SOAR! Newsletter: June 2009

There is a myth going around in many industrialized countries - especially in the United States - that we need to be "well-rounded" and proficient in many different areas. The intention behind this myth is admirable. We agree, for example, that children should be offered a broad range of subjects in school and be taught a wide variety of skills by their parents, for the sake of creating a strong foundation that will serve them in life. However, some organizations take this notion too far, as evidenced by a yearly performance appraisal process that encourages employees to identify weaknesses and improve on them. Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton, the authors of Now Discover Your Strengths, disagree emphatically. They suggest that indiscriminately working on weaknesses is a waste of time and a misuse of organizational resources.

According to Buckingham and Clifton, a strength is a "consistent, near-perfect performance in an activity." As our brain grows and develops since childhood, it specializes in ways we would describe as innate abilities and talents. When we take a talent and augment it with knowledge and skills, we arrive at a strength. Thus, Strengths = Talents + Knowledge + Skills. They can include abilities such as taking command of a situation, being analytical, developing strong relationships with people, or having a strategic outlook. Notice the following key point from the above equation: developing a strength is nearly impossible unless there's an underlying talent beneath it.

In our common cultural parlance, a weakness is seen as a deficiency - as something to be corrected or improved on. Buckingham and Clifton, however, suggest that a weakness is simply anything that gets in the way of a strength. They therefore encourage us to work on our strengths and to address weaknesses to the extent that they interfere with our strengths. We believe that yearly performance appraisals can turn into a more effective and inspiring experience when this strengths-based approach is used.

We encourage you to read Now Discover Your Strengths or, better yet, the sequel by Tom Rath titled StrengthsFinder 2.0. Then, take the online StrengthsFinder assessment that comes with either book. The assessment has the backing of the Gallup Organization and has been validated with over 2 million individuals. In 20-30 minutes, it will reveal to you your five top strengths from their model of 34.

Knowing your StrengthsFinder strengths has several advantages. First, the years of research and validation that Gallup invested in this assessment, coupled with the large population of participants, gives your five top strengths a marked level of legitimacy. You can now name, acknowledge, and more fully appreciate those innate abilities that you may have been taking for granted. Second, you can give greater attention to strengthening your strengths, as opposed to merely improving on weaknesses. Third, when you catch yourself "efforting," procrastinating, or suffering about a task, chances are that it's not aligned with one or more strengths. Consider reassigning the task to (or seeking help from) someone with the requisite strengths. Lastly, it's virtually impossible for one person to have all 34 fully developed strengths. However, it's much easier to form a team whose members have the necessary strengths to achieve its mission.

Would you like to develop strengths-based approaches and practices for your own life or for your entire organization? Please contact us at any time. We would love to hear from you.