8 leadership lessons from the book Facebook's HR chief recommends to all new managers

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lori goler

Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

Facebook's VP of People Lori Goler.

When Facebook's VP of People Lori Goler joined the company in 2008, she got to work making the company a "strengths-based" organization.

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It's a term based on Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman's 1999 bestselling management guide "First, Break All the Rules." The coauthors were Gallup analysts at the time and drew insights from 25 years of Gallup studies of 80,000 managers across 400 companies.

They "broke all the rules" of convention by concluding that the best managers fostered strengths and ignored weaknesses rather than creating a team of well-rounded individuals. They also found that managers were more important to their employees' success and happiness than the overall company's culture and initiatives.

Goler found the lessons in "First, Break All the Rules" so valuable that she recruited Buckingham through his independent management consulting firm, TMBC, to help her at Facebook, and she recommends all new managers at the company read the book. Goler has successfully adapted Facebook's culture from a scrappy social media company into a tech giant that's also regarded as one of the best places to work in the United States.

Business Insider highlighted eight of its core lessons below.

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