrong impression of candidates because they spend the interview trying to fit the person into a characterization based on initial assumptions. Because candidates often pick up on this, they may start giving answers they think are expected, plunging the interviewer into a trap of their own making.

Buckingham said he has two fundamental pieces of advice for managers giving job interviews: "Ask open-ended questions and then shut up," and "Never probe."

"Every time you ask a question you give something away," he said. "You don't want to give anything away." The interviewer should not interject with, "Can you give me a specific example?" because, as Buckingham said, "you're showing your hand." According to Buckingham, managers should not conduct a job interview the same way investigators would, digging until they find all the details on their checklist. They should be doing an assessment of candidates' characters and getting an indication of how they will behave in the workplace. If you're not leading candidates to the ideal answers, the best candidates will reveal themselves, he said.

"And the other thing I always say is, whatever someone says, believe them," Buckingham said. He explained that our unconscious can't help assessing someone within 30 seconds of meeting them, so it's the interviewer's job to refrain from letting their first impression determine the rest of the conversation.

Development goals should focus on outcome, not process (i.e. results oriented).

To accommodate for different approaches to work, great managers give their employees the freedom to find their own paths to agreed-upon results.

Great managers spend most of their time with their best people.

The authors write that when a manager spends time with an employee, "they are not fixing or correcting or instructing. Instead they are racking their brains, trying to figure out better and better ways to unleash that employee's distinct talents."

There must be more than one path to success within a company.

Sad that many companies promote top performers into positions that prevent them from exercising their talents. To have a thriving organization, a company must offer several developmental paths, creating "heroes" in each primary function so that an employee is actually rewarded with more freedom to excel.

Feedback should be regular and actionable.

At least once a month personal interviews, with goals being the critical topic of discussion. Should be no surprises in the annual reviews.