Soar With Your Strengths

Barriers To Excellence and Satisfaction

Until now, continuing education and the human resource policies of most companies have been built around two flawed assumptions:

1. One can learn to be competent in almost anything
2. One's greatest room for growth is in one's areas of greatest weakness

This has led to the current situation:

• More money is spent on post-hire training than pre-hire candidate selection
• Emphasis is on legislated work styles: rules, policies, procedures, required competencies
• Training time and money is spent trying to plug skill gaps
• Promotion is based on acquired skills and experience

A Gallup survey presented the following statement to employees of large organizations around the world:

An average of only 20% replied that they "strongly agree" with the statement. The remaining 80% are probably not making the most of their strengths, and as a result their performance and that of their companies suffer. Human nature has a subtle but significant effect on business results, that is only now beginning to be understood. Efficient, excellent organizations know how to utilize this: they are "firing on all cylinders" and have more satisfied employees.

Strengths Theory

• STRENGTH - Consistent, near-perfect performance of an activity. A combination of:
  
  • Talent: Innate, recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behaviour that can be productively applied. Something one does well and often; something immediate, instantaneous, and instinctive; something spontaneous, yearned for, rapidly learned, and satisfying.
  • Knowledge: Facts and experience
  • Skills: Structured experiential knowledge (not necessarily one's own); knowing the steps of an activity

  Knowledge and skills can be acquired with practice. The amount of practice needed to build a strength depends on the amount of talent (thus explains how some people are "naturals"). In the absence of underlying talent, training can create competence, but never a strength. Some activities (e.g. empathy) defy being broken down into trainable steps.

• WEAKNESS - Anything that gets in the way of excellent performance.

Application of Strengths Theory

In contrast to the flawed assumptions upon which most human resource policies are based, strengths theory states that:

1. One's talents are enduring and unique
2. One's greatest room for growth is in the areas of one's greatest strengths.

Using one's strengths is energizing. Building new strengths is energy consuming. One can excel only by maximizing one's strengths, never by fixing one's weaknesses. The path to excellence entails:

1. Capitalizing on strengths
2. Managing around weaknesses

Managing Around Weaknesses
To manage around a weakness, first identify what kind of weakess it is:

• Lack of skills
• Lack of knowledge
• Lack of talent

Then do something about it:

1. Get better at it
2. Design a support system (e.g. reminders)
3. Overwhelm the weakness with a strength
4. Get a partner - recognize and admit imperfection, find someone with complementary talents
5. Stop doing it - a last resort, but can be effective

Human Resource Management
Strengths theory maximizes the value of an organization's human capital. It enables the deployment of people in a manner more appropriate for today's Knowledge Economy.

• Selection - Hire the appropriate talent from the outset.
• Performance Management - A process focus emphasizes scripted behaviour, and relies on process re-engineering to generate performance improvements (battles individuality). Performance, however, is the journey from individual to results. A strengths focus emphasizes outcomes rather than process (capitalizes on individuality).
• Career Development:
  • Training - Build on strengths; this will yield more dividends than trying to plug "skill gaps".
  • Recognition - Use many ways to reward excellence; "promotion" in the traditional sense -- moving people up the corporate ladder -- may take one out of their area of strength (The Peter Principle)

Career Changes
Though one may leave behind successes and achievements when one changes professions, one's strengths are inherent, and can prove just as powerful in a new role.

Content for this page was abstracted from Now, Discover Your Strengths, by Marcus Buckingham & Donald Clifton, Free Press, 2001