Focus on Strengths

I highly recommend leveraging strengths and talents as a way to improve your professional performance, as well as an effective way to manage and lead others. Gallup has been conducting research in this area for forty years with over 10 million people worldwide. Their findings revealed that only a third of employees agree that they have an opportunity to use their strengths every day. But, for those who do, they are “six times as likely to be engaged in their jobs and more than three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life in general.”

By tapping into what we are good at and what energizes us, we fuel actions that lead to accomplishing our goals. We all learned about simple machines in grade school. Deploying strengths and talents to accomplish work is much like using a pulley or an inclined plane to change the direction or magnitude of force. All too often, we spend time worrying about what we and others are not good at, and how to improve “weaknesses.” This approach is akin to trying to dead-lift a boulder instead of rolling it up a ramp. We shouldn’t ignore things we can improve, but the bulk of our efforts should be focused on matching strengths with appropriate work.

The fields of Positive Psychology and Strengths Psychology have produced some assessment tools and frameworks that executive and leadership coaches use with great results.

1. The first step is to use an assessment to identify, label and describe one’s strengths.
2. Individuals, use this information to: manage your career path; manage daily workload to tap into energizing tasks and parse out draining tasks to accomplish the most work; look for the best way to contribute to a group project; and, to know what kinds of assignments and work to avoid when possible
3. Teams, use this information to: build understanding among the group; celebrate team members’ unique talents; assign roles and tasks based on talents; recruit new members who complement the strengths of existing members; and, to improve communication.

Here are a few resources you might want to check out:

Positive Psychology challenges the traditional approach of focusing on deficits. Rather than looking for the cause and cure of pathology, the field of Positive Psychology looks for strengths, positive emotions, and what contributes to people being content and productive. Dr. Martin Seligman leads this work out of the University of Pennsylvania and provides several assessments on hiswebsite, such as the VIA Inventory of Strengths. (As with any online assessment, I urge you to use accompanying resources to interpret findings, or better yet work with a trained professional.)

I also recommend the Realise2 strengths assessment and the accompanying guide “The Strengths Book,” by Linley, Willars and Biswas-Diener. They have drawn from their work in Positive Psychology to identify 60 strengths and organize them into Realized Strengths, Unrealized Strengths, Learned Behaviors (things we might be good at but drain our energy), and Weaknesses. They suggest one should “marshal realized strengths, maximize unrealized strengths, moderate learned behaviors, and minimize having to do or focus on weaknesses.” I tested this assessment twice and both times I think it was accurate in picking up my mission to help others raise self- and emotional-awareness, self esteem, and the ability to bounce back from setbacks and see possibilities.

Strengths Psychology, and the work of Donald Clifton and Tom Rath, is the basis for Gallup’s “Strengths Finder” assessment and the current book “Strengths Finder 2.0,” which includes a code to take the assessment online and a guide to understanding the results.  The Strengths Finder 2.0 identifies 34 strengths, and through a series of questions determines the user’s top five predominant strenghts. It gives suggests how to deploy them and what other strengths complement them. As a coach, it’s not surprising that my top five fall into strategic thinking, relationship building and influencing.

Whether you pursue this for yourself, or for a group of people, I recommend adding an understanding of your strengths to your strategic and performance planning processes.