The job of an effective manager is to make each member of staff more productive than they would be working for someone else, according to best selling author and self-improvement guru Marcus Buckingham. And he said that the role of an effective manager was to turn one person?s talent into performance, to in effect become the catalyst to making them perform well.

?You manage around what people have,? he said in a conference beamed around the world, and to 300 executives gathered at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess. ?If someone is not organised, then work around it so it does not matter.?

Mr. Buckingham, an Englishman who works for the Gallup Organisation which collects data from around the world, said that most companies focused on the weaknesses and not the strengths of their employees. And he said evaluations were usually given over to two minutes to what employees did well, and the next 58 was spent on what they don?t do well. Mr. Buckingham said that there was a lot of research into what made a company bad, or perform poorly, while little had been done on what made a great company.

?Good is not the opposite of bad,? he said. ?If you study bad, you get ?not bad?.?

And he said that by looking at the positive rather than the negative in both ones personal life and work would improve management skills. ?It would be better to spend 80 percent of the time on working on strengths and 20 percent of the time on damage control,? he said.

And he said that managers had to be deeply optimistic that things will play out in order to be effective. He said: ?If you are pessimistic, this is not the job for you... go be a lawyer... not a leader. The opposite of a leader is a pessimist.?

Mr. Buckingham, whose latest book is called ?First Break All the Rules?, said that capitalising on staff was what a leader should do. And he said most staff had a fear of the unknown and looked for clarity and specifics in their leaders.